TY  - JOUR
AU  - Joshi, Ashish
AU  - Arora, Mohit
AU  - Dai, Liwei
AU  - Price, Kathleen
AU  - Vizer, Lisa
AU  - Sears, Andrew
PY  - 2009
DA  - 2009/11/6
TI  - Usability of a Patient Education and Motivation Tool Using Heuristic Evaluation
JO  - J Med Internet Res
SP  - e47
VL  - 11
IS  - 4
KW  - Computers
KW  - health
KW  - education
KW  - usability
KW  - heuristic
AB  - Background: Computer-mediated educational applications can provide a self-paced, interactive environment to deliver educational content to individuals about their health condition. These programs have been used to deliver health-related information about a variety of topics, including breast cancer screening, asthma management, and injury prevention. We have designed the Patient Education and Motivation Tool (PEMT), an interactive computer-based educational program based on behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic learning theories. The tool is designed to educate users and has three key components: screening, learning, and evaluation. Objective: The objective of this tutorial is to illustrate a heuristic evaluation using a computer-based patient education program (PEMT) as a case study. The aims were to improve the usability of PEMT through heuristic evaluation of the interface; to report the results of these usability evaluations; to make changes based on the findings of the usability experts; and to describe the benefits and limitations of applying usability evaluations to PEMT. Methods: PEMT was evaluated by three usability experts using Nielsen’s usability heuristics while reviewing the interface to produce a list of heuristic violations with severity ratings. The violations were sorted by heuristic and ordered from most to least severe within each heuristic. Results: A total of 127 violations were identified with a median severity of 3 (range 0 to 4 with 0 = no problem to 4 = catastrophic problem). Results showed 13 violations for visibility (median severity = 2), 38 violations for match between system and real world (median severity = 2), 6 violations for user control and freedom (median severity = 3), 34 violations for consistency and standards (median severity = 2), 11 violations for error severity (median severity = 3), 1 violation for recognition and control (median severity = 3), 7 violations for flexibility and efficiency (median severity = 2), 9 violations for aesthetic and minimalist design (median severity = 2), 4 violations for help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (median severity = 3), and 4 violations for help and documentation (median severity = 4). Conclusion: We describe the heuristic evaluation method employed to assess the usability of PEMT, a method which uncovers heuristic violations in the interface design in a quick and efficient manner. Bringing together usability experts and health professionals to evaluate a computer-mediated patient education program can help to identify problems in a timely manner. This makes this method particularly well suited to the iterative design process when developing other computer-mediated health education programs. Heuristic evaluations provided a means to assess the user interface of PEMT. 
SN  - 1438-8871
UR  - http://www.jmir.org/2009/4/e47/
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.1244
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19897458
DO  - 10.2196/jmir.1244
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/jmir.1244
ER  -