In this rapidly changing field of healthcare software, good user
experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design will help determine
whether or not these tools successfully support clinicians and the
patients they serve. User experience (UX) describes how a software
application can support users in completing tasks and offers us a
framework for thinking about what makes an app effective, efficient,
satisfying, and useful for our specific tasks and goals. UI design is
a component of UX – it refers to the layout, interactions, visuals,
and elements of particular software.
Whether it is usability that allows for safe use, effectiveness that
reinforces the intended clinical effect, or efficiency that improves
well-defined objectives, UX/UI design represents best practices in the
healthcare industry due to its rigorous and specific approach. When
applied in clinical settings, UX/UI design complements FDA guidelines
and other best-practice approaches to ensure safety in complex
industrial systems, improve reliability and user satisfaction, and
create clinical systems that enable doctors and nurses to accomplish
their work effectively and with improved outcomes.
We’ll delve into why UX/UI design is so vital in healthcare software
and explain how intelligent design isn’t simply about usability and
aiding clinical tasks. Even more importantly, it has the capacity to
foster a people-centered culture in healthcare that can help breathe
life and optimism into the field.
Well-designed UX/UI can have a huge impact on user experience, making things attractive, intuitive, and easy to use. Good UX/UI can reduce the time to competence for clinicians grappling with a new technology, eroding some of the dreaded learning curve that makes new technologies fear-inducing. Embodying that old cliché about finding the critical function and making it easy to use with one finger, good UX/UI considers the needs of clinicians to perform their tasks efficiently, predictably, and effectively. Patients also participate in their care; many feel responsible for being active healthcare consumers. Imagine a healthcare UX/UI that was simple and intuitive, navigating them to their information, booking an appointment, or allowing them to communicate with their care team. It would be easy to say that this leads to a better experience. Still, higher user experience leads to higher engagement, better compliance with treatment plans, and higher patient and client satisfaction with care systems.
The significance of efficient, useful UX/UI design in healthcare software cannot be underestimated. In streamlining workflows, UX/UI design involves lessening the number of manual mouse clicks and keyboard presses they need to make to complete a task. The graphic representation of the electronic patient record seen below is an example of an overly complex UI. Here, the aesthetics alone serve to distort an understanding of how many keystrokes or mouse movements are required per action. In turn, this complexity takes up a good deal of valuable time. And let’s face it, who has the time to waste, especially when working with software that has life-or-death consequences for your patients? Furthermore, this complexity can lead to accidental data entry errors and performance issues, which can mean the differentiation between life and death. A strong UI can mitigate these possibilities.
UX/UI design is about ensuring healthcare software design complies with regulatory requirements and is accessible to all users. For example, checking boxes to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 can ensure the privacy and security of patients’ data. Accessibility features also protect users with different abilities, such as those who are blind or have physical limitations to their motor skills. By following accessibility guidelines, designers can ensure that they comply with industry standards and the criteria set forth for a compliance program as mandated by law to protect a product’s users.
One of the most essential principles of good UX/UI design in healthcare software is ‘user-centered design.’ This means that to create a good user experience, designers should start by identifying the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the healthcare providers who use the software and the patients who may be receiving care. To this end, designers gather user feedback during the design process through interviews, surveys, and usability-testing sessions. Such feedback is precious because it gives designers insights into how users work, their questions and concerns, and ultimately, how the software can assist them in their jobs, help them be more efficient, or improve their experience with the healthcare system.
These can create a simplified and clear path for users to complete tasks while lessening cognitive load in tasks with high stakes and required accuracy. For example, a complicated or confusing layout in healthcare or other situations where risk, negative consequences, and a high need for accuracy could introduce error or inefficiency. By focusing on straightforward design elements to elicit users’ required actions, such as clear buttons to click for the next steps or an easy-to-locate ‘cancel’ button to cancel a task altogether, the UX/UI designer can reduce complexity and decrease cognitive load. Ultimately, this streamlined design will allow users to access important information and complete actions more efficiently without the interference of extraneous information, such as crowded page options or complex interactions.
Consistency and standardization within the design ensure that all parts of the software seem connected, minimize training, and allow users to predict how the software will behave accurately. Consistent consistency makes less experienced users more productive and removes the doubt or hesitation about using the software correctly. It also helps to achieve a sense of a ‘professional’ and ‘polished’ layout, increasing user confidence. Design standards provide specific rules and guidelines that determine what to use and what not to use in a given application.
Adaptability and dynamic responsiveness are essential because the same software needs to be usable on a smartphone, tablet, and desktop computer while appearing the same on an iPhone 4, an iPhone X, and any of the other millions of screen orientations in today’s landscape. Adaptable and responsive web design ensures that the same user experience manifests on as many devices as possible – the agnosticism we expect from healthcare software. These dimensions of aesthetic engagement make the software more accessible and convenient in an era where users increasingly need to access healthcare either as patients or as healthcare providers through their smartphones or tablets.
