Category Archives: IT-Usability

Social media dashboard design notes

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With Easter out the way and with a project concerning social media dashboard design on the horizon I thought it might be good to look at what blogs and resources are devoted to social media dashboard design.

To be honest I have been involved in dashboard design once before at least, in the NHS the remote IT consultant came up with a nice task dashboard to manage issues and bugs. And I even won an award for a community management dashboard designed for the SiftGroups Drupal ‘backend’, though again the design was more the work of the IT developer than a result of my input.

In that case what was interesting was ensuring the dashboard gave the community manager data which helped them to do their job. Now that sounds obvious (see note below on the ‘obvious’) but with so much data available, and with a techie doing the designing, half the challenge is making sure you get something that’s going to help you do your job. Such issues are commonplace though; for example I recall recently a community manager complaining that Yammer does not come with an automatic notification facility, so you need to keep returning to the dashboard to check if there’s been any activity, relevant or not.

But what I am talking about here is specifically data around social media analytics, to pull both external (eg Radian6) and internal (multiple office sites) into one place to help guide the business. So here goes:

  • Keep it simple stupid – different people have different levels of understanding, so design for maximum effect by keeping it simple.
  • Blinkety, blink – dashboard designed so we can tell the difference between a metric that can sometimes be ignored and when it is alerting us to a critical opportunity or threat.
  • Master of the Universe – data should put social media performance in wider marklet context, to provide competitor comparison for example.
  • Overall the dashboard should help us improve our ‘field sense‘ – how to play the game, no just describe activity.

  • And from data guru Dr Michael Wu: Good Data Science Practice: Know the Limit of Your Data -  “After all, what good is analytics if all it does is give you the “illusion” of confidence?” – including checking for systematic bias.
  • Plus my special bonus point – don’t forget the obvious. Sometimes looking for valuable social media data means missing what’s starting you in the face. Just like helping a friend who calls you with a defunct computer, it’s usually due to a loose power cable…

Comparing US patent search engines

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I quickly put together this short animoto-video showing the beta Google Patents, US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and new Xyggy patent search engines, entry page followed by advanced search page. How do they compare in your view, focusing on US granted patents from 1976 onwards?

You should notice a difference with the Xyggy engine. Why? It runs an item search which it claims provides substantial advantages and additional information over text search.  Also, the makers say that with multiple items in the query, Xyggy discovers what they have in common to return better results.

User centred design

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Bumped into a nice guy from Directgov (‘website of the UK government’) at the launch of Social Media Week in London last night, talking about plans to make it more relevant to its users. When I woke up this morning I recalled hearing an excellent presentation from Directgov’s Andrew Lamb at the BCS in late 2008 which opened my eyes to the value of user centred design. Fortunately I tracked down the past event with a link to the full set of Andrew’s presentation slides (zip file) for your consideration.

Shift handover research gets

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Just stumbled across the good news that £500K has been found to fund research in shift handover for healthcare in the UK. The City University’s Centre for HCI Design has been awarded £494,777 to be precise by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the UK Government’s leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences):

“While there have been small-scale studies of clinical handover in specific settings, including our own study of a paediatric ward on the ACE project, there is a lack of basic research. We will address this shortcoming in the GHandI project [my note: GHandI = Generic Handover Investigation] with an extensive investigation of handover as it is only by achieving a clear understanding of the ‘work’ that handover accomplishes that we will be able to improve the practice. For example, there is evidence that handover contributes to patient safety by accomplishing work other than the immediate transfer of responsibility for care of the patient.

“It is within this context that the current proposal is situated, the overall aim of which is to conduct a detailed investigation of clinical handover and its contribution to patient safety by developing and evaluating a generic theoretical model of handover and deriving detailed recommendations and prototypes for innovative handover support technology.

“With the support of our collaborators, we plan to study handovers in ten clinical settings, ranging from ambulance ‘retrieval’ services to inter-specialty transfers to shift handovers in paediatric intensive care units.” Be interesting to know whether the WHO Collaborating Centre for Patient Safety Solutions (which recommends SBAR) is one of the collaborators?

There’s also the shift handover research already carried out in Canada to refer to: Transfer of Accountability: Transforming Shift Handover to Enhance Patient Safety, Kim Alvarado, Ruth Lee, Emily Christoffersen, Nancy Fram, Sheryl Boblin, Nancy Poole, Janie Lucas and Shirley Forsyth. (Healthcare Quarterly, 9(Sp) 2006: 75-79).

