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Assignment #9: Final Write-Up
May 11, 2004
Problem Statement
Solution Overview
Personas and Scenarios
Final Interface Design Description
Design Evolution
Third Interactive Prototype
Work Distribution Table
Problem Statement
In this information age, we have seen patients increasingly becoming
partners in their own health care, researching health information
online and participating actively in clinical decisions with their
providers. However, in the larger arena of public health, or community
health, there is a lack of partnership and participation by the
general public to improve community health. It is not that people
don't care to improve the quality of life in their communities,
but they lack the appropriate tools to become easily involved. For
example, issues such as residential crime rate and releases of a
toxin in a community affect our living conditions and environment,
and can in turn affect our psychological and physiological health.
What can ordinary citizens interested in improving community conditions
do about these issues currently? Not much, since there is no easy
way to get involved. Although professionals from areas such as public
health, city planning, environmental planning, sanitation services,
law enforcement, religion, and other fields work hard to improve
community health, there is also a lack of coordination and sharing
of information/resources among these professionals, making the effort
even more difficult.
In addition, most of the community-based websites fail to provide
ratings on the living quality of a community, and make that information
easily accessible on their site to promote public health awareness
in the community. Even if the information is available, users are
usually presented with very simple information on the subject along
with some external links for them to find the related information
on that particular subject. Users would need to go between the home
site and the external site back and forth to achieve the task. This
would be a very tedious process especially if they were to look
for information in various subjects.
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Solution Overview
What is needed is an information network system that tracks community
health issues, promotes sharing of community information and best
practices, and supports tools to help people get involved in making
community decisions. The Healthy Communities Foundation, a non-profit
organization founded by two public health professors at UC Berkeley,
has decided to build such an information system to meet the need.
This system, the Healthy Communities Network System, will serve
as a set of templates that can be built on and easily customized
by local communities, so that each interested community can have
its own version of the system while the underlying architecture
remains centralized.
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Personas and Scenarios
| Persona
1: Nancy Fisher (public health master's student) |
|  Nancy
is a master's public health student specializing in environmental
health and health policy. She is interested in examining how
interactions with environmental agents affect human health.
For her master's thesis, she is working on a research project
to better understand how children are exposed to prenatal/postnatal
pesticide and allergen exposures and what their health effects
are. As a result, she needs to get in touch with public health
officials regularly for school projects. Currently, she contacts
these public health professionals mostly through referrals
from professors and other students at school.
Nancy is also a very vocal person, and she deeply believes
that public health is the result of organized community-based
activities that are informed by cutting-edge science and technology.
She is involved with several community organizations, and
she reads the newspaper and several public health newsletters
regularly. She advocates efforts to protect and promote people's
health through action and service in local and global communities.
Besides her schoolwork, Nancy is doing an internship at the
Center for Children's Environmental Health. Her role there
is to develop media campaigns to promote healthy behavior
for children, and to create health promotion services and
programs for these children. To develop programs and resources,
she works closely with individuals, communities, foundations
and government agencies. Advocacy from other public health
leaders and professional is especially important for her work.
She hopes that the experience and networking from the internship
will eventually help her land a full time job upon graduation.
Her goal for the future is to work for government agencies
such as the EPA as a policy analyst.
Goals
- Do well on her master's thesis project.
- To develop successful programs and campaigns for her internship.
- Meet, network, and connect with other public health professionals/experts
- Empower people around her to make positive changes on community
health issues.
Scenario #1
Nancy’s current project for her internship at the Center
for Children’s Health is to develop programs to educate
parents, teachers, and children themselves on the issue of
childhood obesity. The childhood obesity problem has exacerbated
in recent years in Marin county. Many local public health
newsletter and newspaper articles have mentioned the issue
and are calling for actions. Nancy goes to the Healthy Communities
website, and finds that childhood obesity is presented as
a health indicator that needs attention. She reads all related
information about the indicator including the comments posted
on this indicator by other people; she reads current news
articles, stories, and resources about the issue. Based on
information from this website, she drafts a teaching program
to educate teachers and parents on ways to combat childhood
obesity. Since implementing a successful public health requires
support from various community groups, Nancy goes back to
the Healthy Communities website to email the indicator information
to other local public health leaders/professionals /organizations
that might be interested in collaborating with her on the
teaching program.
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| Persona
2: Marcos Smith (MPH, Dr.PH) |
|  Marcos
is 37 year's old, and was born and raised in Massachusetts.
He moved to Berkeley for his college since 1985 and got his
M.D. in Public Health Information Sciences from UC Berkeley.
