A Philips medical imaging platform

I spent nearly two years at Philips Healthcare in Best, the Netherlands. First I defined a multi-touch gesture vocabulary for Philips products, then I worked as an interaction designer and usability engineer on a major imaging platform. I co-authored user interface standards and ran usability tests in clinical settings in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

A hospital rearranges your priorities. The user is trained but interrupted, the room is darker, noisier and more crowded than any lab, and a mis-tap costs more than a lost draft. Regulation adds a second obligation on top of the usual one: you have to show that a design is safe to use. Some images below are processed for confidentiality.

Defining a touch vocabulary

The multi-touch gesture set defined for Philips Healthcare products
The gesture set, built from stakeholder requirements and tested with expert users.

The hard part was restraint. A touch screen will accept a dozen inventive gestures, while a clinician moving through a patient scan should have to remember about five, and none of them should be one a steadying hand can trigger by accident. Much of the work went into arguing gestures back out of the set.

A touch target grid laid over an acquisition device interface
From the UI standard I authored on touch in Philips medical devices: appropriate touch target sizes over a typical acquisition interface.

Testing in the field

A usability test of a digital X-ray acquisition unit
Running a usability test on the touch interface of a digital X-ray acquisition unit, Philips Healthcare Hamburg.
Two candidate interfaces for a CT acquisition unit
Two interfaces for a computed tomography acquisition unit. I ran a comparative usability study of the pair in hospitals in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Designing the workflows

A set of design requirements
Everything began from a requirements set built with clinicians and application experts.
Storyboard of the print workflow
A storyboard of the print workflow, walked through with stakeholders before field testing.
The search function
The search function I designed for the same platform. The import workflow had the same storyboard treatment.
The implemented interface
The interface as built, carrying the functions my colleagues and I specified.

Coach, gesture project: Mark de Graaf