User Interface Refactor
Sponsored by OpenEMR Support, LLC, Development effort by Medical Information Integration, LLC and Visolve
- Project started November 15, 2009
- Target completion end of December 2009 for first iteration and integration pass
- Working from Tip with weekly integrations into our base,
Gory, ie: technical details can found at User Interface Refactor - Functional Design
The information below is the basic mission. As the prototyping advances.
NAVIGATION REFACTOR
Remove the multi-frame aspect of the UI, such that the left-hand nav is replaced by an enhanced top nav userbar, and all screens load at the bottom of the screen in a single iframe (instead of a top and bottom frame).
This cleanup step will greatly simplify the user experience, which now has the added burden of figuring out where load a menu selection (top? bottom?) and to having to resize.
The top-menu userbar will constitute primarily of drop-down, cascading menus, which will be designed to be easily extended (ideally driven by a configuration file of some type); a minimal 'current patient' widget, which when hovered over or clicked produces a DIV popup (not window popup!) with more details; a search widget which when typed in produces a DIV popup with search options (Any, Filter, etc.); and the currently logged in user + log out button.
LOOK-AND-FEEL REFACTOR
All non-custom pages will be standardized as much as possible:
- Sort out what should be buttons, and what should be links; all buttons generated using CSS, and using the same mechanisms site wide
- General font styling to make every page consistent.
- Consistent treatment of column/tabular data (such as lists of things and reports)
- Elimination of heavy-weight javascript popups in favor of lightbox-style in-page modals
- Reduction of the need for scrolling using tabbed menu treatments
- Refactor of pages where javascript, php, css, and html are too tightly coupled (for ease of styling)
- Re-write of select pages as time permits
Examples of Main Demograhics layout
--here--
Examples of Report Launch layout
--here--
WORKFLOW REFACTOR
This is work at the root of usability issues in OpenEMR -- there aren't any wizards in to guide users through their typical workflows. To this end, we will:
- Identify the typical workflows used by most organizations
- Create a wizard API which must be implemented by pages wishing to participate in the wizard
- Workflows will make use of breadcrumbs and next/back user paradigm whereever possible
- Implement a standard set of workflows
This work is dependent on some degree of overall site look/feel refactoring, as well as a general re-tooling of the navigation structure of the site.
