Although interactive interventions for healthcare are becoming increasingly necessary and popular, the creation of these interventions is relatively underexplored in research - especially from a design standpoint. This page combines some of the existing research on interactive design, patient education, web accessibility, learning theories, multimedia design, and human motivation into a guiding resource for designers of these interventions. Whenever possible I included links and instructions for free resources to use when developing interactives.
Examples throughout this page in blue drop-down boxes are pulled from a proof-of-concept interactive intervention that I made to teach a general patient audience about breast cancer risk factors and screening methods. The full interactive intervention can be found here. (If I learned one thing while making the proof-of-concept intervention, it was that Articulate Rise was not a robust enough platform for the level of organization and design that I wanted to achieve - I would encourage future designers to use a more customizable platform like Articulate Storyline instead.)
The main framework I used to scaffold the organization and sorting of my research was Sandanayake et al.’s 2021 paper “A framework to design open educational resources-integrated online courses for undergraduate learning: A design-based research approach”. I would encourage everyone that if they only read one source from my research, it should be this one! Though Sandanayake et al.’s paper centers around online school courses, the “Design Aspects” that they identified are applicable to a variety of online educational resources.
<aside> <img src="/icons/official-document_blue.svg" alt="/icons/official-document_blue.svg" width="40px" /> This Notion page is an overview of my Master’s research for my Biomedical Visualization degree at UIC. If you have any suggestions for edits or additions to the material, please email me ([email protected]) or fill out the contact form on my website. If you’re extremely bored and want to read all 89 pages of my research, you can find my whole paper here. Good luck! Enjoy creating :^)
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*Adapted from the Interactive Design framework from Sandanayake et al. (2021)* 1️⃣
| Factors | Successful implementation |
|---|---|
| - Learning objectives |
Information design addresses the content organization and scaffolding stages of interactive development. This stage is also when Cognitive Load Theory 2️⃣ should be first taken into consideration. Cognitive load theory is the sum of three separate domains of brain processing power:
The ideal learning experience accounts for intrinsic cognitive load, has low extraneous cognitive load, and has high germane load.
These considerations of cognitive load can guide the creation of your Learning Objectives, your content selection, and the presentation of your material throughout your design process.
When writing learning goals and objectives, several considerations must be made. Learning goals guide the creation of learning objectives. As a source from Harvard says:
“The distinction between "learning goals" and "learning objectives" is actually pretty commonsensical: in this context goals generally refer to the higher-order ambitions you have for your students, while objectives are the specific, measurable competencies which you would assess in order to decide whether your goals had been met.”