Nursing process: a lesson for interface developers

Back in the 1980s when the nursing process first appeared in the UK, amongst the pioneering early adopters there were nurses who were also worried. Would the nursing process with its mechanistic connotations lead to the person, the patient - literally being processed? There is a lesson here for nursing (health and social care) IT systems / interface developers ...

They really are star performers you know, regular high-wire runners. They have to make things simple, safe, efficient, fit for purpose and yet also deal with complexity as they juggle multiple contexts and second guess the psychological state of not just one user (crucial as that is), but several groups (disciplines, beginner-specialists, user roles and security...).

In Tidwell's Designing Interfaces the first chapter is more a psychology primer than pure IT text. The first pattern is safe exploration (and there's much more too).

This week someone e-mailed me and stated that the website and links (in particular) are 'daunting'. While for me the website and links pages have been an emergent pursuit, for 1st-xth time visitors .... well; I have to agree.

Thinking beyond a new site for an archive and book project - this is the trick, I suppose. How do you make a site or information system inviting and put the user at ease? How do you hide complexity until it is appropriate to do the non-trivial things? In order to capture data quickly and efficiently at the point of care how can those static check boxes and drop-down lists duck and weave the user's perception that:

1. They as a professional are being de-skilled;
2. or that the patient (person!) is indeed being 'processed'?

That's not just one tightrope, but several ...