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.
Low-fidelity prototype. Starting from the requirements analysis, I would build a paper prototype: hand-sketched or printed screen mockups on paper/index cards for the key redesigned screens (patient chart view, appointment scheduler, medication entry), with interchangeable paper elements (a "dropdown," a pop-up dialog) that a facilitator manually swaps in response to a participant's simulated action — the classic Wizard-of-Oz-style paper prototype. This is deliberately quick, cheap and disposable, so that structural and workflow-level problems can be found and design directions discarded without any sunk implementation cost. Who is involved: the software engineer/designer builds the sketches (informed by the requirements analysis), Happy Medical Clinic staff (a receptionist and a nurse or physician, representing the two user classes from Q10) act as participants walking through realistic task scenarios, and clinic management observes to sanity-check the proposal against the business's stated needs.
Transforming into a high-fidelity prototype. Once the paper prototype has converged on a workflow and screen structure that clinic staff can complete tasks with, I would rebuild the same screens as a digital, interactive click-through mockup (using a prototyping tool such as Figma or Axure) that closely matches the final visual design — real fonts, colours, spacing and realistic sample patient data — and supports clicking through the actual navigation paths, though still without a working database or business logic behind it. Where a specific interaction is technically risky or needs to feel fully real to evaluate properly (e.g. the medication-search autocomplete), I would build a narrow vertical high-fidelity prototype of just that feature with working logic, rather than making the whole system high-fidelity at once. Who is involved: a UI/visual designer (or the software engineer wearing that hat) builds the high-fidelity mockup from the validated paper design, developers are consulted on what is technically feasible within VisualEHR's customization framework, and the same staff participants (plus a wider sample per Q10's user classes) are brought back to run realistic task-based usability tests on the higher-fidelity version, since only a high-fidelity, closer-to-real prototype can validate finer interaction details (timing, exact wording, error messages) that a paper prototype cannot represent.
This progression — low fidelity to find and fix structural/workflow problems cheaply, high fidelity to validate detailed interaction and gain stakeholder sign-off — mirrors the iterative UCD cycle from Q2, with each fidelity level's evaluation feeding directly into the next round of design.
