Nursafe
Nursing Home Incident Reporting System UI Design
This was a group project involving 2 graduate students and 2 undergraduate students. We were working on the UI Design of the Nursing Home Incident Reporting System and Portal. All four members we only working together to design the style guide, and for the rest 2 undergraduates worked on designing the Portal for Nurses whereas the 2 graduates worked on designing the System for Administration. I being part of the system design, I was entirely responsible for the Reports, Cases, and Forms while the remaining was designed by my project partner.
Project Overview
The project’s key objective is to design and develop a user friendly web-based responsive Incident Reporting Portal and System that will aid nurses and administrators in reporting, evaluating, organizing, and examining incidents efficiently, effectively and with ease. We initiated the project by first identifying the problem and conducting secondary research. After that we worked on ideating solutions for the same by designing Concept Maps, User Tasks & Flows, Sketches, Style guide, wireframe and Hi-Fidelity Prototype that embodies the system's functions and features.
Challenge
Problem - Due to staff’s fear of consequences the hospitals suffer from under-reporting of incidents. This could either occur when the process seems time consuming, confusing, and complex or if they are worried that the information will get them in trouble such as losing their job.
Users - Administration staff of Nursing Homes. Their needs are to have user-friendly interface and access to useful functions when at work in order to have reports reviewed quickly and efficiently.
Solution
My goal was to keep my interface simple intuitive and user friendly. In order to do so I first started my design process with secondary research on my product and users to understand the requirements and their needs better. The process to get an ideal solution was by understanding the nursing home system flow and then incorporating it’s required features into the system interface to make it simple and efficient for the Admin users to operate.
Some Key System Features
Creating new report
Submitting report
Editing in progress report
Reviewing submitted report
Appending case documentation
Populate OSHA/ Workers Comp forms
Design Process Tools
Concept Map
User Tasks
UI Flows
Sketches
Style Guide
Annotated Wireframe
Prototype
Concept Map
This first step to design process visually gave a informal view of the various ideas and directions that could fit well into my system design. This gave me a better clarity of how some features are related, user needs could be met, and what is the ideal way to make the interface simple, intuitive and user friendly.
User Tasks and UI Flow
Creating user task list and task flows gave me a clarity on each individual feature. The UI flow on the other hand helped me generate system navigation from one point to another and understanding possible alternate ways in the process as each user has a different approach.
Full document - User Tasks & Task Flows
Full document - UI Flow
Sketches
After working on the UI elements, I sketched some important pages to get a visual understanding of the layouts using UI flow as the guide. To generate these sketches I drew screen pages to understand how the layout, icons, and design would turn out.
Style guide
The style guide includes of the Font style, color scheme, icons, buttons, navigation and pop-up designs. The colors are also compared through color contrast checker to see if they are well put together.
Results
Annotated Wireframe
Hi-fidelity Interactive Prototype
Project Reflections & Next Steps
Reflections
During my research I was only able to find statistical data about incidents occurring with patients in hospitals but there were rare finds on incidents occurring with Hospital staff and what kinds of systems are existing to assist them. With lack of awareness of existing competitors system it can be challenging to know what seems to works for the users and what improvement can be implemented. Thus, I had a few difficulties during the design process stage of UI flows which was a design construction of the entire system’s navigation with alternate routes. Eventually with the better understanding of my design structure, flow, and style I was able to have a much relaxed and clear minded execution of my final iterations.
While our team was working on the Style guide, we had a very systematic voting system for every idea and selection from the font to the icons. We yet should have spent more time in order to refine our guide by adding more colors to the layout and using a more unified designed language between our portal and system . Overall, I am vert grateful for all the feedback from my peers that I was able to shape my design well suited for my users.
Next steps
Testing the prototype would be the next step in my project. User Testing and Interviewing target users would give quality feedback for improvements and further iterations.