Heuristic evaluation
Following Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design: [7]
| Visibility of system status | Patients want to know if the information is saved successfully when they are setting reminders or recording their symptoms. | Pop-up to indicate saved records. Small dot in the calendar dates when a record has been made. If a reminder is set the button turns blue. |
| Match between systems and the real world | When filling out the symptoms checklist, patients might be confused by the use of terms. | Use professional terminology that the patients are familiar with, instead of informal terms to remove ambiguity. |
| User control and freedom | Patients might click a wrong button accidentally due to their physical conditions. | Adaptive ‘remove’ or ‘update’ buttons in the ‘Reminder’ section. ‘Cancel’ or ‘Back’ buttons appears in every pop-up windows and views. |
| Consistency and standards | Pages with different styles, fonts and button colours will potentially confuse the patients. | Same and consistent background colour, order of lists, position of the buttons. |
| Error prevention | Without restricting the format when entering information will cause inconvenience to patients and doctors when handling the records. | Use simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ style questions, put bigger numbers below the slider to prevent possible visualisation errors. |
| Recognition rather than recall | If items or actions are hidden users won't use them or won't know that they are there. | Consistent design with all the options visible in the view. Transitions between views, no appereance of subviews. |
| Flexibility and efficiency of use | Some expert users would like to see a more precise graph or only certain periods of data. | Expert users can customize their graphs. Novice users are offered the option of automated graphs, called SmartViews. |
| Aesthetic and minimalist design | Patients with vision problems will have difficulties using an app with dazzling colours, unclear colour division, small fonts and buttons... | Use soft and simple colours to highlight the text. Remove irrelevant information on each page to enlarge buttons and texts. |
| Help user recognize, diagnose and recover from errors | It’s a waste of time whenever making an error but not knowing the solution. | Error message is shown with possible solutions when wrong details are entered: authentication, invalid dates and time... |
| Help and documentation | It’s useful to have a guideline when entering symptoms and side-effects for the patients. | Put ‘inline help’ links next to the form field for extra help. |