Exploring user background settings in cognitive walkthrough evaluation of medical prototype interfaces: a case study

Abstract The strict safety requirements and the confidential character of the development process of medical equipment call for suitable theory-based usability evaluation methods to be used by in-house cognitive engineering experts at medical companies. In this study, the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method was employed to evaluate two types of graphical user interface (GUI) prototypes of dialysis machines: a haemodialysis machine for hospital use by professional nurses, and a peritoneal dialysis machine for home use by patients as the main users. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether different user background settings could affect the CW results when evaluating the GUI of computer-based medical machines. The evaluation results showed that different user background settings can affect the CW results in the evaluation. When more factors were included in the user background setting, a wider range of usability problems was found. User background setting is an important issue to take into account in further work with the development of the CW method for medical equipment. The methodological guidance and conclusions from the present exploratory case study are transferable to similar situations for studies in other fields. Relevance to industry This paper contributes to the improvement of a usability evaluation method, the Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) method, for enabling designers of medical equipment and usability engineers to identify and specify more usability problems when evaluating interface prototypes for new medical equipment in the early design stage.

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