Marcos has been working in the healthcare communication field
for a few years in the Bay Area. He moved back to Massachusetts
last year and is currently working as the director of computing
resources at Harvard Medical School. He is responsible for
the management of high performance computing infrastructure
and resources to support research throughout the medical school.
Marcos is also working as the CTO of EVALUMETRIX, LLC, leading
the technical architecture and infrastructure implementation
of an advanced health specific search engine and information
prescription tool. Besides building computing infrastructure,
Marcos is also involved with public health research. His main
research interest is on regional differences of health/lifestyle
related issues, especially on differences between communities
within the Bay Area and within Massachusetts. One of his current
projects is to evaluate the water quality across communities
in the Bay Area.
Currently, there is not a centralized community health indicator
repository to support his research. Different information
sources are naming the same indicator differently. He wishes
there is an information system that can organize and present
community health indicators and related information in a more
standardized way, so that there is no duplicate effort in
checking multiple sites. Furthermore, he wants a place to
voice his opinions about the community and present his research
findings.
Goals:
- Manage the computing resources in Harvard Medical School
well
- Develop an effective health specific search engine that
supports rapid searching across millions of pages
- Be able to access a centralized information source that
provides easily visualized indicators on a community's health
issues
- Improve his community living conditions by sharing his expertise
and knowledge
Scenario #2:
Marcos Smith needs to do some research on water quality across
different communities in the Bay Area. He logins into the
system and goes directly to the indicator master list page.
He knows the indicator he is looking for is an indicator belonging
to the Natural Environment Category. After narrowing down
to this one category, he finds several subcategories. He is
not sure exactly which subcategory the indicator belongs to,
so he decides to use the keyword search tool. By typing the
word "water", he gets the link to the "water
pollution" indicator. He views the indicator status at
different locality levels and across different communities.
He goes on to read more related information based on all the
available links. He comes up with a preliminary analysis based
on the findings from this site. He leaves some comments and
shares some of the information from his analysis at the site
before he logs off.
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| Person
3: Maurice Law (an engineer recently relocated to Oakland) |
|  Maurice
Law is a 32 year-old engineer from Hong Kong originally. He
received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical
Engineering from the University of California, Davis. He is
married to a UC Davis graduate also from Hong Kong and is
now a father of a 3-year's old boy, Morris. His wife is now
a stay home mom spending most of the time caring for their
little boy. Both of their families are still reside in Hong
Kong, and they try to go back every year to visit their parents.
Both his wife and Maurice enjoy the life style and living
environment here in the United States, and they plan to stay
permanently to raise their kids here. Maurice has been working
for a small local company in the Sacramento area as an engineer
upon graduation several years ago. After working for the company
for five years, he has decided that it is time to move on
to a bigger company where he could receive better benefits
and pay rate. He is recently being offered an opportunity
to work for a well-established engineering consulting company
near Oakland. He is very excited about this job offer, which
could mean an opportunity for US residency, and he is moving
to Oakland to be closer to his office.
They have just brought a small condo in a decent area of Oakland
as their permanent home, since he is now more settled with
his future plan with a more satisfying job. Both his wife
and Maurice are very excited for being a first-time homeowner
in the United States, as they have been renting apartment
all these years since they came for undergraduate school.
Maurice is very satisfied with his current life both at work
and at home. His only worry is the health of his little boy
who suffers from asthma. Besides providing Morris with the
medical care he needs, Maurice is also trying to find out
what he could possibly do for his son as he was told by the
doctor that Morris’s asthma might have something to
do with the air quality of their living environment.
Maurice is curious to learn about the air quality in his
nearby community. He has been trying to look for related information
and information about asthma in general mainly through online
resources. Looking for information about asthma is rather
easy but finding information on air quality specifically for
his area of residency is relatively difficult. Being a new
resident in the community who plans to stay around, he is
curious to learn about the “overall health” of
his community. He wishes there is a website where he could
go to and be able to find out how his community is doing in
different aspects over time.
Goals:
- Everyone in the family is well and healthy
- Be able to learn about the air quality condition in his
community through online resources
- Learn about the relationship between asthma and air quality
Scenario #3:
It is now three months since Maurice and his family moved
in their new home located near a freeway in Oakland. Their
son, Morris, has been sick since last week with symptoms of
sneezing, coughing, and itchy eyes. His wife brings him to
a doctor and finds out he is suffering from asthma. Maurice
is told by the doctor that it might have something to do with
the air quality in the living environment. Maurice is searching
on Google hoping to learn about asthma, and to learn about
the air quality in Oakland. It returns with many results,
and he clicks on the one call “Oakland Healthy Communities”.
