Designing for Touchscreen

I am working on a handheld medical device that patients use to manage the therapy they recieve from their implantable device. We explored the designs of other commercial products on the market to set the bar for the types of new technologies, interaction paradigms and gee whiz factors we should include in the new handheld device. We came up with a short list of desirable products and chose to emmulate the interaction paradigms of two well known handhelds: iTouch and Blackberry.

Since this is a medical appliance and not a cell phone we needed to have some key goals/rules that are unique to the medical device domain.

Rule #1: Don't kill, maim or hurt anyone

To accomplish this goal we needed to prevent user error. The key use error identified was unintended actuation or prevent the user from activating features without their intent. We needed to prevent the accidental modification of the patient's therapy when they weren't using it, like when they put it in their pocket or carried it around in their purse. We applied the following design mitigations to prevent the use errors. I call them mitigations because they each have a usability draw back.

Locking mechnasim - the patient can lock the handheld when they are finished or the system will automatically lock after a period on non-activity, but this means you will need to unlock the handheld each time you want to use it.

Resistive touchscreen rather than a capacitive touchscreen - the patient uses their finger or other fleshy protruberance to activate onscreen targets, just bumping your handheld into other hard surfaces won't activate the targets, but this also means you need to take your gloves off to make an onscreen request.

Multi-modal interactions for therapy modifications - the patient makes a therapy adjustment request onscreen and then confirms it with a hardware button keypress. This protects the patient, but may cause interaction confusion when switching between touchscreen and hardware interaction combinations.

Use target size and target spacing appropriate for patients with movement disorders - we used a 1/2" target with 1/2" spacing, but this reduced the navigation options and information space available on the screen.

Some other great guidelines for you to use on your touchscreen are available at the Information and Communication Technology (ICT)Accessibility site.

Surgical Task Flows

I am trying to define a best practice for a surgical procedure to implant a medical device. Here's my approach:

Step 1: Who?
What kinds of surgeons and surgical support staff are involved in this procedure?

What kinds of surgical techniques are they familiar and comfortable with and what will be new or different to what they currently do?

Step 2: What?
What products need to be supplied by the medical device company?

What products would be commonly available for these clinicians, but not supplied?

Step 3: Where?
OR or Clinic setting?

What needs to be present in the environment? (sterile, xray, other tools or equipment needed)

What might be present that could pose a hazard? (magnetic or other emissions)

Step 4: How?
What are the primary activites during the surgical procedure?
ex: Assess patient condition

What are the functions within activity?
ex: Intake patient

What are the tasks within each function?
ex: Obtain patient record

What are the steps within each task?
ex: Review patient progress

Note who is involved and where it is done for each task.

Step 5: Document and Review
I start all of this in a spreadsheet with the first column being the Activity (high level of what is being done), the second column the Function (sub-activities that may have different goals), the third column Tasks (Short, 1 to 8 words that describe something that has a clear start and end point; performed by only one user/doer), the fourth column Steps(the precise description of how this is performed and the order of how to do it.) The spreadsheet has a bunch of other columns to capture who is performing the Task, what environment the user is in when performing the Task and some other info and notes columns.

Once I have completed all of the Task Analysis research in the spreadsheet, I create a visio diagram of the draft surgical flow. This is very similiar to the diagrams clinicians use when triaging or diagnosing patients, so I have found this to be a good way to get the clinician involved in helping me to refine the flow and steps when we review and iterate on the recommended surgical procedure. For complex procedures, the flow is per task with each step in it's own box. For simpler procedures, the flow is per function with each task in it's own box. It really depends on where I have the questions and where I think there will be disagreement in surgical approach.

The National Istitute of Health; MedLine provides videos of surgical procedures. I have viewed many of them in their entirety, but squeamish beware!

Products fulfill needs, Experience fulfill desires

From Marc Gobe, The 10 Commandments of Emotional Branding

“Products fufill needs, experiences fufill desires. A product or shopping experience, such as REI stores’ rock climbing walls or the Discovery Channel stores’ myriad of “sound zones” has added value and will remain in the consumer’s emotional memory as a connection made on a level far beyond need.”

Thanks to Kyle for the post that led me to Marc Gobe.

Experience Days - A unique product/service

Whether you are looking for an exciting extreme experience like free falling or 4 wheel driving or something more tranquil like spa treatments or cooking classes the Experience Days offereded at Gizoo were fun to browse through when looking for fun vacation ideas.

Designing for Poor Motor Control

I am working on the design of a hand held device for patients that suffer the hypertonicity or spasticity caused by cerebral palsy, multiple scelrosis, brain injury or stroke. I have thinking about the disability consequences that result from these conditions. I have been researching assistive devices these patients might be using to accomplish common daily tasks like bathing, eating, walking and so forth.

I found this great site that listed the variety of assitive devices that people with motor control use to get through their day. From this list, I have been able to explore what tools people use and would be familiar with, I am hoping to understand why the designs of these devices help a person cope and apply those same principles into the device I am designing.

I am not an accessibility expert, but I am hoping to design something that will fit seamlessly into the lives of these patients and their caregivers.

Online Gaming and Medical Device Design

Some of my close friends know that I am totally addicted to COD5. It is important to recognize that I am using this immersively interactive experience to help me think of new ways to approach design problems. I may even be patenting one of my more promising ideas for a medical device soon. Since I plan on patenting this idea, I can't talk about it yet. I am listed a a co-inventor for two patent applications, one for deep brain stimulation and another for an indoor air comfort system, so maybe all this game playing is paying off.

I would like to share a Game Research site I stumbled on with a link to a good article: http://game-research.com/index.php/articles/making-sense-of-software-computer-games-as-interactive-textuality/

Spend time having fun and ideas will come!

Touchscreen UI for Handheld Devices

I am designing a User Interface for a handheld device with a touchscreen.

One of the first engineering things I needed to learn about was resistive vs capacitive touchscreens.

Synaptics had a white paper at Control Design that helped me understand the technology behind these options.

I am taking a look at several different products available in the market today including: iTouch, Garmin, Blackberry Storm, HP iPaq and other handheld devices I have designed recently that haven't been released to the market yet.  I am constantly learning new things about what works and what doesn't work well with regular folks during usability studies.

There hasn't been much research on touchscreens yet, but the article on Evaluation of One Handed Thumb Tapping on Mobile Touchscreen Devices was helpful and it has helped me while planning for a formative study of the prototype early next year.   In the referenced study, they found that preferred hand motions were quicker, that it didn't matter if you were walking or just standing while using the device, and that on-screen buttons on the edge had higher accuracy, but on-screen buttons in the center were deemed more comfortable to press.  You will need to be an ACM member to download the full paper.

Web Page Tabs and Accordions

After having worked on medical devices for the last four years, I am coming back to my roots and picking up some web design projects. My approach for preparing for this re-entry to the web world was to visit as many sites as possible, taking a look at each from the user's perspective to see what kinds of features and interaction patterns were now routine parts of websites. My second step is to find out how the web producers "do it". Which of these things are technologically practical and useful and which aren't based on my client's technology choices, business needs and target audience.

It has been fun to refresh my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, all of which are very limited.
Here are two sources I think you might want to check out if you are doing any website design:

• warehouse of JavaScript tutorials, examples and code by Jason Bartholme
• animated examples of a wide variety of tab styles at DzineBlog