Check out this post from The Consumerist about how unhappy the FDA is with Durezol and Durasal.

A hint: It’s ok if you accidentally use Durezol when you wanted Durasal, but the penalty is high for using Durasal instead of Durezol!*

This link contains an explanation of the names:

When drugs are submitted to the FDA for approval, the Agency carefully screens their proprietary names for similarities. However, Durasal (salicylic acid) is an OTC medication that did not undergo the approval process. That is why the two names exist side-by-side in the pharmacies.

Thus far, the FDA is asking pharmacists to “be vigilant.” I think we know how that usually plays out.

*Durezol is eye drops. Durasal is wart remover.

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One of my students last semester (thanks, Ronney!) turned me on the “Callback” publication from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System. These are almost all first person stories written as case studies of errors and accidents or near accidents. There aren’t so many that it falls under my list of neat databases, but it certainly is interesting reading.

I’ve collected a few below to give a taste of the stories that are included. These are just the top level descriptions – click through to read the first person accounts.

From Issue 381 Upside Down and Backwards

1. “An aircraft Mode Selector Panel that “looks the same” whether right side up or upside down, and that can be readily installed either way, is a good example of a problematic design. Confronted with an inverted panel, this Cessna 560 Captain found out what happens when the wrong button is in the right place. “
2. “Without detailed instructions and clear notation, nearly symmetrical parts can be installed incorrectly. Faced with the replacement of such a part, this CRJ 700 Maintenance Technician wound up with a case of component “misorientation.”

From Issue 383 When Practice Emergencies Go Bad

1. “…a C182 pilot performed a simulated engine failure while undergoing a practical examination. It appears that both the examiner and the examinee were so engrossed in the simulated emergency that they both tuned BEEEEP out BEEEEP the BEEEEP gear BEEEEP warning BEEEEP horn.”
2. “When faced with a real engine failure, performing the Engine Secure Checklist reduces the chance of a fire on landing. However, actually performing the steps in the Engine Secure Checklist when the engine failure is not real can lead to a real problem.”

From Issue 382 Fly the Airplane!

1. “A review of recent ASRS reports indicates that failure to follow one of the most basic tenets of flight continues to be a concern when pilots are faced with distractions or abnormal situations.”

From Issue 376 The Fixation Factor

1. “The ability to maintain the “big picture” while completing individual, discrete tasks is one of the most critical aspects of working in the aviation environment. Preoccupation with one particular task can degrade the ability to detect other important information. This month’s CALLBACK looks at examples of how fixation adversely affects overall task management.”
2. “Advanced navigation equipment can provide a wealth of readily available information, but as this Cirrus SR20 pilot learned, sometimes too much information can be a distraction.”

From Issue 375 Motor Skills: Getting Off to a Good Start

1. “The Captain of an air carrier jet experienced a very hot start when distractions and failure to follow normal flow patterns altered the engine start sequence.”
2. “This pilot was familiar with the proper procedures for hand-propping, but despite a conscientious effort, one critical assumption led to a nose-to-nose encounter.”

Photo credit smartjunco @ Flickr

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I’d assume when pilots enter a weight estimate for the plane prior to takeoff that there would be a decision aid to prevents gross miscalculation. It certainly seems like an undue load (no pun intended) on the pilot to require entering multiple components for weight correctly. From the article linked below I am no longer sure how much automation is involved. Apparently, the pilot forgot to account for the weight of the fuel. Doesn’t it seem as though that would be the easiest weight to automatically enter?

From the article:

Pilot Miscalculates Plane Weight, Avoids Disaster

“The weight of the plane dictates the speed required to take off and too little speed could have caused pilots to lose control of the aircraft. Luckily, the captain realized something was wrong and compensated before the plane ran off the runway.

According to the report there have been “a significant number of reported incidents and several accidents resulting from errors in take-off performance calculations around the world in recent years.”

On a side note, I’ve been on small planes where we all had to be weighed as well as our luggage prior to boarding. If the margins are that thin, I sure hope no one made any data entry mistakes!

Photo credit martinhartland @ Flickr

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This story was passed to me today by Matt Shipman, who writes about research on The Abstract.