At the top-middle section of the homepage, he sees an eye-catching
dashboard with several color-coded indicators on it. He clicks
on the one says “Air quality” to lead him to a
page with explanations of air quality conditions and factors
on the region. He reads about the explanation of information
source and feels confident with the credibility of the information.
Maurice also uses the search/link function on this page to
search for related information on air quality. After reading
all the information he wants to learn about, he bookmarks
the homepage and prints the air quality indicator page for
reference.
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Final Interface Design Description
The functionality
The feature that we focused on was the “community indicators”
feature. It is a visual representation of a community’s quality
of life and it acts as an alert system of providing information
about community health and identifying problems to be solved. What
users can do with the “community indicators” is listed
below:
| Goals to
achieve |
Tasks to
perform |
Actions
to take |
| Learn about how the community is doing |
Browse or search for information on interested
community health topics |
Option 1: Go to the
homepage, locate the community dashboard at the top of the
homepage if your topic of interest is listed on the dashboard.
Option 2: To learn about indicators
in other topics not listed on the dashboard, click on the
“community indicators” link on the left nav bar,
or the “view more indicators” link located at
the top of the dashboard to go to the Indicator Master List
page.
Option 3: On the homepage, type
interested topics on the search box to find out all available
listings, including indicator information, related to that
topic.
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| Identify problems; Bring awareness to citizens
on community issues |
Read the dials;
Read the graphs, and texts available on the individual indicator
page
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Option 1: On the community
dashboard, read the placement of the pointer on the dials to
learn about the rating. Click on the link to go to the individual
indicator page to view detailed indicator information.
Option 2: On the Indicator Master
List page, scroll down to see a list of all available dials
that are listed by topic, or users can also jump directly to
where their area of interest is by clicking the topic links
at the top of the page, which brings them to appropriate section
of the page.
Users have the ability to select the listing pertinent to the
levels of geographic granularity that they want to see by using
the “region level” pull-down menu.
To go to individual indicator page to view detailed indicator
information, click on the indicator title link.
Option
3: Take you to the search result
page where results are listed by features. Go under “community
indicators” to find links that take you directly to the
individual indicator page.
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| Compare current status with past; compare performances
with other communities |
Read indicator status over a period of time; Read
current indicator status of different communities |
Click the “view past indicator status”
link to look up indicator changes over a period of time in your
community, or
Click the “view indicator across communities” link
to compare your community status with others.
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| Share relevant information or opinions with others
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Email others with information you found on the
indicator page; Post comments |
Click the “email others” link located
on both the top and the bottom of the individual indicator page
to send the indicator information you found on this page to
others.
Login to post comments, or register first if you are a new member.
Click the post comments button to post new comments, or click
on an existing comment to reply to that particular comment.
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Flowchart
What was left unimplemented
- The ability to bring users back to the original worksite
after finishing registering as a new user. It was left unimplemented
because of time constrain and because it requires significant
effort to reprogram.
- The help section is not fully implemented yet. Currently clicking
on the help link located on the top right corner of the page would
bring you to an under construction empty content page. We have
the intention to provide help information to the users but we
plan to wait on it until we have a complete picture of what we
should offer when all the features are completely built.
Tools used
For the low-fi prototype, we mainly used MS Words and Powerpoint
for designing and producing the paper version of the system. In
addition, other materials such as paper, post-it note, markers,
a pair of scissors, and glue were also used. We thought this was
an easy, fast, and convenience way to produce an initial design
of the system.
We moved on to develop a mock-up of the interface using Dreamweaver.
We then built our first, second, and third interactive prototypes
using PHP. PHP allowed us to reuse the HTML elements from the mock-up
when we started building the interactive prototype. The graphical
components were created in Photoshop and Fireworks. We were able
to integrate the mock-up into the prototype without duplicating
efforts.
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Design Evolution
Initial Sketches
It involved brainstorming for high-level ideas that could best serve
the function of providing information about community health and
identifying problems to be solved. We focused more on the basics
of information flow and less on the content detail of each page.
For example, we knew we wanted to have eye-catching “symbols”
to indicate ratings on different community health issues, but we
did not start designing the “symbols” that later became
the “dials” until later in the development stage. We
mainly used the initial sketches to layout all the pages that we
planned to develop to ensure that information was shown in a logical
and easy to understand order.
