Table 6 App design
Field | Input | Design decision |
|---|---|---|
Hospital | Select a single hospital name | As this is unlikely to change between observations, this only needed to be set once per session. |
Speciality | Select a single speciality/department | As above, only set this once per session. |
Area | Select between clinic, ward, theatre, pre/post-theatre and other | This selection needed to be made on each observation as it is likely the observer would move around between areas. |
Setting | Select either team or alone | Quickly (single click) select whether it was observed in a team or alone setting. |
Job Role | Select one or more job roles | We had a broad list of possible job roles that observers could select all the roles involved. |
Outcome | Select either strong negative (−−), negative (−), positive (+) or strong positive (++) | By including positive observations, we provided a smaller and easier to use scale of outcome. |
Tags | Select one or more descriptive tags | Similar to the job roles, this was a broad list of tags that one or more could be selected to describe the event. |
Description | Free text input | The free text input is the slowest input, but is required to clarify the observation. |
Additional information | ||
● The input form was designed to be quick and easy to use, while also gathering as much information as possible. ● The app was created as a hybrid application using the ionic framework and can therefore run on both Android and iOS devices. ● The options for the hospital, speciality, job role and tag fields are stored in an SQL database on the server, which the mobile app accesses via an API on first logging in. This means that the options can be edited at any point without having to update the app. ● To further speed up the data input, an observation can be incremented if it is observed more than once. Also, each entry can be edited on the device if the observer ran out of time to enter all fields in one go. ● Once the user is ready, all results on the app can be uploaded to the server, this requires confirming the username and password are correct. Once uploaded, the observations are deleted from the device. ● As the mobile app only connects to the server API on initial login and when uploading observations, the majority of the time it will function offline—storing the data in an SQLite database on the device. ● As well as needing a valid username and password to connect to the server, the app also required the device to have a secure pin set. | ||