19-Soft-B2 User Interface · May 2015
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams, May 2015 — 04-Soft-B2, User Interface (closed book, 3 hours). Part A: answer any FIVE of the NINE questions (10 marks each); Part B: answer ALL FIVE questions (10 marks each), all based on the same case study — Happy Medical Clinic, a Toronto medical clinic switching from paper-based practice to an electronic health record (EHR) system purchased from VisualEHR Inc., an off-the-shelf vendor willing to customize the product to the clinic's needs. Most questions call for essay-format answers; clarity and organisation count. This solution answers all fourteen questions as a full study resource.
Reference texts. Rogers, Sharp & Preece, Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, 5th ed., Ch. 1–3 (interaction design, cognitive aspects, mental models), Ch. 9–10 (prototyping, personas), Ch. 11–12 (data gathering, requirements), Ch. 15–16 (evaluation, lab vs. field studies); Nielsen, Usability Engineering, Ch. 4–6 (usability heuristics, iterative design, usability testing); Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface, 6th ed., Ch. 2 (guidelines, principles), Ch. 12 (internationalization); Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Ch. 1–4 (visibility, affordances, feedback, conceptual models).
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
1. Effectiveness. The system must let users accomplish what they set out to do (correctly and completely record and retrieve a patient's clinical information) — effectiveness is important because it is the baseline requirement without which nothing else matters: a fast, pleasant interface that fails to correctly capture a medication or allergy is not merely inconvenient, it is unsafe for a clinical record.
2. Efficiency. The system should let trained users complete common tasks (checking in a patient, pulling up a chart during a visit, booking a follow-up) quickly and with minimal steps — efficiency matters enormously here because clinical staff operate under continuous time pressure, and every extra click or screen during a patient encounter is time taken directly from patient care, repeated dozens of times per day across the whole staff.
3. Safety (error prevention and error tolerance). The interface should make it hard to make a serious error (selecting the wrong patient, the wrong medication, the wrong dosage) and should make any error that does occur easy to notice and easy to recover from (clear confirmation before an irreversible action, undo where possible, prominent alerts for out-of-range values) — safety is important above the other goals specifically because this is clinical software: an efficiency gain that increases the chance of a wrong-patient or wrong-medication error is not an acceptable trade-off, whereas an interface that is somewhat slower but substantially safer is the right choice for this domain.
