Heuristic Evaluation of the Reli-On Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor
Background
As the number of older adults in the population increase, medical devices such as blood pressure monitors are growing in popularity for home use. The information provided by a blood pressure monitor is crucial for proactive health monitoring – failure of a blood pressure monitor can have drastic health outcomes. With that said, the usability of these devices is often concerning. Thus, I conducted a heuristic evaluation with a team of three other individuals (names are omitted for privacy) on the Reli-On Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor.
Heuristic Evaluation Method
My team and I began the heuristic evaluation by identifying the user populations of the device as well as individual use cases. Next, we performed a task analysis to understand the procedure of measuring one’s blood pressure. After the task analysis, I identified all the information provided by the blood pressure monitor and their respective meanings/purposes to fully grasp the functionality of the device.
Following the task analysis, each of my team independently evaluated the device twice using Nielsen’s 10 Heuristics and Shneiderman’s 8 Golden Rules of Interface Design. The first time focused on flow, and the second time focused on the individual interface elements. Each team member recorded a list of the heuristic violations, and after the independent evaluations, a combined list of violated heuristics was created.
Using the combined list of violated heuristics, each of the team members ranked the severity of each violation using Nielsen’s Severity Scale. Following the severity ranking, the team collectively identified the most serious violations which were used to inform our design recommendations presented in a technical report and presentation that can be viewed by clicking the links below:
