Long-term Usability Testing for Public Health Information Technologies

Usability testing is most often performed after product development has essentially ended and may result in a few slight changes to the system before it is finalized. As such, long-term usability testing is generally not possible even though the results would track user satisfaction through product design iterations. The BioSense 2.0 redesign team, through a contract with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has conducted long-term usability testing of the BioSense 2.0 syndromic surveillance Web-based application. The results have affected the design of BioSense 2.0 and revealed interesting trends.