Mar
28

Anti-Data Pixels

By kconover Posted in Tutorials | Comments Off on Anti-Data Pixels

Less is More
—Mies van der Rohe

In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, the most pithy: omit needless words.

In Cognitive Friction, we extended the idea to graphical computer user interfaces as “omit needless pixels.” In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we looked at Nielsen and Tahir’s analysis of the percentage of a home page’s area devoted to different purposes; in this way, we could determine which were valid data pixels, which were not, and the ratio of data to non-data pixels. Read the rest of this entry »

Feb
23

Giveaway

By kconover Posted in Tutorials | Comments Off on Giveaway

Dr. Vivek Reddy, a neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, also works on its digital records effort.

In a February 19 article in the New York Times,  Julie Creswell calls the healthcare IT portion of the 2009 stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009)  ‘a $19 billion government “giveaway”’ resulting from the lobbying of the big HIS vendors. One of the quotes in her article points out the usability limitations of these big HIS systems: ‘“On a really good day, you might be able to call the system mediocre, but most of the time, it’s lousy,” said Michael Callaham, the chairman of the department of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.’

I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind giving a lot of our tax dollars to these big companies, if they would only invest it in usability improvements that would save both lives and money.
Feb
15

Skeuomorphism

By kconover Posted in Tutorials | Comments Off on Skeuomorphism

Wood-Grain VinylSkeuomorphism has been around for a long time.

Architects including Frank Lloyd Wright have eschewed it. Alan Cooper, known as one of the founding fathers of user interaction design for computer systems, decried it in the first edition of his classic text, About Face: Essentials of User Interaction Design. And more recently (~October 2012), people have compared Apple products with the new anti-skeuomorphic Modern UI (in-speak for User Interface) of Windows 8, previously known as Metro, and accused Apple of poor design because of rampant excess skeuomorphism.

 

Read the rest of this entry »

Jan
20

PHR

By kconover Posted in Tutorials | Comments Off on PHR
Electronic Health Record Diagram

Electronic Health Record Diagram

One of the supposed means to the great gains of electronic health records is that of the Personal Health Record (PHR). Big guns like Microsoft and Google dived into the PHR pool a few years ago (Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health), only to find that the water was quite shallow. Getting information into a Personal Health Record turns out to be so hard, that the effort wasn’t worth the results. Google gave up, at least for now, yet Microsoft persists. (There may be a lesson in there somewhere… ) But, as pointed out in an article on Slashdot, the Department of Health and Human Services has released newly revised rules for the Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These are effective on March 26, 2013. This is designed to, among other things, make PHRs more functional. As the press release says: “Patients can ask for a copy of their electronic medical record in an electronic form.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Jan
12

RAND

By kconover Posted in Tutorials | Comments Off on RAND

RAND Corporation logoIn the January 2013 HealthAffairs, Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones of the RAND Corporation look back  at the projections of a 2005 RAND study of healthcare IT. Why, in defiance of that study’s projections, are our medical computer systems not saving us $81 billion a year? They list reasons: slow adoption, lack of interoperability, and – you guessed it – poor usability. So, just maybe, if you get vendor CEOs and hospital CIOs to spend a few hours browsing the essays on this website, you can save the country billions of dollars. (Not to mention saving hospitals’ money and making more money for vendors.) Who’d have figured?

 

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
//commented out L sidebar 7/26/11 //