Dear TechNet community,
Effective CCE displays are crucial for maintaining vaccine integrity. Health facility staff rely on these displays to provide unambiguous and timely information to ensure the safety of stored vaccines.
Following the publication of the WHO PQS EMS standards in 2022, multiple manufacturers are developing next-generation CCE, many of which will include new digital displays. This moment offers a unique opportunity to review the UX patterns and practices that have been previously implemented in CCE monitoring systems, and consider which patterns will provide the greatest value in the health facilities of tomorrow.
In this context, I am pleased to share a new resource (attached) for teams designing and developing digital displays for E006 devices. Developed by New Horizons, a nonprofit group working to improve cold chain data usability, the document outlines a set of patterns and practices for CCE displays that we find particularly effective. It reflects the collective perspective of our designers and engineers, based our experience using and designing cold chain equipment. This resource is not associated with WHO PQS and it is not part of the EMS standards. Our intention for this work was is articulate and refine our own design thinking in this domain, so it should not be interpreted as prescriptive and inflexible. We are releasing it publicly in the hopes that other teams may find it useful for their own efforts and, ideally, provide feedback to identify gaps and refine these perspectives.
We encourage you to review this document and consider how these patterns can be applied to your CCE monitoring system. Your feedback is valuable to us, and we welcome any questions or comments you may have.
If you have any questions about the guidance or would like to discuss its implementation further, please feel free to reach out. We are happy to provide additional information or setup a call to discuss how these guidelines can benefit your specific use cases.
Warm regards,
Benson Miller
New Horizons
Thanks Benson, this a really useful reference!
One thing I'm curious on is whether Hot / Cold is more intuitive / easily understood than Heat / Freeze for alarm terminology?
It might also be more versatile if wanting to monitor temperature ranges that do not have their lower bound close to 0 °C (freezers, for example) as 'Hot / Cold' is relative, whereas 'Freeze' is tied to 0 °C.
Many thanks,
Adam
Hello Adam,
Many thanks for reviewing this material. This is a very good and interesting question. We didn’t consider this question deeply, given that the EMS specifications uses the terms HEAT and FREEZE for alarm definitions (WHO PQS/E006/DS01.2, Section 4.2). I would note that HEAT alarms are required for all appliance types (e.g., fridges, freezers), whereas the spec does not require FREEZE alarms for freezer appliances. I don’t know how this observation affects your assessment.
I acknowledge that the PQS / E006 / DS01.x specification is primarily a technical in nature, which describes how data would be recorded on refrigerators. It’s reasonable to ask whether the UX considerations for local displays are significant enough to diverge from the terms used in the technical specification.
There are certainly some linguistic differences between the terms HEAT / FREEZE and HOT / COLD, which might lead to ambiguous interpretation. The single word “HEAT” might describe a state-of-affairs (e.g., “The HEAT makes it difficult to work in the middle of the day.”) or could be interpreted as a verb (e.g., “HEAT this water.”). But I'm not a linguist and I don’t have any data on how these terms might be interpreted by people in the field, especially in the context of cold-chain equipment.
I am interested in feedback from others who are reviewing this material.
Best,
Benson
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