Timeline: September 2020 - January 2021
Project: Master Thesis
My Role: Study design, literature research, prototype design, prototype evaluation, report writing
Understanding the role of interactive elements in breast cancer risk visualizations on users understanding of health information.
This thesis was an academic project, here you can see a simplified overview of the thesis with a focus on the user experience research and evaluation of the prototype developed. If you are interested in the complete master thesis please do not hesitate to contact me.
The project
Decision Aids
Breast cancer decision aids are tools used by patients and clinicians to support patients in their treatment decision making. These tools aim at explaining the health benefits and risks in a clear and balanced way, so to help patients clarify their values and preferences. Usually consist of leaflets, interactive media, video or audio tapes.
Interactivity
Interactivity has started to play a role in the development of decision aids, with the majority of online decision aids including some form of interactivity. However, current interactivity features consist mostly of weighting exercises to assign values to preferences or ranking/rating exercises, rather than allowing users to interact with the actual data, by for example manipulating it.
Visualisations
Decisions supported by these tools are very significant for the life of patients, as they can determine how they deal with the disease. Because of this it is essential that patients properly understand the information presented to them. Research has shown that the most efficient way to present patients with risk health data is to make use of visualizations such as graphs.
Interactive visualizations
Given the positive impact of interactive visualizations it seems relevant to understand whether these can as well support patients understanding of health information. Recent studies have attempted to understand the role of interactive visualizations on the understanding of health risk information, however results are contradictory, with some studies pointing towards a positive influence and others negative. To complement this gap in research this project was developed.
The prototypes
Branding
When developing the branding for the decision aid, it was important to keep in mind that the information presented in this tool needed to be trusted and credible. Thus, a minimalistic design with a clean look and feel was developed.
Interfaces
Two prototypes were developed, one which included interactive visualizations and one which included static visualizations. Both prototypes consisted of a web-based decision aid which included a dashboard and three subpages with a comparison of the side effects of mastectomy and breast conserving surgery.
Decision aid with static visualisations
| Subpages with side effects of treatments were developed in a linear fashion
| Information was presented all in one page without links
| Users were able to go through the information by scrolling up and down
Decision aid with interactive visualisations
| Subpages with side effects of treatments were developed in a nonlinear fashion
| Users were able to click through the information and navigate through the different links as they wished
Methodology
Online experiment
One hundred and thirteen women participated in the study which lasted approximately 30 minutes. Half of the participants interacted with the decision aid with static visualizations and the other with the decision aid with interactive visualizations. Participants started by filling in a pre-test questionnaire, afterwards interacted with the prototype and in the end filled in a post-test questionnaire
Questionnaires evaluated
| The understanding of the health risk information presented
| The cognitive elaboration on the information
| The participants’ need for cognition
| The participants’ graph literacy
| The participants’ knowledge about breast cancer
Insights
The results from the experiment were inconclusive. It was not possible to ascertain whether the participants that interacted with interactive visualizations understood the information better than participants that interacted with the static visualizations.
Extraneous load
For visualizations of complex health data, designers should focus on reducing the extraneous load of the information on individuals’ memory (e.i the way the information is presented). Using interactive elements can be an effective way of doing so, since these can help to break down the information into understandable bit-sized pieces of information.
Keep it unflashy
Web tools with an informational nature do not benefit as much from flashy interactive elements as experiential web tools (e.g., travelling websites) do. Designers should take this into consideration so that the design has the effect intended.
Selective scan
Highly interactive decision aids can lead to selective scanning. Because people are generally not very good at navigating and processing through large amounts of information, they end up ignoring items that do not seem of immediate interest/important which can lead them to miss on important information.
Pain points
The “years slider” did not have a clear interactive affordance. Participants did not understand that they could interact with it, thus some important information might have gotten lost. In addition, many participants associated the color orange with a negative experience, this might have influenced the way they perceived the information.
Recommendations
Conduct more research
Due to resources this study was conducted with the general population. For more accurate insights it should be conducted with breast cancer patients. Further, this project was a first step towards understanding the role of interactive elements in visualizations in a breast cancer decision aid, thus more in-depth research is needed.
User studies
This tool was received with great enthusiasm from the study’s participants. This shows how fundamental it could be in the lives of breast cancer patients. Therefore, user studies should be conducted to understand how such a tool could be implemented and what the needs of the users actually are.
Keep it simple
When designing health decision aids, designers should take into consideration the role of the complexity of the information. Information should be broken down into bite sized pieces, important information should be highlighted with visual prompts and navigational aids should be used.