Usability Evaluation of a Mobile Ecological Interface Design Application for Diabetes Management

Abstract

Healthcare applications for small-screen mobile devices are becoming increasingly common for medical professionals and patients. Even so, usability issues including navigation and screen clutter remain a challenge. Ecological Interface Design (EID) was used to design a patient-oriented diabetes management display for Java-enabled mobile devices, making it one of the first mobile EID (mEID) applications. This paper presents a usability evaluation of the diabetes management application, which compares the mEID display to a modified taskbased display (mEID+Task). The mEID+Task display integrates functional task characteristics such as frequency and necessity; menu structure, item ordering, item labelling, and input scheme were varied. Results showed that normalised trial completion times were moderately faster in the mEID+Task display than in the mEID display, while no differences were observed in trial completion accuracy. Furthermore, the mEID+Task display received higher preference ratings than the mEID display alone. The findings suggest that the usability of mEID displays can be improved by incorporating a task-oriented approach.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bodenheimer

Lorig

Holman

Grumbach

(2002). Patient Self-management of Chronic Disease in Primary Care JAMA, 288(19), 2469–2475.

Burns

C.M.

Hajdukiewicz

J.R.

(2004). Ecological Interface Design. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Jamieson

G.A.

(2002). Empirical Evaluation of an Industrial Application of Ecological Interface Design. Proceedings of the 46^th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 536–540.

Miller

C.A.

Vicente

K.J.

(2001). Comparison of Display Requirements Generated Via Hierarchical Task and Abstraction - Decomposition Space Analysis Techniques International Journal of Cognitive Ergonomics, 5(3), 335–355.

Robeson

Vohra

Wang

(1999). EDIT - Electronic Diabetes Information Tracker. Retrieved November 1, 2004, from Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing Web site: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2000/cs6750a_fall/projects/Team2B/part1.html.

Seidler

K.S.

Wickens

C.D.

(1992). Distance and Organization in Multifunction Displays Human Factors, 34(5), 555–569.

Thompson

L.K.

Hickson

J.C.L.

Burns

C.M

. (2003). A Work Domain Analysis for Diabetes Management. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 47th Annual Meeting, 1516–1520.

Vicente

K.J.

Rasmussen

(1992). Ecological Interface Design: Theoretical Foundations IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 22, 589–606.