3 ms·
A slight nitpick: > The ambulance I shadowed had an ePCR. Nobody used it. I talked to the EMTs about this, and they said nobody they knew used it either. Lack
by MaxBarraclough 6y ago
A slight nitpick:
> The ambulance I shadowed had an ePCR. Nobody used it. I talked to the EMTs about this, and they said nobody they knew used it either. Lack of training? No, we all got trained. Crippling bugs? No, it worked fine. Paper was good enough? No, the ePCR was much better than paper PCRs in almost every way. It just had one problem: it was too slow.
That is a crippling bug. The UI is a soft real-time system, [0] and it's doing such a poor job of meeting its deadlines that the user considers the system to be unusable.
If you're writing an autopilot system, it's not enough for the system to eventually make the right decision, it must arrive at the right decision before the deadline. Failure to do so would by definition qualify as a bug.
> Most of us aren’t writing critical software. But this isn’t critical software, either: nobody will suddenly die if it breaks.
Won't they? If the software corrupts the patient data, someone could die, right? Elsewhere the article essentially says as much:
> An error might waste valuable time as nurses chase invisible problems or ignore obvious ones. Worst case, it leads to the wrong treatment. In emergency situations these mistakes can be fatal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing#Soft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing#Soft
edit I see brundolf's comment already makes some of these points
- jspash 6y agoI would argue that the 250ms lag mentioned in the article was not the reason the ePCR system was perceived as being slow. Consider the new trend in login forms these days whereby you are forced to enter you username or email THEN press a button THEN enter your password THEN press another button. What used to be simple is now no longer simple. Why is it like this? To accommodate the x% of people who seem to get confused in some manner when presented with "too many choices". I forget the reasoning now, and disagree 1000% but don't want to sidetrack my argument any further. Anyhow... compare the original form to an imagined GUI since we're not presented with the software to make a proper comparison. If you needed to fill out the paper form quickly you can tick..tick...tick..tick..write a bit.tick...tick..read..write.etc. Now with the software, does it use a mouse? Probably not. It's most likely a touch screen. Possibly a tablet. So now every choice required more interaction. More choices. Opening a dropdown? So you mean to say the developers have decided to hide important information until you request it? The paper version has everything you ever need to know at a glance. One side of a sheet, no need to even flip it over. This is all conjecture, but I experience this type of thing all the time when a software "solution" comes to fix a real-world "problem". It can be done well. Most UK Govt websites are incredibly well-done IMHO. But usually they're not.
- phkahler 6y agoWhat you describe is very common. The best example I can think of is a map app with pinch zoom vs an old one with pan and zoom buttons. People want to interact with data, not fiddle with UI controls, menus, and popups. The best UI looks like no UI.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> Why is it like this? To accommodate the x% of people who seem to get confused in some manner when presented with "too many choices". FWIW, this is done to accommodate SSO (single sign-on), which matters for any software that's going to be used in corporate or governmental environments. You have to submit your login first, because it's used to determine what authentication method and provider to select. That said, I hate this flow too, and there must be a better way. It also doesn't excuse products that do not support SSO that still implement such split flow anyway.
- setr 6y agoCouldn’t you just accept the username and password Determine the Auth provider from the username Feed both username & password to the provider And be done with it? I’m not clear why the user needs to be made aware of the SSO setup..
- detaro 6y agoNo, because part of the point of those systems is that they redirect you to your SSO provider to enter the password so the app can't see it.