News and Insights

By Arathi Sethumadhavan I just finished reading Philip Kortum’s latest book on  Usability assessment: How to measure the usability of products, services, and systems . This is a very comprehensive book for beginners to understand what usability assessment is, why it is important, and the techniques to perform a usability evaluation. Below are the common myths on usability that the author discusses. I am sure several of you reading this have heard or experienced at least some of these. Usability assessment is complete if the product developers can use the product: Programmers, though skilled in developing the most robust code and algorithms often times fail to consider the expertise and skills of the actual users of the product. Therefore, they conclude that if they are able to use the system, the end users will have no trouble using the system as well. Usability assessment is just common sense: The author gives the example of fire trucks, which are usually painted red.

By Naomi Cherne If you are reading this blog, you are probably pretty comfortable with reading. You can engage with the text in your world to understand and evaluate your options, guide your actions, and pursue your goals. However, literacy is a struggle or even a barrier for lots of people.  If your medical device requires that people use text in any form, then you should consider the literacy of your user groups when thinking about usability. 35%  of adults in the US have limited health literacy 44%  of high school graduates and  76%  who did not complete high school have limited health literacy 17%  of adults in the US cannot draw low-level inferences from text 50%  of adults in the US cannot integrate, interpret, or synthesize information from complex texts 69%  of adults in the US who did not complete high school are at or below the lowest level of literacy proficiency In our experience, literacy can affect someone’s product interactions in many ways. For example,