Using Storytelling to Elicit Design Guidance for Medical Devices

Medical device designers must understand the complex context of use within a health care environment to ensure product usability. Designers must overcome domain-specific obstacles during usability research, such as patient privacy standards, which prevent designers from observing practitioners in context. In this project, we investigated storytelling as an alternative elicitation method for medical device requirements when direct observations are limited or not possible. While gathering requirements for an infusion pump, we compared the types of information elicited by focus groups, interviews, and storytelling sessions. Several advantages and implications for the use of storytelling in usability research are discussed.