Usability Study of a Pre-anesthesia Evaluation App in an University Hospital: Before the Revision of User Interface

Abstract

A pre-anesthesia evaluation app named EVAN was developed to facilitate anesthesiologists in their daily practice. EVAN contained a well-organized interface for medical records and an evaluation entry page. The purpose of this study is to assess the usability of EVAN and to find the weakness in the user interface before the revision. Twenty participants were recruited in this study with three components: user task analysis, questionnaires, and semi-structured interview. During the user task analysis, participants were asked to complete 16 tasks under monitoring. The second component of the study is questionnaires, consisted of SUS and AttrakDiff-Short. According to the results, seven participants completed all the tasks successfully. Two tasks had the most failures (8 and 7 failures, respectively). Participants were unable to find a specific function due to inadequate clues on the interactive buttons. Results of task analysis also revealed that the current logic of data storage which aimed to prevent accidental deletion, was not intuitive for most participants. Despite the drawbacks, the gradings of SUS questionnaire was 80.6 ± 14.4, which is an above average result. Scores from the AttrakDiff-Short were all positive, for both pragmatic quality, hedonic quality, and attractiveness. The results of this study are summarized and integrated for the revision of EVAN.