Recently several of us on the SOAPware development team watched a series of presentations on software user interface design. The series was done by Robbie Ingebretsen as a part of Microsoft’s MIX 09 conference. It served as a great reminder of how important (and difficult) it is to design software that is intuitive to users and allows them to work as effortlessly as possible. Though Robbie shared several helpful points regarding good design, one that was particularly striking is the idea that empathy is key to making good software.
A simple definition of empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” While it’s apparent that empathy is important when it comes to relationships with other people, it’s easy to forget that it’s a critical quality to have if you want to design something useful to people, whether it be a car, a wristwatch, or an EMR product like SOAPware. Without it – without putting yourself in a user’s shoes and attempting to understand what their struggles are – it’s very possible that a user’s real needs will be overlooked.
The development team at SOAPware has recently taken some measures to help improve our ability to design and deliver quality software (and hopefully make us more empathetic programmers). One thing we’ve adopted is an agile methodology called Scrum, which encourages high levels of communication during the development of new software products and features, and enables us to rapidly respond to evolving industry and customer needs. Other changes we’re incorporating into the development process are frequent peer review of each other’s work, and something called “paired programming” where two developers work together at the same computer and collaborate to solve a problem. These improvements keep us accountable to each other, and help us as programmers do our best to design software that is efficient, powerful, and even fun to use.
At SOAPware we’re striving to have high levels empathy regarding our customers’ needs. Though each department has a slightly different responsibility in meeting this goal, we are all working together to deliver top-notch products that enable excellent patient care. We realize there will always be room for improvement, but in the end we hope our software will prove to be carefully crafted because we’ve sought to “understand and share the feelings of” our customers.
User Testimonials
Loading 