“Prescription for Learning”
Web App Designed to Meet the Needs of Health Professionals and Patients
• Project Challenges
Cancer Patient Education Specialists (doctors and nurses) face many challenges when trying to educate their cancer patients and families. There is a shortage of tools available to support their education efforts and no way to consistently document the education they do provide.
The user experience design for this program is based on usability studies with health professional staff and patients.
The “Prescription for Learning” Web App is designed to run primarily on a tablet making it easy for nurses to provide a learning session and easy for patients to use it to learn.
The “Prescriptions” for cancer patients are responsive so users can access learning content later from their smartphones or other devices, an important aspect of the user experience.
Responsive Design Provides Maximum Flexibility
• Project Solutions Provided
To address the needs of doctors, nurses, and their patients, I designed a program that uses a tablet-based web app to provide education directly to cancer patients. Both the health professionals and their patients have simple navigation and responsive web screens. Google Analytics were added to the web app and custom analytics were created to collect program specific user statistics. These user statistics help support health professionals in their decision making, ongoing program evaluation, and user experience improvement.
Usability testing with nurses showed that nurses needed screens and commands streamlined to avoid confusion. This led to several new designs which placed the button commands on one main screen for nurses/doctors to lessen the need for them to go to separate screens to find a given command.
Usability testing of the app with the Microsoft Surface tablet running Windows 10 also demonstrated that having separate apps for the nurse/doctor interface and the patient’s learning program was confusing and cumbersome for some health professional users. Based on this testing, the program design was updated to combine the separate apps into a single and integrated “web app.”
Usability testing with cancer patients and nurses in the clinical setting, also found that iPads running an installed “Kiosk Pro” app helped to simplify the tablet user environment. This “kiosk” app also gave users a more engaging user experience and added important security features.
The “Prescription for Learning” Program is Successful and User Data Supports Ongoing Evaluation
• Project Outcomes
The user experience design includes user-friendly dashboards within a cloud database app program. The cloud database app enables educators and medical center managers to view their own data or the data for all staff in a given medical department. The dashboards are specifically designed for use on tablets, and include pie charts, bar charts, and tables to provide a visual view of the data. The design for this management tool enables these highest level health professionals to easily evaluate and make decisions about their cancer center patient education programs.
The “Prescription for Learning” web app learning program is being successfully implemented throughout the Florida Hospital Cancer Institute and 10 associated hospitals in Central Florida. With the user interface tools and program features I designed, this web app now makes it possible, for the first time, for department managers to use dashboard reports to evaluate the education being provided by each of their educators. The “Prescription for Learning” web app also enables patient educators to easily standardize the health education topics that they provide to their cancer patients.
The cloud database app framework provides a secure way to collect user experience data and provide analysis and reporting.
A Wireframe “Mockup” from Balsamiq showing a web browser view. This screen is designed to be used on both desktop/laptop or tablet. The buttons on the right side and bottom of the screen help doctors, nurses, and educators have commands easily accessible. To view additional “web browser” and “tablet” wireframe mockup screens, Click Here.
Wireframe Interactive Prototype Using Balsamiq Software
Interactive wireframe mockups help team members and stakeholders
Website, Web App, and interactive software design is supported by the preliminary step of creating wireframe images and prototypes based on usability and user experience testing. The Balsamiq mockup program is useful since it can export to PDF and the wireframe screens can have interactivity. With this feature, the buttons in the mockup simulate their actual behavior by going from screen to screen. This allows members of the team, both internal and external, to view preliminary navigation and screen design protytpes. Team members can also make edits to the design using the cloud version supporting collaboration. View a sample “Interactive PDF” by selecting the button “View Mockup PDF” below.