Notification Philosophy

Description

Notifications are a key component within any product to assist users in understanding the information they need to make decisions. However, when used inappropriately, users can quickly become fatigued, distracted, irresponsive, and in some cases annoyed when being alerted too often.

Please note with the nature of this project, there are intellectual property details I cannot disclose.

Role

I led a multidisciplinary group of individuals in the completing analysis of our current notification philosophy to make further recommendations that encompass how to design for patient safety, mitigate clinician alert fatigue, and meet regulatory requirements for medical devices.

I was responsible for:

  • Managing relationship between Product Management, Human Factors, User Experience, and Engineering for strategic uplift across products.

  • Creating and prioritizing project roadmap of the design standards and supporting UI components that would be impacted by any findings of our updated notification philosophy.

  • Gathering requirements and regulations that would impact decision making of the workgroup.

  • Conducting industry standard research based on use cases and complexity of healthcare.

  • Defining and documenting design decisions and rationale based on workgroup recommendations, creating a notification evaluation model and component delivery method mapping.

  • Create standardized messaging for notifications of the same or similar scenarios to be handled consistently.

  • Training entire User Experience organization on the new notification philosophy and holding working sessions to remap existing notifications onto the new model.

Research

Human Factors engagement was paramount to the success of the notifications workgroup. I worked with the Director of Human Factors Safety and Quality to ensure we created recommendations that would achieve our goals and mitigate risks to patient safety. Systematic reviews of literature and multiple studies were conducted to gain understanding of how user's perceived different notification severity in addition to their understanding of the visual concepts used to deliver the notification itself.

Studies

  • Usability studies using prototypes (HTML & Live Code) targeting:

    • Severity and urgency relative rankings by signal word terminology.

    • Severity rankings based on color.

    • Iconography studies to ensure association of icon and signal word.

    • Workflow tests with notification displays for perceived vs. designed classifications.