Individual Assignment #2: : HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Website Selection
South Georgia Medical Center – https://www.sgmc.org/
I have selected the South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC) website for the assignment 2 heuristic evaluation. This website represents a small but surprisingly comprehensive medical center and hospital located in Valdosta, Georgia. The website serves as it’s public-facing virtual destination for those seeking information relating to its services in patient care, employment opportunities, patient portal access, its medical residency program, public health and hospital census data, and community events.
Retrieved from: https://www.sgmc.org/
Scenario Description
The scenario that I chose to center my heuristic evaluation on is that of an individual who is attempting to discover more information about South Georgia Medical Center’s palliative care program and what services the program provides. Palliative care is defined by the U.S. National Institute on Aging as “specialized medical care for people living with a serious illness…meant to enhance a person’s current care by focusing on quality of life for them and their family,” (NIA, 2021). Palliative care is different than hospice care, as hospice care does not contain curative treatment as part of its care planning and is designed for patients that will be terminal in the short term, typically within six months (NIA, 2021). I approached the SGMC site evaluation somewhat unconventionally based on the framework described by in Nielsen, as I was a single individual conducting the evaluation acting as both the evaluator and the observer with no additional participating evaluators to aggregate findings with (Nielsen, 1995). In the scope of these roles, I am evaluating my use of this website as a first-time user for this specific scenario without the possibility of guardrails or hints provided by an observer by requesting guidance – I am on my own as an evaluator.
Usability Flaws
The first usability flaw discovered is that the landing page is not branded with the full name of the organization, South Georgia Medical Center, and instead only displays the organizational acronym, SGMC. This lack of brand awareness connecting the more generally recognizable full name with the acronym violates the usability heuristic #2 match between system and the real world, as the website’s current state assumes that the user is familiar with identifying this organization by its acronym, which they may not. Due to this lack of identification, it is possible that an individual in the evaluation scenario could be confused about whether they have even arrived at the correct website after searching for a “South Georgia hospital” and being presented with two very similarly named organizations “Southeast Georgia Health System (SGHS.org)” and “South Georgia Medical Center (SGMC.org)”, two different health systems that are over 120 miles away from one another. When an individual visits the physical location of a South Georgia Medical Center campus or building, the full name is displayed outside (https://www.sgmc.org/about-south-georgia-medical-center/our-mission-vision-and-values/), and similarly, when an individual calls the main telephone line for SGMC, it identifies itself through its full name not an acronym. The website failing to follow real-world conventions by clearly identifying itself on its landing page violates usability heuristic #2 match between system and the real world.
The second usability flaw that was encountered during the evaluation was in the medical service listing page while attempting to locate information on palliative care. The list of services contains “palliative care” in two different locations and the information that each links to is different, with no mechanism on the service list page or the following linked pages to explain the difference and route to the other. This flaw represents a violation of usability heuristic #4 consistency and standards and #7 flexibility and efficiency of use. The first link displays “Hospice/Palliative Care” and links to an external website for an organization called “Hospice of South Georgia” with no explanation of its affiliation to SGMC. The second “Palliative Care” listing in the services links to a SGMC page that very briefly describes the program, defines the difference between hospice and palliative care, and requests personal contact information to receive more detail about the program. The service list having two listings for palliative care violates usability heuristic #4 consistency and standards because it requires the user to click on both links to ascertain what the difference between the two are and even then, it is not readily apparent. This violation causes unnecessary confusion for the user and negatively impacts the user experience in a context that is likely serious and emotional. Furthermore, this design also does not allow the user to be routed from the palliative care page to the hospice care site, despite the effort made to make the user understand the difference. By not providing a link from the palliative care page to the hospice care site and vice versa, the design violates usability heuristic # 7 flexibility and efficiency as it requires the user to navigate between both links from the service list inefficiently despite acknowledging a confusing semantic difference.
Retrieved from: https://www.sgmc.org/our-services/
Recommendations
The first design recommendation that I propose is to include a prominent display of “South Georgia Medical Center” on its landing page front and center. Additionally, I recommend including the full name under the website home icon located on the top left of the website throughout. Through the inclusion of these recommendation design optimizations, users can enjoy a higher level of brand awareness and thus less confusion regarding the website they are viewing while seeking information from this specific healthcare system.
The second proposed design recommendation is to remove the “Palliative Care” from the “Hospice/Palliative Care” link on the service list; the inclusion of it creates unnecessary confusion in the user experience. I also recommend creating a section on the remaining “Palliative Care” linked page that describes this available service through the affiliation with Hospice of South Georgia with a link to that website’s palliative care page in addition to the palliative care service option that SGMC provides independently. Additionally, on the SGMC palliative care page I recommend including a link to Hospice of South Georgia’s website in the section defining the difference between palliative care and hospice for navigational convenience.
Retrieved from: https://www.sgmc.org/our-services/palliative-care/
References:
Nielsen, J. (1995). How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-to-conduct-a-heuristic-evaluation/
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging. (2021). What are palliative and hospice care? Retrieved September 23, 2021, from https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-are-palliative-care-and-hospice-care#palliative