An excerpt:

[Right - Comparison of two road signs, Highway Gothic on the left, Clearview on the right, 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons - click on link to see large]

The previous road sign font, Highway Gothic, was hard to read because of very small counter spaces, or the enclosed shapes of a letterform (the inside of an “O” or “P”). Clearview, with larger enclosed shapes, taller lowercase letters and better letterspacing, is easier to read from a distance and at night.

[Left - Clearview letterforms. Credit: Wikimedia Commons - click on link to see large]

Clearview improved drivers’ reading accuracy, reaction time, and recognition distance – all with a few small tweaks to the design. In this case, proper type is crucial for public health and safety.”

Really, it is worth reading the whole article. Enjoy!

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Here is a link to some neat new research being done by my colleagues at NCSU.  It’s about the development of a tool that instantly changes the look of software code as it’s being developed, allowing for different ways to investigate bugs and features, but without changing the code in any way that might introduce errors. Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill developed the interface for this “refactoring” of code and published on it this past semester.

From the article:

Making Refactoring Tools More Attractive For Programmers

“The researchers designed the marking menus so that the refactoring tools are laid out in a way that makes sense to programmers. For example, tools that have opposite functions appear opposite each other in the marking menu. And tools that have similar functions in different contexts will appear in the same place on their respective marking menus.

Early testing shows that programmers were able to grasp the marking menu process quickly, and the layout of the tools within the menus was intuitive.”

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NPR interviews Bill Buxton on the technology side and Sherry Turkle on the social impacts side.

The Touchy-Feely Future Of Technology

Excerpts:

“I wasn’t trying to make a computer interface, I was just trying to make a drum,” Buxton tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “Did I envision what was going to happen today, that it would be in everybody’s pocket — in their smartphone? Absolutely not. Did we realize that things were going to be different, that you could do things that we never imagined? … Absolutely.”

Today, Buxton is known as a pioneer in human-computer interaction, a field of computer science that has seen a spike in consumer demand thanks to a new, seemingly ubiquitous technology: Touch.”

…

“Turkle says that’s because touch-screen devices appeal to a sentiment that pretty much everyone can relate to: the desire to be a kid again.

“[The] fantasy of using your body to control the virtual is a child’s fantasy of their body being connected to the world,” Turkle says. “That’s the child’s earliest experience of the world and it kind of gets broken up by the reality that you’re separate from the world. And what these phones do is bring back that fantasy in the most primitive way.”

And Turkle warns that living in that fantasy world could mean missing out on the real world around you.”

 

 

Photo credit Bejadin.info at Flickr.

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Two articles came up that both touched upon the topic of how behavior is shaped and influenced by the environment and how we shape our immediate environment to suit particular behaviors.  The topic of how behavior is constrained by the physical environment is a long discussed topic in psychology and human factors (e.g., affordances, ecological psychology, situated cognition, “cognition in the wild“).

NPR:  What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits

According to Wendy Wood, a psychologist at University of Southern California who researches behavior change, throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s scientists believed that if you wanted to change behavior, the key was to change people’s goals and intentions.

…

“Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they’ve done it enough, their behavior doesn’t follow their intentions,” Neal explains.

Neal says this has to do with the way that over time, our physical environments come to shape our behavior.

“People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment,” Neal says.

Outsourcing control over your behavior sounds a little funny. But understand consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car.

The Atlantic: The Psychology of Home: Why Where You Live Means So Much

Memories, too, are cued by the physical environment. When you visit a place you used to live, these cues can cause you to revert back to the person you were when you lived there. The rest of the time, different places are kept largely separated in our minds. The more connections our brain makes to something, the more likely our everyday thoughts are to lead us there. But connections made in one place can be isolated from those made in another, so we may not think as often about things that happened for the few months we lived someplace else. Looking back, many of my homes feel more like places borrowed than places possessed, and while I sometimes sift through mental souvenirs of my time there, in the scope of a lifetime, I was only a tourist.

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I’m catching up on some older topics I never blogged about. This is one of my favorites.

The Consumerist posted a video of a blind user interacting with an ATM. As they said, “Overall, it seems like whoever designed the ATM didn’t ask a blind person to try it out first.”

Quotes from the video:
(Re: finding the headphone jack) “It was camoflagued, I swear it was camoflagued.”

Then the voice instructs him to press Enter on the keypad and pauses. THEN it describes the location of the enter key on the keypad.

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Enjoy this video by Tristan Cooke and Thomas Nelson at Humans in Design.

