JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Given the dearth of resources to support rural public health (PH) practice, the Solutions in Health Analytics for Rural Equity Across the Northwest dashboard (SHAREdash) was created to support rural county PH departments in northwestern United States with accessible and relevant data to identify and address health disparities in their jurisdictions. To ensure the development of useful dashboards, assessment of usability should occur at multiple stages throughout the system development lifecycle (SDLC). SHAREdash was refined via user-centered design methods and upon completion it is critical to evaluate the usability of SHAREdash.

Objective:

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of SHAREdash based on the SDLC stage 3 evaluation goals of effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction.

Methods:

PH professionals from rural health departments from Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Alaska were enrolled for the usability study from January-April 2022. The online evaluation consisted of two think-aloud tasks and a semi-structured qualitative interview. Think aloud tasks assessed efficiency and effectiveness, and interviews investigated satisfaction and overall usability. Verbatim transcripts from the tasks and interviews were analyzed through directed content analysis.

Results:

Of the nine participants, all were female and most worked at a local health department (78%). Mean clicks were 10.1±1.4 for Task 1 (could be completed in 7 clicks) and 11.4±2.0 for Task 2 (could be completed in 9 clicks). For both tasks, most participants required no prompting—89% for Task 1 and 67% for Task 2, respectively. For effectiveness, all participants were able to complete each task accurately and comprehensively. Overall, participants were highly satisfied with the dashboard with everyone remarking on the utility of using it to support their work, particularly to compare their jurisdiction to others. Finally, half of participants stated the ability to share the graphs from the dashboard will be “extremely useful” for their work. The only aspect of the dashboard cited as problematic is the amount of missing data that was present, which was a constraint of the data available about rural jurisdictions.

Conclusions:

Think aloud tasks showed the SHAREdash is effective and allows users to complete tasks efficiently. Overall, PH participants reported being very satisfied with the dashboard and provided multiple ways they planned to use it to support their work. The main usability issue identified was the lack of available data indicating the importance of addressing the ongoing issues of missing and fragmented public health data, particularly for rural communities.