User Experience vs. Co-Design in Aligning Outcomes with Functionality
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by Rumaisa
Introduction to User Experience vs. Co-Design
Human-centered design has many sectors, two of which include co-design and user experience. Although co-design and user experience are related, it’s crucial to understand how they are distinct. While co-design focuses on bringing stakeholders into the design process, user experience focuses on refining and optimizing the end product for intuitive experiences. This is especially important in contexts such as VA health IT, where both user engagement and practical functionality must coexist so that technologies are successful in the long run. Furthermore, omitting either of these sectors may result in costly and harmful patient outcomes.
The Role of User Experience in Optimizing Outcomes
User experience focuses on improving how a user interacts with a system. It ensures that the system is usable, efficient, and promotes satisfaction. In federal health IT solutions, this may mean creating intuitive interfaces that meet the needs of a diverse patient population. Furthermore, a well-designed user interface can lead to improved patient outcomes and provider satisfaction. Furthermore, promoting a positive user experience will depend on developers incorporating user feedback and behavioral patterns to indicate whether or not a solution is effective. However, user experience focuses more on the flow of the interface, but it may not always result in a functional and usable product that meets the needs of a diverse patient population. This is where co-design becomes essential.
Co-Design Promotes Functionality
Co-design focuses on inclusion, specifically bringing users into the design process. One primary difference is that user experience often brings users in for feedback, however, co-design focuses on bringing users in during the development process. This ensures that solutions are actively and continuously developed to meet user needs. This can also lead to lower costs overall because developers won’t have to wait until the end to find out that a product isn’t functional. Furthermore, including users in the development process will help make sure that their needs are being considered. This is especially important when considering DHA digital transformation solutions, because co-design means that active-duty clinicians, patients, and administrators are actively involved in shaping the system. This ensures that the final product aligns with user needs.
Furthermore, when government healthcare agencies leverage co-design, they are more likely to address systemic gaps that would otherwise go unnoticed by developers. For instance, software designed for veterans may work on paper, but if it doesn’t accommodate disabilities that some veterans may have, then it ultimately fails. Therefore, by incorporating co-design in the development phase, developers can promote positive user experiences that result in positive stakeholder interactions and outcomes.
The Risk of Ignoring Integration
While user experience and co-design differ in approach and timing, they’re ultimately not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, they are most effective when they are incorporated together. For instance, co-design focuses on preventing incorrect assumptions from being made. This can look like systems that don’t accommodate disabilities, software that isn’t intuitive to use, and even workflows that are difficult to use due to language or cultural differences. This leads to low adoption or even rejection by users. Furthermore, skipping user experience means the product might technically be functional, but may feel confusing to use or inefficient. This diminishes trust and utility. In federal health IT solutions, failing in either of these would lead to millions wasted, delays, and may even harm patient care. Therefore, only when users are involved from the start and continuously can health IT solutions be effective and result in positive patient outcomes.
HITS
Overall, healthcare continues to advance rapidly in terms of the vast amount of data continuously being collected. Therefore, it’s important that this data is being used effectively to empower clinicians rather than hinder them by making it harder to make data-based decisions. Furthermore, government health programs must incorporate data analytics in a way that benefits diverse patient populations. This means that clinicians should be able to make faster and smarter clinical decisions in a way that doesn’t result in burnout or dissatisfaction among providers and patients. Ultimately, clinicians must be empowered with the tools they need to be successful so that healthcare shifts toward proactive and evidence-based care.
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