I guess they’ve also seen the US patient safety tool, the SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation) technique which “provides a framework for communication between members of the health care team about a patient’s condition. SBAR is an easy-to-remember, concrete mechanism useful for framing any conversation, especially critical ones, requiring a clinician’s immediate attention and action. It allows for an easy and focused way to set expectations for what will be communicated and how between members of the team, which is essential for developing teamwork and fostering a culture of patient safety.”

And of course there is existing tried and tested shift handover solutions currently used in industry such as Lifetrack, “which was developed as part of a sponsored research program involving BP, Honeywell Control and the University of Cambridge. The project spent 2 years understanding the social, communication and information dimensions of shift hand-over and operations logging”. Anything from Cambridge has got to be worth a look too, I would have thought (and indeed I added a posting on Lifetrack, together with one on SBAR, to the Medicexchange Forum).

Reality checkpointPhoto by Stuart Glendinning Hall

Shift handover research gets funding

Posted on by

Just stumbled across the good news that £500K has been found to fund research in shift handover for healthcare in the UK. The City University’s Centre for HCI Design has been awarded £494,777 to be precise by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the UK Government’s leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences):“While there have been small-scale studies of clinical handover in specific settings, including our own study of a paediatric ward on the ACE project, there is a lack of basic research. We will address this shortcoming in the GHandI project [my note: GHandI = Generic Handover Investigation] with an extensive investigation of handover as it is only by achieving a clear understanding of the ‘work’ that handover accomplishes that we will be able to improve the practice. For example, there is evidence that handover contributes to patient safety by accomplishing work other than the immediate transfer of responsibility for care of the patient.”It is within this context that the current proposal is situated, the overall aim of which is to conduct a detailed investigation of clinical handover and its contribution to patient safety by developing and evaluating a generic theoretical model of handover and deriving detailed recommendations and prototypes for innovative handover support technology.

“With the support of our collaborators, we plan to study handovers in ten clinical settings, ranging from ambulance ‘retrieval’ services to inter-specialty transfers to shift handovers in paediatric intensive care units.” Be interesting to know whether the WHO Collaborating Centre for Patient Safety Solutions (which recommends SBAR) is one of the collaborators?

There’s also the shift handover research already carried out in Canada to refer to: Transfer of Accountability: Transforming Shift Handover to Enhance Patient Safety, Kim Alvarado, Ruth Lee, Emily Christoffersen, Nancy Fram, Sheryl Boblin, Nancy Poole, Janie Lucas and Shirley Forsyth. (Healthcare Quarterly, 9(Sp) 2006: 75-79).I guess they’ve also seen the US patient safety tool, the SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation) technique which “provides a framework for communication between members of the health care team about a patient’s condition. SBAR is an easy-to-remember, concrete mechanism useful for framing any conversation, especially critical ones, requiring a clinician’s immediate attention and action. It allows for an easy and focused way to set expectations for what will be communicated and how between members of the team, which is essential for developing teamwork and fostering a culture of patient safety.”

And of course there is existing tried and tested shift handover solutions currently used in industry such as Lifetrack, “which was developed as part of a sponsored research program involving BP, Honeywell Control and the University of Cambridge. The project spent 2 years understanding the social, communication and information dimensions of shift hand-over and operations logging”. Anything from Cambridge has got to be worth a look too, I would have thought (and indeed I added a posting on Lifetrack, together with one on SBAR, to the Medicexchange Forum).

Reality checkpointPhoto by Stuart Glendinning Hall

Buttons & usability

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Joking about lift button design with my colleagues today I recalled that internet usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently admitted to a contract for just such a task (though doubt he contributed to the Random Lift Button project from Chris Speed, where you press a button marked ‘R’ and it takes you to a random floor):

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Have you been asked to do any weird or interesting projects recently?

JN: Well, we had one where we worked on elevator control buttons. It wasn’t something that was crying out for usability, but it’s an example of the fact that anything can be made a little easier to use if you bother to look at it with the right mindset.

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What did you recommend?

JN: Well, that’s confidential from the point of view of the client. I wouldn’t say we made these elevators twice as easy to use, which we typically say about a website. But if you think about the amount of time people press an elevator button a day, even a few percent better would be worth doing.

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Funny really as I was once in a lift with my mother and two brothers as a teenager and saw the lift had an off switch and of course flicked it. Never seen someone lose their cool so fast.