Title
Scenarios, personas and user stories: User-centered evidence-based design representations of communicable disease investigations
Abstract
Purpose: Despite years of effort and millions of dollars spent to create unified electronic communicable disease reporting systems, the goal remains elusive. A major barrier has been a lack of understanding by system designers of communicable disease (CD) work and the public health workers who perform this work. This study reports on the application of user-centered design representations, traditionally used for improving interface design, to translate the complex CD work identified through ethnographic studies to guide designers and developers of CD systems. The purpose of this work is to: (1) better understand public health practitioners and their information workflow with respect to CD monitoring and control at a local health agency, and (2) to develop evidence-based design representations that model this CD work to inform the design of future disease surveillance systems. Methods: We performed extensive onsite semi-structured interviews, targeted work shadowing and a focus group to characterize local health agency CD workflow. Informed by principles of design ethnography and user-centered design we created persona, scenarios and user stories to accurately represent the user to system designers. Results: We sought to convey to designers the key findings from ethnographic studies: (1) public health CD work is mobile and episodic, in contrast to current CD reporting systems, which are stationary and fixed, (2) health agency efforts are focused on CD investigation and response rather than reporting and (3) current CD information systems must conform to public health workflow to ensure their usefulness. In an effort to illustrate our findings to designers, we developed three contemporary design-support representations: persona, scenario, and user story. Conclusions: Through application of user-centered design principles, we were able to create design representations that illustrate complex public health communicable disease workflow and key user characteristics to inform the design of CD information systems for public health.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.jbi.2013.04.006
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
human centered design,evidence based medicine,personas,public health informatics
Public health,Information system,Data mining,Computer science,Persona,Knowledge management,Public health informatics,Evidence-based design,User story,Workflow,User-centered design
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
46
4
1532-0464
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.47
8
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anne M. Turner19123.04
Blaine Reeder2707.87
Judith Ramey3807.67