User Workflow Centered Design

Software systems are often built in a tool-centric fashion, providing hierarchical functional groups simultaneously to a user, and the user needs to find and select the right tools to use based on his/her current task needs. Even though this design approach provides some flexibility for the user, it fails to address the needs of the workflow support. Indeed, when such software is used in complex, dynamic, and stressful working domains, users are often overwhelmed and struggling to find the right functionality and data for their time sensitive tasks. Here, we report our experience of applying the user workflow centered design (UWCD) method for redesigning a tool-centric software system in medical intervention. We elaborate the UWCD process from capturing, documenting, and to modeling user workflow information. The user workflow model is then used to derive a user interface (UI) solution with the goal to “provide the right data and functionality to the right user at the right time”. We show that the new design can more effectively support users’ work in term of function selection and task switching as measured by time.