Sedig Kamran, Parsons Paul, Dittmer Mark, Ola Oluwakemi
Western University, Canada.
Online J Public Health Inform. 2012;4(3). doi: 10.5210/ojphi.v4i3.4270. Epub 2012 Dec 19.
Public health professionals work with a variety of information sources to carry out their everyday activities. In recent years, interactive computational tools have become deeply embedded in such activities. Unlike the early days of computational tool use, the potential of tools nowadays is not limited to simply providing access to information; rather, they can act as powerful mediators of human-information discourse, enabling rich interaction with public health information. If public health informatics tools are designed and used properly, they can facilitate, enhance, and support the performance of complex cognitive activities that are essential to public health informatics, such as problem solving, forecasting, sense-making, and planning. However, the effective design and evaluation of public health informatics tools requires an understanding of the cognitive and perceptual issues pertaining to how humans work and think with information to perform such activities. This paper draws on research that has examined some of the relevant issues, including interaction design, complex cognition, and visual representations, to offer some human-centered design and evaluation considerations for public health informatics tools.
公共卫生专业人员利用各种信息来源开展日常工作。近年来，交互式计算工具已深深融入这些活动之中。与早期使用计算工具的情况不同，如今工具的潜力不仅限于简单地提供信息获取途径；相反，它们可以成为人类与信息交流的强大媒介，实现与公共卫生信息的丰富互动。如果公共卫生信息学工具设计和使用得当，它们可以促进、增强并支持对公共卫生信息学至关重要的复杂认知活动的执行，如问题解决、预测、意义建构和规划。然而，要有效地设计和评估公共卫生信息学工具，需要了解与人类如何利用信息进行工作和思考以开展此类活动相关的认知和感知问题。本文借鉴了一些研究，这些研究探讨了一些相关问题，包括交互设计、复杂认知和视觉表征，旨在为公共卫生信息学工具提供一些以用户为中心的设计和评估考量。