Low-fi testing
Now with a good understanding of the information and interaction
flow, we moved on to designing the content layout of each individual
page. Knowing that users would like to “browse indicators”,
“search indicators”, and “share indicator information”,
we developed a paper prototype of the system that had links to browse,
and a search box to search throughout the system. Emailing function
was also included for sharing information. Design decisions were
made on where the contents should be placed on each page and how
should they be presented, i.e. using links, buttons, pull down menus,
radio buttons, or check boxes. One of the major design accomplishments
we achieved with paper prototyping was the “dashboard of indicator”
on the homepage. We all agreed that the rating “symbols”
should be color-coded (red, yellow, and green) dials horizontally
listed across the top of the homepage to catch attention.
First Interactive Prototype
From here on we started to fine-tune the system interface step-by-step
based on the feedbacks we received from different testing sessions.
More and more refined changes were made as we started to gather
more and more concise feedbacks. The major revisions between the
low-fi prototype and the first IP were:
Labeling: some links on the left navigation bar were renamed
for easier understanding.
Labeling: the “view more indicator” link was
added on the dashboard to improve clarity of indicator information
that was available in the system.
Appearance: the blue dial indicator was used instead of
the rectangular bar indicator to make the subjective indicator more
consistent with the objective one, at least in shape.
Functionality: the ability to view comments was added to
allow unregistered users to view comments. We felt that it was a
valuable function to add to make the system more powerful.
Second Interactive Prototype
In the second IP, we further improved our system design using the
feedbacks we received from the Heuristic Evaluation. Most feedbacks
were valuable and constructive, which allowed us to further refine
both the presentation and flow of information in our system. Changes
made included cosmetic, design were:
| Function |
Problem (First
IP) |
Solution (Second
IP) |
Location |
Types of violation |
Level
of Severity |
| Search |
Search box gunction too complicated |
Use simple search box. Add the advanced search link underneath
the search box |
Homepage |
Simple & Natural Dialog |
3 |
| Search options too confusing |
Remove bool search options, advanced search could
be done using the advanced search link |
Main search page |
Speak user's language |
3
|
| Login/ Registration |
Logout link appears even the user hasn't logged in |
Fixed. Logout link only appears after loggin in |
System-wide |
Simple & Natural Dialog |
3 |
| Unnecessary registration procedure for new users |
Remove unnecessary pages. Go directly to registration
page |
Registration Page |
Simple & Natural Dialog |
3
|
| Email/Post Comment |
No confirmation after email sent |
Add email confirmation page |
Individual Indicator page |
Feedback |
3 |
| Graphic Design |
Color of the left navlinks are too dark to see |
Change links to white color to make them stand out from the
background blue color |
Left navbar systemwide |
Simple & Natural Dialog |
3 |
| Browsing information |
Some links located in the "Related links" section
are misleading |
Change the order of the links to make them clearer to understand |
Right navbar within the individual indicator page |
Simple & Natural Dialog |
3 |
Final Prototype
Our final prototype was based on the feedbacks we received from
the pilot usability test where we were able to observe the system
being used by first time users. Most of the feedbacks were quite
positive except for the following issues:
| Problems
(Second IP) |
Action
taken (Final IP) |
| Blue dials still confusing. The position of the
blue bar on the dial did not match where the pointer was pointing.
|
Improved the blue indicator dial presentation
by making the bar positioned at where the pointer was pointing.
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| The list of dials available on the Indicator Master
List page was somewhat too long and confusing. |
Added filter function in a pull-down menu on the
top of the indicator master list page so that users could filter
the locality (city/county/nation) of indicator they wanted to
view.
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| Some function links were not very clear and obvious.
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Improved the location and color of the links to
make them more obvious to users. |
| Lack of help and explanation information in the
system |
Added the “what is this?” link under
the indicator dial on the individual indicator page to explain
what different colors of the dial meant. |
Most valuable evaluation technique
Out of the three testing sessions, we felt that both the heuristic
evaluation and the pilot usability test were valuable to our prototypes
usability. They provided different levels of feedbacks that worked
well at different development stages. The heuristic evaluation was
a valuable tool that we were able to see how the system was performing
in general. Comments were given in many aspects of the system, such
as functionality and design, of which most of them were valuable
comments. On the other hand, the pilot usability test allowed us
to build on the feedbacks from heuristic evaluation to further improve
the system by focusing the testing on very refined parts of the
system. It was particularly useful as we were able to visually observe
how each specific part of the system was used and what the users
were thinking. This was very different from the heuristic evaluation,
in which the system was evaluated without we knowing what the evaluators
were doing and thinking. What the evaluators attempted to do might
not actually be what the system would offer them, which would then
affect the usefulness of the rest of the evaluation related to that
particular part of the system. Therefore, we thought the face-to-face
follow-up session with the Mapping China team after the heuristic
evaluation was very useful and constructive.
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