Page - 51 - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

Figure 1: The interdisciplinary field of HCI Human decisions that relate to health outcomes are multifaceted and are enacted within complex and dynamic contexts. HCI offers a means to enable designers to comprehend how humans use and interact with health systems [15]. Engaging users in the design process early and throughout the design life cycle helps to develop systems that are easy to learn, increase user productivity and satisfaction, increase user acceptance, decrease user errors, and decrease user training time [7]. Several design methodologies for HCI focus on feedback and conversation between users, designers and the technical system. Furthermore, research has identified that healthcare researchers, software developers and practitioners often overlook relevant user characteristics, user tasks, user preferences, and usability issues, resulting in systems that decrease productivity or simply remain unusable [7,16]. The importance of involving target users in the design process for effective interaction with mHealth interventions is, therefore, emphasised [8]. mHealth interventions need to be developed with adequate consideration of the needs of their intended users so that they are efficient, easy to use and perceived as useful [15]. This has increased the interest in applying a UCD approach to mHealth interventions [17,18]. 1.2. Understanding User Centred Design as an approach to successful design, implementation and evaluation of interactive computer systems UCD is an approach that places users at the centre of the design process from the stages of planning and designing the system requirements to evaluating and deployment of the product [18]. UCD refers to how end users influence design through their involvement in the design processes and has been shown to contribute to the acceptance, adoption and success of systems [2]. It can be characterised as a multistage problem- solving process that not only requires designers to analyse and foresee how users are likely to use a product, but also to test the validity of their assumptions with regard to user behaviour in real-world tests with actual users. Figure 2 shows the iterative stages of UCD. A.GoodandO.Omisade /LinkingActivityTheorywithUserCentredDesign 51