The benefits and risks of developing healthcare specific interface design guidelines
In previous posts, I illustrated the benefits of having consistent interfaces. Consistent interfaces uses our brains’ dual information processing capacity. In my tacit knowing post, I presented need for care for the smallest details in interface design. This post is the how. How should we design these interfaces? Do we need domain specific guides? Two examples of healthcare interface guides are Microsoft Healthcare Common User Interface (MSCUI) guide being developed with UK’s National Health Services (NHS) and the European Helios project. These two projects were perused for practical and economical reasons. Yet, there is significant cost for developing such standards. More, there are unwanted side effects that need to be minimized. Examples of these side effects are decreasing flexibility and decreasing ownership. (Nielsen 1989 p)
One benefit of having healthcare design guidelines is to speed up the development cycle, and still ending up with high quality interfaces. A significant part of the design decisions will have been set by the guidelines developers. This does mean that these developers carry a huge responsibility.
At least for now, UK’s National Health Services (NHS) is going with the guidelines route and mandating the compliance to these guides for systems to be used by NHS. It will be interesting to see how things will unfold.
Nielsen, J., 1989. Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency, Academic Pr.
