A Design Study to Improve user Experience of a Procedure Booking Software in Healthcare

Abstract

In the era of technology-driven healthcare delivery and the proliferation of e-health systems, procedure booking software is becoming common. Procedure booking software (PBS) affects healthcare delivery by improving health care efficiency and outcomes, while cutting costs. Therefore, poor software design for PBS, especially if it is designed for important and critical appointments such as cardiac catheterization operations, creates stress for physicians and may result in their rejection of this technology. Moreover, if the system design forces them to spend more time documenting health information, physicians would then tend to prefer face-to-face interaction with patients. Software with poor usability increases the workload of physicians thus reducing system efficiency. So designing a useful and effective web user interface for such software is an essential requirement for health websites. The aim of this paper is to design and develop a PBS as a case study using the health systems design (HSD) tool. HSD is a validated design tool for creating PBS based on physician behavior and persona. The applicability of a PBS design is explored by physicians evaluated. The PBS design was evaluated in terms of objective and subjective characteristics and user experience attributes. Test participants were divided into two groups: specialists and fellows. The results show that there was no significant difference between participants in either group. All were able to complete the tasks successfully with a minimum amount of time, clicks, and errors indicating that the effectiveness, efficiency and cognitive load were similar for all participants. User satisfaction yielded a score of 86 on the System Usability Scale (SUS), putting it in the A Grade. Also, user experience attributes demonstrated that participants were satisfied using the proposed design system.