Though the usability team suggested some wild redesigns of the interfaces before, they didn’t reach as far as implementation. However, the eye was still always on the ball, which was to make the life of our users easier. So some of our developers have taken a second and third look at all the feedback regarding TMS, from support emails to the TMS User Groups we had over emails, and also the design suggestions we had already formulated, and finally, some changes are being made. We have great hope that this will help everyone using TMS to manage their training better!

Read more about it, or watch Kara’s introduction of the features.

The navigation buttons/arrows are now on both side of the splash message. There is also a pagination option which will show the number of splash message you currently have. The numbers displayed with blue background are messages from your agency and the numbers displayed with orange background are messages from Therap.

All the work you see here are prototypes and implementation and changes are purely based on our user feedback and us (Therap Team). So send us your comments using the form below.

We’ve recently changed platforms for serving documentation and presented the Help & Support site, where we used to have a ‘Knowledgebase’. We’ve switched to Therap Ideas, instead of using a Forum. Sometimes a little change here and there can go a long way to creating something effective, where you had tried and tried something really similar in the past that just didn’t hit. So its always important to keep an eye on what a user is getting, and to assess if it makes sense to improve it, or just do away with it.

We’ve nearly finished moving/updating our old support documentation into the Help & Support site, and we’re again waiting anxiously to hear from you, our valued users, if we’re really helping with the documentation, FAQs, etc we are putting up there. We’ve put that as a direct question on top of every page there, and we do hope you go ahead and let us know how we’ve done!

From a usability perspective, we’ve tried to do many things that would make the use of Therap’s services faster. One of the main concerns was with our Health Tracking application and how data entry there could be made faster. That actually spurred us on a totally wild spree and we came up with what you see here:

Image of a concept for a FirstPage providing faster access to forms and reports

We first came up with one idea for a bar that stays on top of the screen, which allows users to easily access 4 things, and once selected, it stays until something is changed. Those 4 things were:
1. Programs
2. Name of an Individial
3. Choice of a module (e.g. – within Health Tracking it could be vital signs, height/weight, or appointments among many)
4. Choice of a task – creating a new form, accessing the worklist, searching etc.
(The full prototype can be accessed from here)

So, the idea was for program based data entry about an individual, a user could select a program from a list, and then start typing in an individual’s name in the Individual box, which would then pull up a list of names as the staff person is typing. Without leaving a page, these two steps are taken care of. Then comes the matter of selecting the appropriate module, and task. Instantly, it was plain to see that this is something that could be generally used for individual centric data entry! If you go through the full prototype you can play around with bits of dummy data we’ve put in for demonstrating the features we were thinking up. The ‘faster’ here would have been achieved by eliminating the need to go back to the FirstPage to access another module. It changes the whole flow of selecting a module’s action, e.g. clicking on New or Search, and then getting to a list of programs, and then onto the form where you select an individual (with some exceptions).

While developing this would have been a heavy lifting for the time, little ideas from the concept stayed on and got implemented. This was mainly achieved by utilizing the ‘Done Pages’. That’s the page you reach after you’ve completed working on a particular form. E.g.:

Image showing the options present on the Done Page of a Health Tracking module

This particular done page is from the Health Tracking suite of modules and you can quickly switch to a different Health Tracking form for the same program (click on a module name) or a different one (select program from the drop down menu, then click the module name). And for each module, there are different options provided on the done page depending on what makes sense.

We also added the Quick Links menu which takes out the need to go back to the FirstPage on some occassions after completing one task:

Image showing the Quick Links menu added for greater convenience

There are some forms in Therap which are very very long. Forms are usually split into sections and much scrolling would be necessary to go back and forth between sections. For that, we’ve added the Jump To menus, as shown below:

Image showing the Jump To menu

Overtime we will continue to try and provide you features that make your documentation faster and easier and your ideas are also welcome on the subject, either here or on Therap Ideas! Happy Theraping!

So here are the scores for you -

1. Firefox 3.5 = 93/100
2. Google Chrome 3.0 = 100/100
3. Safari 4.0 = 100/100
4. Opera 9.2 = 47/100
5. Internet Explorer 6.0 = 12/100
6. Internet Explorer 7.0 = 13/100
7. Internet Explorer 8.0 = 20/100

Test your browser now

Despite the score, IE remains a very popular browser, much to the virtue of it being shipped with every copy of Windows. Every other browser needs to be obtained and installed. We sure do hope IE will improve even further in the coming future. As far as I can remember Firefox 2.8 used to score something around 63, now they have improved that and getting closer to 100. Opera’s score was a bit disappointing. Being the most criticized product of Google, Chrome still scored perfect 100 along with Safari as both of them use WebKit engine.

Chrome and Safari will to most users seem a faster browser, and it could prove that following the web standards do bring benefits in the overall browsing experience.

“live long and prosper”

1. Sounds On/Off
Its often that I end up on websites where they’d have a music jump me and startle me and often its even likeable, but what I am raving about here… is not the actual music, but the ability to control it. Talking about a volume bar, or at least an On/Off option. I might be at home already listening to some music and suddenly theres a new layer of sounds to it creating a strange effect! When I find out that there is no button to turn that website music off, it really doesn’t make me feel like sticking around it any longer.

