Designing an online appointment system for semiliterate users

Abstract

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has revolutionized the healthcare leading to provision of eHealth facilities remotely. During the peak time of COVID-19, as the long queues at health care facilities can result in spread of the virus. ICT can play an effective role especially for reducing the extended waiting time of patients to consult a medical practitioner which is considered as a source of hazard during the pandemic. However, in developing countries where majority population is semiliterate so find difficulty when come into contact with appointment systems which are not particularly designed keeping in consideration the requirements of semiliterate users. It is extremely important to better understand how to design user interface which allow semiliterate users to effectively perform the tasks. So there is a dire need to develop a simple, effective, easy to learn user interface (UI) of an online appointment system for the productive doctor-patient consultation. Therefore, this study aimed to providing an effective user interface of web based online appointment system to semi-literate users through User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology. To achieve this, a prototype was designed to overcome issues in the existing appointment systems gathered through a field study. The needs and expectation for semiliterate users were fulfilled by incorporating the requirements of UI development for the target users. A sample of forty-two semiliterate users was used to evaluate the prototype. The evaluation results showed that semiliterate users’ performance measured using— effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction significantly improved while interacting with the prototype as compared to existing interfaces. The effectiveness is measured through number of errors and tasks accomplished in UI, efficiency by the time required to complete the task and satisfaction by System Usability Scale (SUS). The SUS score improved from 50.8 to 77.6 for the prototype.