A heuristic evaluation of the user and programming interfaces of a sleep medicine application
Eduardo Mosqueira-Rey, David Alonso-Ríos, Vicente Moret‐Bonillo · 2018
In many cases, the development of computer systems to help clinicians make decisions does not take into account fundamental aspects for the integration of these systems into routine clinical practice, such as aspects related to usability. In our case, the system under consideration is MIASoft, a comprehensive medical decision-support system for the diagnosis of Sleep Apnea-Hypopnea Syndrome (SAHS). Our objective is to perform a heuristic evaluation of this tool following a systematic and generalizable approach based on using comprehensive taxonomies of usability and context-of-use attributes as a source for the heuristics. We focus our analysis on two possible interfaces: (1) the graphical user interface, in which users interact directly with the tool and (2) the programming interface, in which programmers interact with the Application Program Interface (API) of MIASoft. Although both approaches are quite different, the same methodology was used for their heuristic evaluation. This demonstrates that we can retain the usefulness, ease of use, and generalizability of heuristic evaluation while adding depth and structure since we are basing our study on a comprehensive usability model.