Bringing medical user interface designs to life

Whether in the operating room or at home, medical device GUIs are on the front lines of delivering effective care to patients. Medical GUIs are the key interface between humans and computers, using visual, audible, and tactile elements to enable safe and easy interactions. Modern medical GUIs are evolving to provide not only more complex features, they must also offer a rich, smartphone-like experience to win over the hearts and minds of medical practitioners.

There are three drivers for building effective GUI user experiences (UX) for medical devices: Competition, complexity, and attractiveness. The strong competition among medical device OEMs causes enormous pressure to deliver products and updates faster than everyone else. Increasing complexity in user needs and in integrating more technologies onto one device causes friction between development effort and shorter timelines. Perhaps the biggest pressure in creating medical GUIs is delivering the vivid graphics and interactivity that users have come to expect from their smartphones. Clients otten tell us that even though a device’s functional and safety requirements may have been met, sales to a health care network can be won or lost based on the product’s look and feel.

To create an effective user experience with medical GUIs, manufacturers must incorporate strong human factors expertise, adopt processes that support UX designers and software developers working together, and use application architectures that separate the GUI code from the hardware. By aligning UX design closely with development, and allowing both to work in parallel on a GUI application that is decoupled from the platform, manufacturers are better able to prototype, build, and validate UX in faster timeframes.

With the number of medical device recalls growing — many caused by poor user interface design — there are three factors to consider for improving UX. First, real-world usability and UX testing is essential for gathering independent feedback that helps mitigate the future cost of user-related defects. Second, GUI designers and developers must work in parallel to leverage the unique skill sets of both and make decisions together without sacrificing good UX, good software design, and safety compliance. Third, rapid iterations and testing should be built into the development process, allowing designers to quickly update UX based on feedback without disrupting the backend work of software developers.