Integrating User-centred Design in an Early Stage of Mobile Medical Application Prototyping - A Case Study on Data Acquistion in Health Organisations

This paper reports on collaborative work with an SME, developing a system for data acquisition in health care organisations, providing mobile data support. We briefly introduce the ICF and the ICD classification scheme from the WHO as a foundation for our mobile application. A two-staged usability evaluation in a very early stage of development allows us to integrate user-centred design in the mobile application development process. Our procedure comprises interviews and usability tests with a limited number of users and thus can even be performed within a resource-constrained setting as it is typically found in smaller software development teams. We discuss the consolidated results of the usability tests quantitatively and qualitatively. From these results we deduce recommendations (and open issues) concerning the user interface design of the mobile application.