Representational Affordances in design of Clinical Research Information System.

Representational Affordances are distributed representations extended across external (the environment) and internal (the organism) representations. Usability problem of Clinical Research Information System (CRIS) is a major barrier for their acceptance. Design of user interface (representation) is very important to the functionality and usability of CRIS. We propose that the user interface with more perceivable external representational affordances will have better usability. Our study focused on developing a framework to study the representational affordances of CRIS, and developing a framework that can systematically apply representational affordances to the design of user interface of CRIS.