Veterinarian Form Design for PathTracker

About

As a part of my Assistantship with Prof. Ian Brooks, I am currently working on the Pathtracker project which is funded by NSF. More information about the research project could be found in the Research section of my portfolio. 

Since, this project is not yet completed, I cannot share the details of the application which we are building, but I would like to talk about my experience of designing new treatment forms which could be used by veterinarians for their everyday check ups.

Also, I would not be able to share screenshots of this project due to confidentiality reasons. But I would like to talk about my experience on this project.

Story

I have a degree in Computer Engineering and my knowledge about Biochemistry and healthcare was almost negligible before I started working on this project. So first of all, I had to acquaint myself with the terminologies and jargons of the biochem world and also empathize with the problems that they had been facing with interface design thus far.  I was required to design the front-end of the application which is a challenging task because people from many fields are associated with this project and I was needed to satisfy the needs of all of them.

One particularly challenging task was to design the forms that veterinarians use to perform diagnosis of horses. I was working with a vet on this project and it was interesting to observe that currently, the only way of reporting what they observe is by means of noting down everything on physical papers. There was a need of digitizing everything. 

I was required to create a medical form which could help the vet in identifying the information required, the correct flow of noting down the information and validating and correcting any information entered incorrectly by the vet. Since, we were basically standardizing the way in which medical check-ups had to performed, my design needed to be uniform, simple, and easily understandable. Also, it should be able to support people who are visually impaired and color blind.

I came up with various design ideas and eventually we were able to find the correct method of designing these forms. I also coded the forms in HTML and CSS for sample trials in real cases. If successful, these forms would be used by vets all over USA, to perform medical check-ups.