Nurse-computer interaction: staff performance outcomes

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of nurses' cognitive and demographic characteristics to their information retrieval speed, accuracy, and subjective screen satisfaction during on-line interactions with three different computer screens. One hundred ten randomly selected female clinical nurses interacted with computer screens of varying information densities. Age, spatial memory, and spatial visualization were significant predictors for nurses' practiced and overall performance speeds. Age was an important variable across screens; the cognitive variables, however, differed according to screen types. Age was a predictor of nurses' practiced accuracy, while both age and spatial visualization predicted overall accuracy scores. Perceptual speed was not a significant predictor in any equations, and none of the nurse characteristics predicted subjective screen satisfaction.