JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Pre-pandemic saw the rise of online teaching. Yet, online tools for teaching the essential nursing skill of empathy remain limited. Not only are more of these tools needed, but they need to be tested for ease of use and understanding by students.

Objective:

To evaluate student usability of the In Your Shoes web-based empathy training portal application with quantitative and qualitative methods.

Methods:

A mixed methods design was employed in this 3-phase formative usability study. We conducted remote observation of student participants interacting with the training portal application and captured their qualitative reflections followed by data analysis and iterative design refinements to the application. Eight third- and fourth-year nursing students were from an undergraduate baccalaureate program at one mid-Canada university. Student participants in Phases 1 and 2 were remotely observed by research personnel while engaged in pre-defined tasks. In Phase 3, student participants were asked to use the application as they liked in their own environments; this was followed by a video-recorded exit interview with a think aloud process as student participants responded to the System Usability Scale.

Results:

We found ‘above average’ perceived usability with the application. Student participants had a range of technology skills and tended to give one-off comments on application appearance, content, navigation, and functionality. Main challenges included navigation during video-analysis and the length of educational materials. Application refinements were made (e.g., pop-up messages, narrated video) based on feedback.

Conclusions:

With the rising engagement in online teaching, technology is an essential medium for learning in health care education. We developed a novel tool as a supplemental classroom tool to foster students’ self-directed learning about empathy. This study provided direction for ongoing refinements to enhance the usability and user satisfaction with the application. Our next step is to obtain feedback from users who will experience more authentic experiences doing ‘live’ video-capture, -annotation, and -analysis as these could not be fully evaluated due to COVID protocol. Clinical Trial: not applicable.