Usability testing is an effective risk mitigation process that can be employed for eliminating the human errors in software application. Human beings tend to make errors that cannot be avoided completely. Therefore, usability testing is considered as a major technique, by the developers in the development process of any software application (Lindholm & Höst, 2013).
Medical devices play an important role in managing and monitoring the health of the people and nowadays, major part of the medical devices is based on software. Different researches prove that almost 87% of all incidents in medical environments occur due to human factors. In order to lower the cases of such errors, it is essential to incorporate human factors in the process of development of the medical devices.
Therefore, the possibilities of utilizing usability testing as an effective risk management process are widely considered in development of any software application. The user is considered as a key player of the usability field, and the usability testing aims at investigating the type of problems and the associated risks user may face while using a software application. Undergoing a usability testing is therefore considered as the risk mitigation process for reducing the number of human errors.
An experimental case study was conducted for understanding the effectiveness of the usability testing. It was carried out on a patient’s monitoring system for monitoring the critical health factors of the patient. The usability test results unveiled the major two problems, which were commenting function and alarm function. Apart from this, there are other 15 problems associated with the usability of the system (Lindholm & Höst, 2013).
The usability test was carried on four test users, two of which were nurses and other two were enrolled nurses of the hospital. The important selection criteria for determining the test users were that they have not worked with the system before. Active intervention was used for performing the test and the test person was encouraged to think out laud, while using the system (Lindholm & Höst, 2013). The test facilitators further encouraged the test persons to express their thoughts.
Reference
Lindholm, C., & Höst, M. (2013, May). Introducing usability testing in the risk management process in software development. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care (pp. 5-11). IEEE Press.