2. YouTube’s Dim the Lights
YouTube had an idea to put this feature that when clicked, just turned everything around the video player window dark! For watching a video, you might find it more comfortable that way to reduce the bright white surrounding so your focus is more on the video. Unfortunately, this feature is now only available for videos longer than 50 minutes! So, as a sample you can see this video. At the top right of the video window, click the image of the lightbulb

3. Autocomplete
When I have to select stuff from long lists, nothing beats having an autocomplete feature! For users of GMail, you might recognize this as the feature that brings out the list of recipients when you are trying to type in who you’re sending the email to. We’ve actually implemented this feature in Therap SComms too hoping our users will also benefit from it.

4. GMail Labs’ Attachment Reminder
As forgetfulness of human nature goes, its a very common thing to forget to actually attach that important feature to an email before sending it out! I have heard of one story where someone sent 3 mails before finally remembering to attach the file. The second mail apologized for not sending the attachment and it was still forgotten! So, anyway, this feature picks up from the written email whether the author intended to send an attachment if it finds words like ‘attachment’ ’sending a file’ etc in it! Pretty smart, and it has saved a lot of time for me personally many a times. Mind you, that this feature is not there by default in GMail, you’d have to go to Settings, and then Labs to find it. Don’t forget!

5. Search As You Type on Firefox
As far as browsers go, I LOVE Firefox! Theres a world of useful plugins, and the build in search engines for google, imdb, wikipedia and others .. .its all very cool! But theres one feature that really helps me out – Thats the “search as you type” feature. Its not turned on by default (I don’t know why) and for that not many people know it or use it! But if you have often ended up on long pages and you are interested in a certain part only, this feature can help you out immensely. Turn this on from Options > Advanced > General. I have already once raved about this before, so I’ll just end here and point you to that blog for more on this. And this feature also comes into good use when I am testing Therap out for usability issues, on browsing the FirstPage. Often the FirstPage can have many many modules and go south quite a bit. In those circumstances, I just start typing in the module name – ‘Personal Finance’ for example, and as soon as I have typed till only “Perso” the browser has already scrolled to where that name appears on the FirstPage! This way, I don’t have to scroll down and read through the names on the FirstPage boxes to find the module I am looking for. Of course, users of other browsers can very well use Ctr-F to search for it, but with this option on Firefox, its faster doing a lot of things throughout the day.

Cheers!

If you are using a Windows PC, knowing the above will be a time saver. Whenever you are using their File Manager or Internet Explorer, pressing down the Ctrl key, and then pressing down the F key at the same time brings out the Search window.

Using Therap requires you using the browser and you might be looking at a long list somewhere or a pretty long form. You can use this combination of Ctrl and F also on your browsers to bring out their search facility. They can be pretty handy when going through long lists and forms! If you know you want to access the Review or Comment portion of a General Event Report (yes, be sure the word is there in the form, and you have to make sure you type it in right), you could Ctrl-F and type in the word “Comment” and hit Enter and the browser will take you down to where that word appears. If the word you are looking for appears more than one time, like 3 “John”s in a user list, you could click F3 and the browser will move to the next appearing match, and so on till you get to the right one. However it can’t help you if the word doesn’t appear on the page itself. When dealing with lists, it best to check if there is a second page to it, page numbers appear either above or below a list.

Firefox users can fortunately take this further, and this is something I personally use a lot. Go to the Tools > Options > Advanced, and look under the General tab. If you check the box beside “Search for Text When I Start Typing”, from then on, you wouldn’t even have use Ctrl-F to search on your Firefox browser! Any time you are on any webpage, simply start typing and the browser will look for tha word on the page and take you there! You can learn about more Firefox fun things from their pages.

Hope this helps!

If you are not already aware of it, Therap National Provider Administrator’s Conference is coming up in January 2010! Register for it and come attend to meet the folks and attend sessions on how you can use Therap better.

The author mentioned above, wrote an article for Maya recently (Oct 18, 2009) about the need for good design when it comes to Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Maya is a design research/consultancy institute that help tech companies get the best results in terms of user experience.

While reading, I couldn’t help but compare with Therap.

EMR under the Obama government is a major requirement in the pursuit of improving health care. Without EMR, doctors are missing vital information like side effects of a drug, which could lead to adverse errors, and increased spending on everyone’s part.

So by introducing EMRs, we have something to contain the data that doctors need and it’ll be readily available. But its proven that even then, errors do happen because of badly designed systems, which makes making errors while reading data easy!

The article opines that a majority of EMR systems originate from the needs and wants of insurance companies, or billing issues, and the aspect of information systems for improving the care provided by the health institute is only addressed later.

Here, is the first advantage of Therap. Its journey started with and is continuing strongly, in the attempt to improve the quality of care an agency provides. When a form or a report is designed, its analysed and reviewed for faster data entry, and for preventing documentation errors, and reading errors. There are a number of ways to achieve these and the people of the Usability Garage take part in ensuring that the end result produces a good user experience, and through this Garage here, we present it to the users to get their feedback about it.

Additionally, we are reaching out to users through email, or personally during our conferences, user groups or by phone. Our users are also wonderful people who are very active and give us great suggestions that help elevate the level of services Therap provide.

However, this led to some users having problems of getting logged out halfway between work, e.g. if they stepped away from the desk while they were in the middle of filling up a form, they would get logged out and they lost data due to our auto session expiration.

So, now we came up with this idea of locking a session when left unattended for a long time, instead of logging users out. And this locked session can be easily unlocked! Take a look at the following screen shot. All you need to do is re-enter your password and you can resume whatever you were doing. Send us your comments using the form below.