A key issue in UX/UI healthcare software design is the paradoxical requirement for specificity. On the one hand, there is a need to reflect the essential features of specific clinician and patient workflows. On the other hand, it must deal with the complexity of practical data management. We have already mentioned how the human capacity for abstraction breaks down in complexity. For this reason, the clinical workflow – sequence of events, information flows, roles, involved parties, and complexity – will often span the entire system. Similarly, there is the issue of practical data management, the collection of various data elements crucial to a specific clinical process, which may involve cooperation from various parties. A key design issue is how to incorporate both of these considerations.
One of many essential usability considerations is ensuring that the features needed to support a task have been included in the software while balancing this against making the Users’ experience too convoluted and frustrating. Particular challenges in healthcare are how to include all the required features without making the system overcomplicated while allowing users to adapt it to meet their specific requirements. UX/UI designers must understand the necessary features and prioritize these features to support the workflows involved across a clinical department or healthcare system. Then, they must combine all this functionality into powerful and ergonomic interfaces that match healthcare professionals' requirements, helping them reach decisions, make therapy plans, order medicines and other treatments, maintain their electronic health records, and provide useful information to patients and clinical departments.
The sensitive nature of health information poses a major usability challenge in healthcare software design: patient data must be protected while the software is kept intuitive and accessible to the end user, which starts with robust security features mandating the use of encryption, secure authentication protocols and regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) laws. UX/UI designers must distinguish between protecting patient data and maintaining an intuitive interface.
Conducting user research and performing usability testing is at the core of building valuable, usable, and effective UX/UI in healthcare. When designers conduct extensive user research with healthcare professionals and patients, they get better insights into these users’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. Research methods such as interviews, surveys, observational studies, and the like provide designers with insights into user requirements and design preferences. Meanwhile, usability testing allows these users to interact with software prototypes or beta versions and identify issues and areas of improvement before the software is fully deployed and available to the end user. Research proves invaluable in ensuring that design decisions are made based on user experiences, needs, and preferences and not by guesswork or intuition.
Designing software in collaboration with healthcare community members is essential to generating usable and usable software in the specific context of a clinical setting. Suppose software designers work hand-in-hand with clinicians, administrators, and other end-users. In that case, they are able to observe and understand the requirements of the workflow, the specific sources of frustration for users, and their unique preferences. Clinical users are the best source of knowledge about the needs of a clinical work environment. Collaborating allows designers to receive actionable feedback and create software that better meets their specific requirements. This, in turn, provides more efficient software, has fewer errors, and is, therefore, easier for users to adopt.
There should be an iterative design process, focusing on successive refinement of the software by involving users to provide feedback. The idea here is that for healthcare application software, multiple versions of the software, or prototypes, should be produced, tested with users, and then iteratively refined with small changes in succession until the function of the software is achieved. This allows the designer to continue to hone the software by addressing issues or improving it incrementally based on the iterative feedback from users. In an iterative mindset, changes made in the design can help improve upon or resolve issues found in the process of use, by those who will ultimately use the software.
Several emerging trends and technologies will influence the future of UX/UI design in healthcare. For example, the emergence of voice interfaces, as well as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are starting to transform the manner in which users interact with healthcare software. Voice-controlled interfaces allow for hands-free operation, and this could be particularly helpful in the clinical environment when a provider needs to keep their hands free. AR and VR have the potential to completely change the way we train, diagnose and educate patients and the way we experience healthcare. Advancements in wearable technology and in mobile health apps will likely allow us to further integrate the flow of healthcare data and, in turn, to further engage consumers. As we begin to see these technologies become a larger part of our lives, this will likely translate into improvements in how we design healthcare software to make it more useful, intuitive, interactive and convenient.
Today, thanks to AI and machine learning, the future of UX/UI design in health shows real promise for improved diagnostics, efficiencies, and ease of use. AI can work with mountains of data and deep-analyze the minutiae of patients’ behaviors, survivability rates and outcomes, treatment efficacies, and grief. It can even make recommendations regarding specific patients’ treatment options. In UX/UI design, AI can infuse user interfaces with better interaction, predictive text responses, more personalized content, and real-time decision support. In the backend of healthcare software, AI can also enhance diagnostic validity and cut down on administrative noise and muck with machine learning algorithms that spot patterns, automate routine processes, and even predict potential problems before they crop up.
User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design are nowadays among the most important factors in developing and designing healthcare software. Healthcare software can become more useful, easier to use, faster and more time-saving when the user comes first. UX/UI Design can anticipate clients’ needs with attractive colors, icons, proper navigation, and simplicity that facilitates faster workflows. We need to be innovative, and in recent years, thanks to improved technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, voice recognition, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and many others, there are more and more possibilities for improving and evolving the future of UX/UI in medicine. Following these rules and being always up-to-date with the next trends of tomorrow will help healthcare software and patients face the challenges and opportunities of the future.