How Much Do You Know About Painpad

Field Study of a Pain Monitoring Device

• Accurate pain monitoring is important in hospitals but can be difficult and time-consuming.
• Pain is typically managed by nurses asking patients to rate their pain on a 1-10 scale, which is then recorded.
• Painpad is a tangible device for patients to report their pain levels.
• The goal of the field study was to evaluate the use of Painpad by patients recovering from ambulatory surgery in two UK hospitals.
• Patients were encouraged to use Painpad every two hours to report their pain levels.
• Two studies were conducted involving 54 people ranging in age from 32-88.
• Data was collected through Painpad and verbal pain scores collected by nurses every two hours.
• Patients were given a satisfaction questionnaire and asked about their experience with Painpad.
• Patients recorded more pain scores with Painpad than would typically be collected by nurses.
• Painpad was well received by patients and was easy to use (mean rating 4.63 on a scale of 1-5).
• The field study showed that Painpad was a successful device for collecting patients' pain scores in hospitals.
• Field studies may be conducted to evaluate how experts learn and interact with tools for complex tasks in realistic settings.

Communicating Usability Findings

• Usability evaluation helps to identify good and bad aspects of an interface.
• In complex organizations, changes to improve usability need to be communicated to others.
• Achieving a usable interface requires designing to meet users' needs and fixing problems.
• Reports on compliance criteria are often required, but they need to be read and acted upon to be effective.
• Involving developers in the evaluation process can be the most effective method for conveying the need for changes.
• The interpretation session can be used to share experiences and ideas among the design team.
• Video or audio recordings can be edited to produce highlights for communication purposes.
• Reports should be written with the reader in mind, keeping them short and engaging with clear recommendations for action.
• Snapshot reports can be useful for providing timely information to teams.
• Including a management summary and optional appendix can make reports more approachable.
• Presentations can be an effective alternative to lengthy reports.
• Enthusiasm for reading reports can be created by first presenting key findings in a condensed format.

Severity Scales and Priorities for Usability Issues

• Discovering problems and opportunities for improvement in the user interface design is common during requirements, design, and evaluation activities.
• Assigning severity levels or priorities to usability issues is more effective than simply writing reports.
• Many organizations have their own categorization schemes for defects, system problems, or bugs, and it is important to work with the organization's existing system.
• Usability practitioners use various severity scales, such as Rolf Mohlich's scale with categories ranging from disasters to cosmetic problems, or Julianne Chatelain's binary scale of thumb-in-the-eye problems and all others.
• Usability requirements should be included as part of project requirements to ensure their delivery.
• Changes to methods or new data and requirements may affect other people, and resistance to changes may arise.
• Lars Jensen's severity scale uses two categories: severity (crash, major, medium, minor, nuisance, intermediate, low, and very low) and development priority (fix for the next internal or external release if possible, or desirable but not necessary).
• Avi Harel's approach is to classify usability problems by business goals, such as market penetration or user productivity, and associate them with one of three usability types: apparent, continuous, or critical.
• Identifying the business goal can help decide which usability type is relevant to the product.
• It is important to consider who is involved and their level of usability maturity when thinking about usability changes.
• Chapter 29 will discuss how to win support for usability activities based on the level of usability maturity.
• Usability requirements should be treated as a delivery issue and given the same priority as other requirements from marketing or legal.

Stakeholders in a Project: Identifying and Communicating with Them

• Even small projects can have stakeholders, including family, friends, customers, suppliers, and contacts.
• The At Home Catalog is an example used in Chapters 28 and 29, which produces consumer products listed in a paper catalog and now on a web site.
• Stakeholders in the At Home web site project include front-line staff, trainers, support, and customers.
• There are four types of stakeholders: beneficiaries, decision makers, gatekeepers, and workers.
• Beneficiaries include external customers, shareholders, and managers who will benefit from the project's success.
• Decision makers may not be limited to development staff managers, as they may control resources needed for the project.
• Gatekeepers control access to other groups, such as senior managers' secretaries or mailing list organizers.
• Workers are stakeholders whose workload may increase due to changes brought about by the project.
• Communication with stakeholders is crucial for persuasion activities and to help workers adjust to changes.
• Four groups of communication techniques include involvement and interpretation, highlights and snapshots, reports and recommendations, and severity scales and priorities.
• Table 28.1 presents a summary of communication techniques suitable for each group of stakeholders.
• Restricting involvement in the report to beneficiaries may be more effective than communicating with all groups.

Understanding Organizational Change and Usability Maturity

• Designing a user interface using a user-centered approach creates two sets of changes for organizations: changes in the project itself and changes in approach from traditional to user-centered methods.

• To make these changes easier, it is important to understand the complexity of stakeholders and the impact of different activities on them.

• Pugh's principles for understanding organizational change include: organizations are organisms, occupational and political systems, members operate simultaneously in all three systems, and change is most likely to be acceptable and effective in successful people or departments experiencing tension or failure in some part of their work.

• If an organization is changing its design methods to be more user-centered, it is also asking users to change, and other parts of the organization may also be affected.

• There are expressed, felt, and normative needs for each stakeholder group in a user interface project.

• Ehrlich and Rohn's four stages of acceptance in usability engineering include skepticism, curiosity, acceptance, and partnership.

• Usability maturity is a six-step scale from level X (unrecognized) to level E (institutionalized).

• The INUSE usability maturity model provides a formal framework of questions to assess an organization's level of maturity.

• The INUSE model aligns with the user-centered design standard, ISO 13407, and can be used as part of an overall assessment in terms of ISO/IEC TR 15504-l:1998, Information technology- software process assessment.

• Pugh's principles and the INUSE model help understand objections to user-centered design and find ways around them.

• Assessing an organization's usability maturity can provide a structured approach to diagnosis or evidence of maturity.

• Understanding organizational change and usability maturity can help organizations make the necessary changes to implement user-centered design successfully.Usability Maturity and Reporting Evaluation Findings

• The majority of people and organizations encountered are at the early stages of usability maturity.

• The chapter focuses on how to utilize and report findings from evaluation.

• It is important to consider who in an organization will be affected by changes needed to deliver usable interfaces.

• Usability maturity refers to the level of awareness and implementation of user-centered design within an organization.

• There are four stages of usability maturity: hostility, apathy, curiosity, and acceptance.

• By this point in the book, readers are expected to be at least at stage two (curiosity) and possibly at stage three (acceptance).

• The next chapter will discuss ways to choose arguments for justifying user-centered techniques based on the stages of usability maturity.

• The goal is to win and maintain support for user-centered design.

• Reporting evaluation findings involves presenting them in a clear and concise manner.

• It is important to identify the most important issues and prioritize them for action.

• The audience for evaluation findings can include designers, developers, management, and other stakeholders.

• Effective communication of evaluation findings can lead to improved usability and a better user experience.