Impact of design expertise and methodologies on the usability of printed education materials

Printed Education Materials (PEMs) are a knowledge translation intervention for disseminating synthesized clinical evidence to end-users. Since end users may have little expertise or may have low numeracy or low levels of other relevant constructs, it is important that PEMS be usable and understandable. Including human factors design and evaluation strategies in general, and usability engineering methods in particular (i.e. iterative design focused on user needs, user testing, and heuristic evaluation) has the potential to enhance usability and user experience in PEMs and lead to increases in their effectiveness. Through a series of four studies and one systematic review, this thesis explores the effect of design expertise and human factors principles on the usability, user experience, and user preference of Printed Education Materials. The results show that including expertise from designers and human factors experts in the development of PEMs can increase user-rated usability scores and user preferences, and can enhance the user experience when using these PEMs. The main contributions of this work include the use of usability testing and heuristic evaluation as new methods for the evaluation of PEMs as well as the use of both methods to triangulate on the most critical issues. This work has also presented new evidence on the effectiveness of PEMs targeted to women's cancers and the beneficial impact of human factors and user experience expertise on PEM usability and user experience. Finally, the observation that not all designers/designs are created equally and these differences can have large impacts on usability and user experience ratings from both users and experts has implications for the way PEMs are currently evaluated.