Alida Veldsman

Managing User Experience – Managing Change

Interactive products with innovative user interfaces are being designed while the user interfaces of existing products are being improved. The changes in user interfaces are being prompted by the need to design products that are useful, usable and appealing for an enchanting user experience to the people using the products. It is harmoniously agreed within the user experience domain that a change in the user interface of a product consequently affects the user experience of the people who use the product. Furthermore, user experience practitioners and academics acknowledge that user experience evolves over time. Paradoxically, there is lack of strategies for managing user experience as it evolves, or when a new user interface is introduced. Change in user experience is a process that needs to be managed for a positive user experience to be attained. Literature is awash with models aimed at guiding and managing change implementation. On the contrary, most of the change management models are aimed at managing change in organizations while neglecting managing the user experience of the people to which change is introduced. At the time of writing this paper, no evidence was found of an existing model aimed at managing user experience, both in theory and practice. Following the aforementioned premise, the purpose of this paper is to propose theoretical requirements for managing user experience of the people using interactive products. The paper commences with a conceptual background synthesis of related domain components required for managing user experience. Thereafter, the requirements for managing user experience are determined. After-which the requirements are presented in a User Experience Management Requirements (UXMR) framework. The paper culminates with proposed future work.

Implications of baseline study findings from rural and deep rural clinics in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and South Africa for the co-design of mHealth4Afrika

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020, that is evaluating the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual mHealth platform on the quality of maternal and newborn healthcare delivery in rural and deep rural clinics. This paper presents results from a comprehensive baseline study carried out with 40 informants from the leadership of 19 healthcare clinics in Northern Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November — December 2015, using focus groups and semi-structured interviews. These findings identified human resource capacity, environmental, practical and technical challenges, and equipment and infrastructure deficits. Training requirements of healthcare workers were also identified. Constraints identified include the need for: intuitive, easy-to-use user interfaces to reduce the need for extensive training; use of flexible data protocols to facilitate cost effective bandwidth and effective data exchange; cost effective; low power consumption technologies to reduce cost of replication and scaling; solar charging units to increase availability; support for sensors and telemedicine due to a deficit of healthcare professionals in rural and deep rural clinics; and the need for easy configuration and adaptation to facilitate wider adoption. This insight will be used to inform co-design of the mHealth4Afrika platform during 2016–2018, based on user-centered design principles, leveraging current state-of-the-art in terms of electronic patient record systems and medical sensors. It will also inform the minimum ICT infrastructure required in each clinic. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa.

Comparative usability evaluation of a mobile health app

Ncediso™ is a mobile application currently under development by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The purpose of the application is to provide information to community healthcare workers (CHWs) who are based in remote areas and who do not have the opportunity to attend regular refresher courses. The end user population has varying levels of digital literacy and therefore the user interface design and associated workflow is of great importance. To ensure that the final user interface not only meets the requirements but is also user friendly, two sets of user interfaces were developed. The purpose of this paper is to report on the requirements for a positive user experience that supports the workflow and leaves the end user with a feeling of satisfaction. To this end, the project set out to evaluate two user interfaces and make recommendations as to which is the preferred design. The paper reports on the findings of a comparative usability evaluation and makes as to the preferred user interface.

Electronic Health Records: Benefits and Challenges for Data Quality

Data quality (DQ) issues in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a noticeable trend to improve the introduction of an adaptive framework for interoperability and standards to large-scale health Database Management Systems (DBMS). In addition, EHR technology provides portfolio management systems that allow Health Care Organisations (HCOs) to deliver higher quality of care to their patients than possible with paper-based records. The EHRs are in high demand for HCOs to run their daily services as increasing numbers of huge datasets occur every day. An efficient EHRs system reduces data redundancy as well as system application failures and increases the possibility to draw all necessary reports. Improving DQ to achieve benefits through EHRs is neither low-cost nor easy. However, different HCOs have several standards and different major systems, which have emerged as critical issues and practical challenges. One of the main challenges in EHRs is the inherent difficulty to coherently manage incompatible and sometimes inconsistent data structures from diverse heterogeneous sources. As a result, the interventions to overcome these barriers and challenges, including the provision of EHRs as it pertains to DQ will combine features to search, extract, filter, clean and integrate data to ensure that users can coherently create new consistent data sets.

The Faceless Mobile Youth of Africa Drive Change

Over decades, millions of rands and countless volunteer hours were used to attack the problems facing youth across the nation. Yet, by most standards, problems have worsened. There are no simple answers as the obstacles that today’s youth have to overcome are many and formidable. It is the aim of this project to create a concentrated effort in the Gelvandale area using mobile technology to address a number of the challenges faced by at-risk-youth in this area. The primary aim of the research is to determine and develop best practices and strategies for overcoming challenges and creating successful leadership experience for youth from the Gelvandale area. A secondary objective of the research is to determine how Information Communication Technology and then specifically mobile technologies can be used to achieve the primary aim without excluding human participation. This paper will discuss the approach taken to the exploratory study, outline the objectives and highlight not only the impact achieved to date but also the lessons learnt.

Re-engineering school healthcare services using mobile technologies, in the Eastern Cape

For children to benefit from education programmes, they need to be healthy. The provision of healthcare services in schools thus responds to the need of children but also increases the efficacy of other investments in child development, ensures better educational outcomes, achieves greater social equity and is a highly cost effective strategy. One such a strategy is South Africas Integrated School Health Policy, which is a mechanism to improve the general health of school-going children as well as removing health barriers to learning, in order to improve education outcomes. The context in which the policy is implemented, however poses many challenges resulting in school health services not functioning in far-off schools in rural parts of the country of which the shortage of qualified nursing staff, lack of appropriate equipment and the remoteness of schools are contributing factors. In an attempt to find a solution to this problem, research into the use of technology as an alternative way to provide access to school healthcare services, are currently investigated. This paper shares how school nurses in rural Eastern Cape, use mobile devices with specific mobile applications, to improve access to healthcare and health education in schools.