We recently did a project in the health care field. The overall goal was to improve the usability of a data collection app that was supposed to accurately record every step of a detailed, half-hour long medical procedure. The problem was that for some reason, there was a unusually high rate of error in the data being entered into the app by the care giver.
Now, these same users had been complaining to customer support and account teams -- your normal user listening channels -- about many aspects of the interface. But fixing those never seemed to fix the inaccuracy problem. Wasn't until we conducted ethnographic research that we discovered that the users were hiding a very important issue. They actually weren't entering data at the time it was collected -- they were waiting for a couple hours, then entering data from (a sometimes faulty) memory. They did this for a variety of reasons relating to the interaction design of the application, and fixing those issues did end up solving the problem. But because the users were ashamed to tell us how they were actually interacting with the app in the field (I think it was a violation of FDA rules, to some degree, and they felt bad about taking shortcuts), our client's user listening channels weren't able to provide the critical insight needed to fix the problem. I suspect that as long as people are subject to cognitive bias, user listening alone won't be able to diagnose all usability problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=24074 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
