Button Order & Placement

Description

When refining our Cerner Design Standards we found inconsistencies of button ordering and placement across our products, in some cases even within the same product. When industry research didn't provide conclusive answers a button study was performed to define the ordering as well as where within product the buttons should be placed.

Role

As the owner of Cerner Design Standards, my role is to identify areas where there is unknowns and to tease out the nuance to provide tactical designers with design rationale to support decision making, versus providing an answer of "it depends." I identified the need for further research to be conducted in order to provide direction and guidance to increase consistency of button order and placement across our Cerner Design System.

For this study, I was responsible for:

  • Providing industry standard research and auditing of our current state.

  • Collaborating with my Human Factors Researcher to ensure the study would answer the questions identified.

  • Prototypes for each tasks of the study.

  • Reporting and documenting study findings within our Cerner Design Standards.

Research

Usability testing was conducted separately first on the original Orion design, then on the OCS design of the Patient Kiosk to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement in the design as well as validate that the OCS design was an improvement from the Orion design previously tested.

Study Methodology

  • 360 Participants: 120 general population, 108 practicing clinicians, and 130 Cerner associates.

  • 30-Minute Moderated Sessions

  • 16 different contexts


Findings

  • User preference was for forward progression or primary actions "Submit" to be placed on the far right.

  • When grouped with primary actions, user preference was for secondary actions "Save" to be precede the primary action "Submit."

  • Placement preferences of "Cancel" actions were inconsistent and dependent on other actions.


Learn More

Want to learn more about how research is applied within our Cerner Design Standards? Select one of the highlighted projects below: