DOI: 10.5176/2251-3833_GHC13.51
Authors: Ashish Joshi, Douglas Puricelli Perin, Kate Trout and Stephen K. Obaro
Abstract:
Despite the modern advances in information and communication technology (ICT), quality of data capturing is still low in many African countries. Nigeria currently lacks a national surveillance system that can track the occurrence, prevalence and development of various chronic and infectious diseases. The Interactive Surveillance System was developed to capture data electronically from patient evaluations in Nigeria. The platform was constructed with the ultimate goal of ease in navigation, and data input data for health workers. Usability assessment is critical to the success of interactive computer-assisted health applications, as a variety of problems can arise from usability and HCI design weaknesses. To evaluate an interactive system’s design against user requirements, the heuristic evaluation is among the most widely adopted expert-based methods. Two usability experts working at the Population Health Informatics Research Lab used Nielsen’s heuristics to review the ISS usability from November to December 2012. A total of 864 violations were identified with a mean severity of 1.9 (s=0.1). Highly rated usability violations were visibility of system status (mean=3.5, s=0.7) and recognition rather than recall (mean=2.75, s=1.1). The interface of the program presented the majority of the catastrophic problems (64{6e6090cdd558c53a8bc18225ef4499fead9160abd3419ad4f137e902b483c465}, n=7) compared to the evaluation forms. Problems detected by this study will be addressed before new user-based usability testing is conducted. Once ISS arrives at final stage of development, the program can hopefully facilitate data capturing for public health workers, providing a way to collect data more efficiently and effectively, and consequently improve surveillance outcomes.
Keywords: Heuristics, evaluation, Nigeria, usability, surveillance
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