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.
Part A — concerns of current users. (1) Loss of learned efficiency / re-training cost. Staff who have used the current interface for years have built up muscle memory and workarounds that let them work quickly despite its flaws; a redesign, even a genuinely better one, forces them to relearn familiar tasks and will feel slower and more error-prone during the transition, which they may reasonably fear will hurt their own performance metrics. (2) Loss of trusted, hard-won workarounds and personal customizations. Users often develop personal shortcuts, macros, or ways of working around known quirks of the current system; a redesign risks removing these without providing an equivalent, and users cannot be certain the new interface will actually support the specific edge cases their daily work depends on until they have tested it themselves.
Part B — concerns of their managers. (1) Productivity dip and business disruption during transition. Managers are typically measured on team output and are directly accountable if a redesign temporarily slows their staff down while retraining — for a medical clinic, a productivity dip translates into fewer patients seen or longer wait times, a visible and immediate operational cost the manager must justify upward. (2) Project cost, schedule risk and uncertain return. Managers must weigh the redesign's budget and schedule against a benefit (improved usability, fewer errors) that is harder to quantify up front than the visible cost of the project itself, and they may worry the redesign will run over budget/schedule or fail to deliver the promised improvement, as prior technology projects sometimes have.
