Administration Mode Panels: A Card Sorting Study

The administration mode panels of VirtaMed AG’s surgical simulators is meant to house all the settings for the simulator. However, the panels are disorganized and are unsatisfying to use by both experts and novices. This study uses card-sorting in order to find categories that would work for novices and for experts. Novices who have never seen the system and experts who have used this system for longer periods both categorized 30 cards from the panels in an open card-sorting exercise. The experts also weighted the importance of the cards. A structure of 5 categories is proposed for implementation in future software by VirtaMed AG based upon the results of these card-sorting tasks.

The fulltext can be found here.

Keywords: human-computer interfaces; card sorting; administration mode panels

Authors: Pascal Blöchlinger, Carolyn O’Brien, Philipp Schaad (all ETH Zürich)