Healthcare applications for small-screen mobile devices are becoming increasingly common for medical professionals and patients. Even so, usability issues including navigation and screen clutter remain a challenge. Ecological Interface Design (EID) was used to design a patient-oriented diabetes management display for Java-enabled mobile devices, making it one of the first mobile EID (mEID) applications. This paper presents a usability evaluation of the diabetes management application, which compares the mEID display to a modified taskbased display (mEID+Task). The mEID+Task display integrates functional task characteristics such as frequency and necessity; menu structure, item ordering, item labelling, and input scheme were varied. Results showed that normalised trial completion times were moderately faster in the mEID+Task display than in the mEID display, while no differences were observed in trial completion accuracy. Furthermore, the mEID+Task display received higher preference ratings than the mEID display alone. The findings suggest that the usability of mEID displays can be improved by incorporating a task-oriented approach.
[1]
K S Seidler,et al.
Distance and Organization in Multifunction Displays
,
1992,
Human factors.
[2]
Catherine M. Burns,et al.
A Work Domain Analysis for Diabetes Management
,
2003
.
[3]
Kim J. Vicente,et al.
Comparison of Display Requirements Generated Via Hierarchical Task and Abstraction-Decomposition Space Analysis Techniques
,
2001
.
[4]
Kim J. Vicente,et al.
Ecological interface design: theoretical foundations
,
1992,
IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..
[5]
Greg A. Jamieson,et al.
Empirical Evaluation of an Industrial Application of Ecological Interface Design
,
2002
.
[6]
Catherine M. Burns,et al.
Ecological Interface Design
,
2004
.
[7]
Barbara Klug Redman,et al.
Patient Self-Management Of Chronic Disease: The Health Care Provider's Challenge
,
2003
.