Teamwork is considered the weakest link in most medical practices. Teamwork is important not only to get the job done but also to grow your practice because the patient’s perception of teamwork is one of the two key factors in generating referrals (the other factor is your experience). . Therefore, the user interface for medical practice management systems must be designed for teamwork.

This article expands on and concludes my previous reviews of two design books: “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman and “Designing with the Mind in Mind” by Jeff Johnson. Both books emphasized the importance of the conceptual model, consistency, and responsiveness. It turns out that understanding the conceptual model does not necessarily mean control, and both Norman’s and Johnson’s books do not deal with designing complex software products that enable teamwork or competition.

Think about how you learned to play chess. Someone explained to you “a pawn goes like this and a knight goes like this. Your goal is to checkmate the king.” So did you know how to play the game? Could you assess your situation, opportunities and risks? Could you create an improvement strategy? Chess requires years of practice to learn to play well.

As for social networks and online communities, the concepts of walls, comments, shares and likes are almost self-explanatory and millions of people of different ages and cultures have no problem understanding the basic conceptual model. However, only a few networks are up and running, while most have not survived the first six months.

Tharon Howard – “Design to Thrive”

Tharon Howard is a professor at Clemson University and director of its Usability Testing Center. His book “Design to Thrive” focuses on what motivates people to join, stay and grow within an online community or social network, formulating four strategic design principles for building successful online communities:

1. Remuneration – people will not become members of a social network without a clear benefit. The most important compensation you have to offer is experience.
2. Touching It exists in a community when its members believe they can control or shape policies, procedures, issues, and standards. Different types of members – visitors, newbies, regulars, leaders and elders – have different needs for influence.
3. belonging they are the techniques and mechanisms to help community members develop a sense of “social presence”, a sense that they belong to that community, that they identify with it and share a bond with its members. Shared mythologies, origin stories, initiation rituals, symbols, codes, rituals, and brand identity all contribute to belonging.
4. Meaning – to be considered important, your community must be well recognized, established as a “reference place” to achieve the goals of its users, valued by people that its users respect, populated by serious and passionate people in their field, distinguished as a trust mark for its users. The importance of your community is in the story you tell when you invite people to join, in member achievements, videos shared, and contests won.

Like chess, complex software products designed for teamwork, for example social networks, need at least two levels of conceptual models:

1. tactical: how to manage your wall and share comments (or how the pieces move on the chessboard)
2. strategic: how to design a thriving social network where users can experience pay, influence, belonging, and meaning (or how to plan defense or attack on the chessboard)

Howard’s book focuses exclusively on the strategic level, leaving the successes and failures of user interface design in popular and failed social media products to other authors.

Practice Management

Practice management involves multiple types of activities (patient scheduling, visit documentation, billing) that can be roughly divided into a six-step cycle below:

1. collect data
2. Quantify
3. Interpreter
4. Formulate Goals, Plans and Tasks
5. Assign tasks
6. Check the execution of the task: go back to step 1.

Steps 4, 5, and 6 above are all about teamwork. Teamwork also means working together to discover errors, prevent future errors, and reduce their impact.

There seems to be a growing body of research and literature at every level of design. I hope to read a book that bridges the gap in tactical-strategic system design.