The environment of professional healthcare is highly complex and dynamic, making it hard to overview and communicate risk-related information. Risks can have major conse- quences which makes it important to have good decision support as well as continuously monitoring the mitigation progress. Risks within healthcare cover safety of patients as well as staff but also emphasizes on upholding integrity and confidentiality of the informa- tion administerated within the practice. Safety procedures and organisational guidelines exist to mitigate these risks but they are always expanding and evolving at the pace new risks are discovered and therefor surfaced risks should be highlighted and managed appropriately.

The aim of this master’s thesis was to investigate if the concept of visual communi- cation would be an attractive and usable support tool for risk communication within the professional mental health care practice.

A prototype was developed to convey risk-related information for personell working in a psychiatric ward. The design was devised through UX methodology including in- terviews, contextual inquiry, requirement elicitation and design rework iterations. The contents were based on risk visualisation framework and theories of visual variables. At- traction was evaluated with questionnaires about characteristics of application appeal (hedonic, pragmatic and direct appeal) and usability through usability questionnaires.

Basing the data visualisation of two types of data visualisation concepts, namely a bubble graph and bubble set, this master’s thesis saw good characteristics of appeal re- garding hedonic and direct appeal. With the appeal characteristic of being pragmatic the application indicated being less than good having issues with being complex, incom- prehensible, obstructing and uncontrollable. The usability showed good results and was evaluated between good and excellent according to the SUS-scale.

Regarding the soundess of the results there was large standard deviations in the pragmatic characteristics of appeal. The same conclusions were made on the usability evaluation where the majority of statements showed large standard deviations.