A Formative Usability Study Evaluating a Decision Aid for Caregivers of Incapacitated Patients

Abstract

Families making medical decisions for an incapacitated loved one need to process medical information for various care pathways while balancing different perspectives and experiencing distress. A decision aid tool to help family members make medical decisions on the patient’s behalf should be easy to use and not create additional burdens. A formative usability study with high, medium, and low verbosity versions of an initial decision aid was conducted with university students before clinical testing. The results showed no significant differences in usability metrics between different verbosity levels, but the qualitative findings indicated areas of improvement in the organization of information that could lead to improved usability of the decision aid. While the findings are limited due to the study being void of some of the burdens families face in true clinical situations, the study allowed us to identify numerous usability issues before testing with target users.