Hey @akanter, I agree that where/how to organize such a project feels a little confusing right now :). I’m optimistic we could work this out though in a way that gets clearer over time.
As an organization, Medic Mobile is interested in exploring how we might implement OpenMRS in tandem with the CHT, and how we as an organization might contribute to the OMRS community. We have a strong UI/UX team and this seems like an area we might be able to add value. That interest is distinct from our organization’s contributions to the CHT, though recently we’ve been discovering that there’s more overlap in needed UI components than we had previously realized. Part of what what interests me about this project is that contributing to design projects for OpenMRS might teach the Medic Mobile team things that we could also contribute back to the CHT. So there is overlap in OMRS and CHT interests/needs here. If this sort of UI/UX project proves useful, it will probably involve a series of conversations in various places and Medic Mobile taking part doesn’t need to mean the conversation happens in any particular place.
I also agree that it’s probably best for the OpenMRS community if we try to separate a conversation about how to improve OpenMRS UI/UX design from conversations about how the OMRS platform interacts with the various mobile technologies in this space (although OMRS-CHT integration is a topic I’ll certainly be interested in on other threads!). I think we can achieve this by focusing this project on reusable UI components and UX design patterns that can be implemented by any OMRS front end framework. Doing something of this kind on UI/UX is important not just for users’ quality of life, but also because of the growing evidence that usability has a big impact on quality of care (see e.g. 1, 2). There are good examples of open source UI component libraries that we could draw from directly or/and use as inspiration for how to establish the kind of UI library that developers can find helpful and not feel constrained by. For example I think one of the key questions we could start with is, how might we use Google’s Material Design spec to establish a set of EHR UI components that follow usability and accessibility conventions and agree with web design patterns that users are likely to already be familiar with?
@gschmidt, does this resonate with how you’re thinking about the project? And @akanter, I’d be curious to hear if this framing of the project feels like it answers your questions reasonably well, or if you have additional ideas/suggestions about how to approach this sort of UI/UX agenda?