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.
These four methods are not interchangeable alternatives used once; each is best suited to a different stage of the project, and used together they cover the whole lifecycle.
Early (requirements/understanding-users stage): observation of the clinic's current paper-based workflow reveals how tasks are actually performed today, including workarounds invisible from documentation alone; interviews with staff and management (per Q12) gather the reasoning, priorities and pain points behind that workflow and surface the specific customization requests VisualEHR needs; a broad questionnaire to all clinic staff at this stage can efficiently confirm how widely shared the pain points found in a smaller set of interviews really are, before design effort is committed to addressing them.
Middle (design/prototyping stage): user testing (formative, per Q5's Nielsen ~5-user rounds) on successive paper and then digital prototypes (Q13) directly measures whether specific redesign proposals actually work for real staff, iteration by iteration; targeted follow-up interviews after a test session let a participant explain why they struggled with a particular screen, which the test session alone (task completion/error data) cannot reveal; brief post-task questionnaires (e.g. a short satisfaction/confidence rating after each prototype task) give a lightweight, comparable measure of subjective reaction across iterations and across participants.
Late (release/summative-validation stage): a larger, more representative user testing round (summative, per Q5) validates that the finished redesign meets its usability goals (Q11) across both user classes (Q10) before go-live; a post-launch questionnaire deployed to the full staff measures real-world satisfaction and surfaces any remaining problems at scale; periodic observation of the live system in real use (and occasional follow-up interviews) after go-live continues to catch workflow-fit issues that only emerge once the system is used for real patients over time, feeding into future maintenance releases — closing the loop back into the iterative UCD cycle from Q2 rather than treating go-live as the end of the process.
