Healthcare has a very high bar for their software and devices, and even higher bar for such critical workflow that Hypercare is aiming to tackle for clinicians.
For the readers who don’t know, Hypercare is aiming to help clinicians get rid of pagers and the annoyances it comes with it (such as relying on call centre to page on their behalf) and do all that through an app. So essentially clinicians can quickly locate their colleagues on call, and compliantly message their colleagues with audit trail while no sensitive information is stored on device.
One recent learnings is the importance of providing feedback to users on the state of their actions
Let’s walk through a user attempting to log into an application.
Potential states (in user’s perspective) with potential reasons behind it
-
Failure State
- No internet connection
- Server is down
- Server is slow/experiencing issues
- Empty credentials
- Account is locked
- User does not exist
- Invalid credentials
-
Loading State
- Client sends the server credentials
- Server retrieves the hashed credentials from the server
- Server compares the hashed credentials
- Server sends back a response to the client
- Client reacts to it
-
Success State
Users seldomly care about the reasons behind the loading state nor the success. It’s when a failure happens, a user would love to know what ended up wrong, to feel in control and be empowered to resolve it (by Googling, or tinkering) or be able to know the next steps (finding stable internet connection).
Not showing proper feedback to a user can make the experience extremely poor especially returning a generic response like “an error has occured”
For us at Hypercare, we went through a mental exercise on numerous potential actions and are working towards ensuring every critical action returns an understandable error for the user. One step to building trust with the user.