Rapid Heuristic Evaluation: Ensuring Fast and Reliable Usability Support

摘要

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Human Factors Engineering (HFE) office developed a usability testing method called “Rapid Heuristic Evaluation” (Rapid HE) that offers benefits to users of the Agile development process. Rapid HE addresses the need to combine fast, reliable usability support with feedback from clinical subject matter experts (SMEs) during the design and development of an electronic health record (EHR). The Rapid HE process leverages established EHR heuristics to accelerate wireframe review and approval, and merges a traditional heuristic evaluation (HE) with an expert review by two SMEs. Our application of Rapid HEs has maximized use of resources and minimized the amount of time needed to provide feedback during Agile development cycles. This paper describes the Rapid HE process, deviations from traditional HEs, and reports on data from 16 HEs that our group conducted on an EHR platform currently being developed by VA.