Some of the blame for our current financial crisis lies in the opacity of legal documents. In this post, a mortgage statement gets a facelift to become easily interpretable and allow the homeowner to predict and well as understand the payment schedule.

The Mortgage Statement Fix from Tom Nelson on Vimeo.

 
The original post can be found here.

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Here is a link to an enjoyable radioshow called “99% invisible,” about the “design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.”*

99% Invisible-37- The Steering Wheel

This episode covers the difficulty people have in correctly miming use of a steering wheel (spoiler: they can’t!) and how they can learn to do so correctly with no visual feedback. The researcher interviewed was Steven Cloete, whose website can be found here with more information about research specifics.

99% invisible was recently featured on Radiolab, one of my favorite science podcasts.

*no relation to the 99%.

Image credit ryanready at Flickr

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One thing that annoys me is the silly argument that paper is bad or paper kills. Such hollow arguments are used to encourage technology adoption in airplane cockpits, the class room, and hospitals. Usually they are associated with silly statistics about how much paper is saved or how much less weight is carried, or how much easier it will be to look through documents (I use an iPad to hold hundreds of articles and while I can *hold* more articles, it has not translated to more reading and it does not improve my reading comprehension at all).

We are now finally starting to see a more nuanced view of technology.  The NTSB recently proposed banning all distracting technology while driving and this NYT article discusses the downsides of blind technology adoption in hospitals.

Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies.

But like many cures, this solution has come with an unintended side effect: doctors and nurses can be focused on the screen and not the patient, even during moments of critical care. And they are not always doing work; examples include a neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.

I hope this brief period of common sense lasts.

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This NYT article discusses the “new” scourge of rude people interacting with their phones in public via voice thanks in large part to Siri, Apple’s new virtual assistant.

This article reminded me of something slightly different about human interaction with virtual assistants or automation. In a 2004 paper, researchers Parasuraman and Miller wondered if automation that possessed human-like qualities would cause people to alter their behavior.

They compared automation that made suggestions in a polite way or a rude way (always interrupting you). As you might expect, automation that was polite elicited higher ratings of trust and dependence.

This might be one reason why Siri has a playful, almost human-like personality instead of a robot servant that merely carries out your commands. The danger is that with assistants that are perceived as human-like, people will raise their expectations to unreasonable levels. Like mistakenly ascribing political motivations to it.

Lastly, the graph shown below was in the latest issue of Wired magazine.  I think it’s a nice compliment to the perceived reliability graph we showed in a previous post:

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In the “why didn’t I think of this!” department, we have the Little Printer Concept by Berg.  It basically seems like a cash register thermal printer (in much nicer packaging) that sits in your home and prints messages, puzzles, etc.  

I could see this being very useful for older consumers who are resistant to technology.  Imagine printing medication instructions or doctor appointment reminders or any reminder.  Another use might be adult children using it to send their parents messages that they can rip and read anywhere.

I love the simplicity of the design and the fact that you can take the output anywhere you want (unlike a WIFI-digital picture frame or other “high tech” solution).  I really hope this product comes to market.  The video is definitely worth a look.

Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.

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Follow the link to read “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” by Bret Victor. The briefest of summaries would be that we over-use simple touch in our visions of the future, when we could be including many other cues, such as weight and balance.

From the post:

If you’re with me so far, maybe I can nudge you one step further. Look down at your hands. Are they attached to anything? Yes — you’ve got arms! And shoulders, and a torso, and legs, and feet! And they all move!

Any dancer or doctor knows full well what an incredibly expressive device your body is. 300 joints! 600 muscles! Hundreds of degrees of freedom!

The next time you make breakfast, pay attention to the exquisitely intricate choreography of opening cupboards and pouring the milk — notice how your limbs move in space, how effortlessly you use your weight and balance. The only reason your mind doesn’t explode every morning from the sheer awesomeness of your balletic achievement is that everyone else in the world can do this as well.

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

 

 

Photo credit jstarpl @ Flickr

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This page contains an interesting inventory of past speedometer designs from Chevrolet.  Quite a variety!  Is usability getting better or worse?

I like it when the design works such that the prevailing speed limit (e.g., 60 MPH) lets the needle be oriented in a cardinal direction (pointed up or left) like the one below:

(via Kottke)

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