Teamwork is considered the weakest link in most medical practices.
Teamwork is important not only to get the job done but also to grow your practice because patient's perception of teamwork is one of the two key factors for referral generation (the other factor is your expertise).
Therefore, user interface for medical office management systems must be designed for teamwork.
This article starts where my earlier review of Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" left.
Jeff Johnson elaborates on Norman's ideas, spells out relevant behavior patterns, and formulates Nine User Interface Design Principles in his book "Designing with the Mind in Mind.
" Johnson lists our observed behavior patterns in the twelve chapters of his book:

1. We perceive what we expect.
   So we see what we are looking to see and ignore everything else even when it's clearly present on the computer display.
   
2. Our vision is optimized to see structure.
   So a structured presentation is more likely to get noticed and retained.
   
3. We seek and use visual structure
4. Reading is unnatural
5. Our color vision is limited
6. Our peripheral vision is poor
7. Our attention is limited; our memory is imperfect
8. We have limits on attention, shape, thought, and action
9. Recognition is easy - recall is hard
10. Learning from experience and performing learned actions are easy - Problem solving and calculation are hard
11. Learning depends on many factors
12. We have time requirements for interactions

Based on his observations, Johnson formulates nine Design Principles:

1. Focus on the users and their tasks, not on the technology - understand the users and their tasks, work within the context in which your software will function
2. Consider function first and presentation later.
   Develop a conceptual model.
   
3. Conform to the users' view of the task
4. Design for the core cases, don't sweat the "edge" cases.
   Two types of common: number of users and frequency of usage.
   
5. Keep it simple.
   Don't give extra problems; don't make users reason by elimination.
   
6. Facilitate learning.
   provide low-risk environment.
   Stay consistent.
   
7. Deliver information - not just data.
   
8. Design for responsiveness.
   Instantly acknowledge user actions.
   Let users know when software is busy.
   Free users to do other things while waiting.
   Alow users to abort length operations.
   
9. Try it out on users; then fix it.
   

In contrast to Norman's book, which deals with the design of many different kinds of things and systems, Johnson's book is entirely focused on user interfaces for computer systems.
Building on the past 25 years of experience, Johnson presents numerous examples of successful and unsuccessful designs that respectively follow and contradict his design rules.
The most important lessons of his book for me are the importance of system responsiveness and the conceptual model.