aethelwulffe wrote on Sunday, February 19, 2012:
Hey, I’m just one of those ergonomics freaks. I round off all the cabinet corners, and simplify the boat rigging to the point where no lines snag, and friction is minimal. I find it’s a lot more fun to sail than to fight the boat.
I made that menu mock-up to test the performance difference in switching view modes. With lots of experience, in the EMR takes about 8 seconds for me to switch from a single view/default loading with top-bottom, to a left-right view with one panel locked. In the mock-up, it takes less than a second. That means it will not be more of a pain to switch modes than to just “live with” however it is at the moment. I feel the four lines of code would be well worth it.
Warning: I am using speech recognition, so my posts tend to wax loquacious.
I’m not sure I agree about that mock-up being complicated, but I agree that there are any number of possible arrangements. I personally would also prefer a left/right click option, and I do CAD in a program that is almost entirely controlled by a three button mouse. Way faster than menus or tool tip buttons for everything. The EMR tree menu is also preferred by many. The sliding menu is the vanilla default though. This means it is going to be the one that gets used in most cases.
Despite my preferences/opinions, you can never underestimate the public.
I find that fully graphical tool buttons are better for many people, and you don’t have to worry about label verbiage in 16 languages. The other problems are the whole two-button issue with our end users. I am not saying that it is acceptable for a professional that does ANY kind of documentation in the present day to not have a extensive experience with typical basic keyboarding interfaces, but that isn’t the real world. many (ok, almost all) of the office workers I have attempted to train are not even aware of the typical “left click execute, right click context menu” bit. Then there is the damn Mac crowd who got one (One!) button with their mouse or touch pad. Stylus users and touchscreen users would also benefit from a button interface.
When I have demonstrated OpenEMR to doctors, I always run into the “Tor” syndrome. That is a Doctor that isn’t into the .doc part. They whine about every last little click. Literally, I hear "I don’t like having to click so many times to do a note! *whine* ". Yes, they are prima donna aristocrats, and they make me puke. That’s the way it is though, and I don’t like having to start explaining how to use the interface in terms of “Well, first click here, then click down here if you want it the other way, then pick this from the drop down, unless you have opened a new patient, then of course you need to do it all over again….”
(There are already six (depending on how you count them). There is a css button way at the bottom of the nav bar that talks about frame orientation (Betty black would need that one pointed out to her, and explained a few times), then you have the drop down menu with three options and no clear (from the eyes of an uninformed, non-curious, non-experimentalist type) explanation of what it does, and then the two top-bottom (or left-right) buttons. I see that as “terribly complicated” and dispersed (or I wouldn’t be worried about it, -ja?). To most users, they are essentially hidden features. I’m not bashing it, but if I made a video game with controls arranged like that, the high scores would suffer, and not very many folks would want to try playing it twice.
Simplicity is sometimes terribly complicated to achieve.
Not bitching about how things are, but it’s just something I want to see worked out, at least for me. No-one has tinkered with this stuff for a while (despite a lot of interest over the years), so I figured no-one would mind me doing things how I saw fit for my own edification. Just throwing the ideas out there.
>Personally<, I would like a multi-mode button that lets me pick what layouts and menus I see. Click a button to cycle through the Admin, Provider, Financial, Scheduler “modes”. If you are in “Biller” mode, you always get the billing widgets, billing history etc… You don’t default to the calender when you pick a patient, you don’t get clinical forms, or any of that stuff. It could pare everything down to the financial functions. By default, that means that anything you CAN see, is stuff the user should probably tinker with. Same benefit for the doctor. Yeah, you can achieve this with the ACL to a limited extent, but that is “include or not include”, and doesn’t have an option to pare down just for efficiency. Data entry time is a real concern for clinics, and not just because of their lazy-butt whining. repeat($years*$hours*$minutes){$A_tiny_efficiency_boots+=$chump_change;}