UPA 2008 Workshop
Models of Healthcare Consumers’ User Experience
Workshop facilitators: Whitney Quesenbery and Christy Mylks
Position papers due: May 9 (template-RTF)
Workshop materials due: June 2
Workshop date: June 16, Baltimore, Maryland
What have we learned about healthcare information consumers and their usability needs? This workshop invites practitioners who have done user research with healthcare consumers to share - and compare - their results, including context, product and user goals, and user profiles, personas or other models. This workshop invites practitioners who have done user research with healthcare consumers to share what they have learned.
From the early days of the web, sites began to make medical and healthcare information available online. Information once restricted to medical professionals is now free for the reading, from advice on staying healthy to information about cancer clinical trials. As healthcare facilities move to electronic medical information systems, they can provide patient health records, detailed and personalized support information and even services like scheduling a routine appointment online. And Web 2.0 is only accelerating health networking, as patients connect to share information and support.
What have we learned about healthcare information consumers? Do they have special usability needs? Are their personas based on their demographics, or their disease? How do the patients’ journeys intersect with and inform their user experience? What do we see consistently, and what differs across projects and why?
This workshop is a chance to look across projects and see if there are any common themes to what different user researchers have learned about users and the user experience in different project contexts. Although this is a subject for discussion in medical communications conferences, we do not believe it has been done from a usability/UX perspective before. This may be little more than a chance for practitioners to share information, but it might also show areas of overlap or difference that could provide direction for further work.
We will start with each participant presenting a brief, structured summary of a model for understanding users, and the context in which this model was created. We will then break into small groups to discuss similar models in detail and identify areas of overlap and difference. After reports from the breakouts to the full group, we will then re-examine the models from the perspective of themes such as medical context, product type, or aspects of user demographics and behavior considered in the models. At the end of the day, we will work as a group to summarize what we have learned from this exchange of user research, and consider ways in which we can publish our results (meeting the requirement for dissemination of our results).
Participants in the workshop will be limited to people who can provide details of their research, so we can examine the context, product and user goals, and results of their research, in the form of user profiles, personas or other models. Each prospective participant will submit a short description of their background in this work and the work they would present. Participants will be selected for diversity of:
- Healthcare context
- Geographical, cultural or socio-economic diversity
- Types of organizations (corporate, non-profit/advocacy, healthcare providers)
People accepted for the workshop will create a description of their user models, including a structured description of the context in which the models were created, and any visualizations or other materials to communicate the model.
Position papers
Use this template (RTF) for your own position paper, and email it to" whitneyq at wqusability dot com"
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