Today I saw this wonderful usability pyramid come across my Twitter feed:
Usability Pyramid: Functional > efficient > Intuitive* > Beautiful
* http://t.co/W4VyxKxOtS pic.twitter.com/g1WeG7gYqK
— Charles Webster MD (@wareFLO) April 28, 2015
There’s so much we can learn in healthcare from this pyramid. I’m still chewing on whether the pyramid is the right way to display each of these 4 areas, but I love the way that it breaks it out into these 4 categories. Do they build on each other though?
As I look at these 4 categories of usability, I think that healthcare IT and EHR have done a pretty good job at the functional area. I also think that most of the advanced EHR users are able to work quickly in their EHR. In fact, it’s a complaint I often hear from EHR users that the EHR is so powerful that it takes forever to configure it. The experienced users love these extra configuration options.
I think very few EHR and healthcare IT companies have done a great job on the intuitive and beautiful side of usability. Many doctors think they can just pick up an EHR and start using it just like they did their iPad. This just isn’t the case. It requires a mix of configuration and training to make an EHR work effectively for an organization. Should it? I have yet to find an EHR where this isn’t the case.
I’d love to hear where people think various healthcare IT and EHR applications fit on this pyramid. Let’s hear it in the comments.
