Product Usability Driven System Engineering

Abstract

Usability is vital to every functioning system, especially when the functioning system is intertwined with people's safety and needs. A radiological diagnosis is a critical tool for identifying diseases and tumors. Therefore, its usefulness is beyond questionable despite the risk of radiation. In general, Medical devices follow a trend, just like consumer electronic products, where they are becoming more complicated, and performance is doubling every two years. Consequently, medical devices require a multidisciplinary team for design and development. Therefore, with so many commands and systems to deal with, users' cognitive loads are challenged to execute commands effectively. In fact, Current radiology practices face extreme pressure on available resources with demands of multi-dimensional requirements. Technicians are at the center of a constant drive for optimal productivity and optimization with the minimal possible resources. In medical devices, the cognitive workload will play more of a role because it uses advanced technology, is extremely expensive and takes a great deal of specialization to operate. Thus, effective and economical methods are required to evaluate user experience. Heuristic evaluation is an effective method to identify major usability problems and highlight issues faced by users. Heuristic evaluation was adapted to identify the usability of a CT scan on Saudi Arabian users and to identify if operating the CT scan can lead to physical and mental load effort. Subsequently, an in-depth investigation was conducted to identify major contributing factors impacting the operational usability of the CT scan.