Okay, the fact that clinicians are busy is not actually all that newsworthy–it’s pretty widely known. In fact, the one overarching characteristic that seems to be common among the different workflows practiced by the clinicians I’ve worked with is that clinicians are busy. Whether it’s dividing time between similar-but-different proprietary systems or working with different colleagues as shifts are changed, clinicians have a lot of work to do and a lot of distractions to deal with. As a result, the amount of time and energy that clinicians can devote to learning a new user interface on a healthcare application is minimal.
Therefore, a central goal of any healthcare application should be to save clinician users time and mental energy. Applications should require minimal training and allow users to complete basic tasks within a few minutes of first using the application. Advanced features should be designed such that they are easily discoverable and in turn learnable by users. It’s also important to resist the temptation to add any unnecessary “splashes of color” or to increase the size of “featured” content without adding any value to the clinician user experience. The visual design should be clean and minimalist; the last thing users need is visual clutter.
Remember, clinicians are busy and have more important things to do than waste time using yet another healthcare application. They want to get in and out of the computer as soon as possible so that they can spend more time in front of patients.
