Developing a user-friendly interface for a self-service healthcare research portal: cost-effective usability testing

Usability is a critical but often overlooked factor in the design and development of healthcare information technology systems. One system increasingly being leveraged as a research and quality improvement tool is an online research portal that allows self-service access to electronic health record (EHR) data. We discuss the usability testing of such a portal through a low-cost usability inspection method: heuristic evaluation. Using heuristic evaluation methods, we identified 20 usability errors: 15.0% (3/20) were cosmetic, 35.0% (7/20) were minor, 40.0% (8/20) were major, and 10.0% (2/20) were catastrophic. Our heuristic evaluation demonstrates an affordable and efficient method to identify and correct a significant number of problems, thus improving the system using limited effort and resources. A user-friendly environment that follows accepted heuristics for good interface design is essential for ensuring accessibility and usability of data extracted from EHRs for quality improvement and research projects.