Heuristic evaluation of a web-based interface for internet telemedicine

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Health Informatics
• Usability Engineering

Background:

• Web-based telemedicine systems require robust usability for effective healthcare delivery.
• Traditional usability methods can be costly and time-consuming.
• Evaluating the user experience for medical professionals is crucial for system adoption.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess a low-cost usability engineering methodology for a web-based telemedicine system.
• To identify usability issues in the Spacebridge to Russia web portal.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of combining heuristic evaluation with expert usage assessment.

Main Methods:

• Employed a mixed-methods approach involving heuristic evaluation and small-scale expert assessment.
• Recruited six experts: three Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) specialists and three medical-content experts.
• HCI experts used ten usability heuristics to identify interface problems; medical experts performed predefined tasks and verbalized their experiences.

Main Results:

• HCI experts identified 52 interface problems, ranging in severity from minor to critical.
• Medical-content experts encountered usage difficulties primarily stemming from a mismatch between designer and user mental models.
• Identified issues directly correlated with the heuristic evaluation findings, validating the methodology's effectiveness.

Conclusions:

• The combined heuristic and usage-based methodology offers a cost-effective approach to identifying critical usability issues in telemedicine systems.
• This integrated approach can provide incremental benefits across various design activities.
• Recommends incorporating this combined methodology as a standard design component for dynamic telemedicine systems to improve user-centered design.