After this week’s lecture on usability in design and how important it is I thought back to the book, ‘Tragic Design’.

I had first heard of this book from Jason at Instil who did a short presentation to our class weeks ago. At the time he mentioned the book, I looked over it but didn’t have a reason to do a blog post about it at the time. Until this week and I remember the first chapter I read had a very good view point on why useability is important.

The excerpt I’m covering from this book is the introductory chapter. The title of the introduction really drew me in, it was called ‘The Interface That Killed Jenny’. I thought it might have been a metaphor but unfortunately it was a very real story that happened to a young girl.

The story in the book talks about a girl named ‘Jenny’ this was not her real name for privacy reasons,and I also will refer to her by this name. Jenny was a young girl who was fighting cancer, after years she had finally been discharged but unfortunately relapsed. Apparently the medication needed for her relapse was incredibly potent and required 3 day hydration. The nurses in this hospital, although took great care of Jenny, made a tragic mistake when updating her charting software. One of the nurses missed the critical information about Jenny’s hydration requirements and Jenny died a day later from toxicity and dehydration.

When the cause of Jenny’s death was looked into it was found out that the nurses had been too distracted trying to understand the software, they missed out on that fatal information. The authors make it clear in the book that this is not the nurses fault and there are obviously other problems in the healthcare industry that build and build and line up for mistakes like this one to happen. This is a known problem apparently and is referred to as ‘The Swiss Cheese Model of Accident Causation’, meaning there is multiple layers a mistake has to go through before something like this happens.

When designers look at the interface the Jenny’s nurses were looking at and trying to understand it wasn’t hard to realise the problem. The interface was extremely information dense. I looked at the interface myself and tried to point out all the problems with it.

• There is no information hierarchy– tabs or sections of the website that are most important or used most by the end user are not made bigger on the screen or more visible. All text and information is treated the same
• There is no type hierarchy-Titles, navigation and content text are all the same size, making it difficult to see what it is important when first looking at it.
• There is both horizontal and vertical navigation- the tabs at the top navigate you to different things as well as the tabs on the left, this is too dense and hard to understand.
• Too many colours used without reason- colours can be good to distinguish different sections but also highlight important information. For colour to highlight something it must not be competing with a lot of other colours.
• Important alerts or information is not made clear– the medicine the patent is using is near the top of the screen but isn’t made to look any different than the other text and has also been made quite small. This makes it harder to see what is important.

According to the book ‘To Err is Human’, “44,000 – 98,000 people a year die from medical error” Jenny’s story, though tragic is not uncommon.

The authors go on to explain ‘cognitive capacity’, which is the total amount of information the brain is capable of retaining at any moment. This capacity is limited and the software interface the nurses had to use just overwhelmed it. The authors urge us as designer to do our part in making sure healthcare technology

Shariot and Saucier explain the roles and responsibilities of designers. They say that ‘good design should be transparent, delightful and/or helpful’ and ‘bad design are the ones that collide with human behaviours and cause undesired friction’  This was a very interesting way to describe bad design. I have heard bad design described that way because it went against aesthetics and design fundamentals however being described as an undesired friction was something I had very heard before. Calling it a ‘undesired friction’ also encompasses designs that don’t look outwardly bad but are bad when it comes to the user’s experience within the design. I think hearing it described this way has made me rethink how I view my own designs and I will look at any future projects through this lens.

The authors also describe the awkward feeling of designing for a client and not having the control over the project you would like to stop it becoming a bad design. This takes a bit of the responsibility off of the designer but Shariot and Saucier challenge this by saying ‘when a project feels wrong to designer, try to educate the client or refuse the work’ If the client is reasonable they would probably accept the opinion of the client but sometimes they are not. In the case of refusing the work they did explain that for working designers it is hard to pass up a job.

To finish off this section of the book the authors advise that when taking on a new project, at the briefing stage write out what you wish the goals of your product to be, the non-goals of the product and anti-goals of the product. A goal would be something you are aiming for your product to do. A non-goal would be a goal that is currently out of scope. Finally, an anti-goal is something you really really don’t want your product to do. To make sure the anti-goals don’t happen they say to set up some safeguards.

I used this concept and decided to make my own list for my Elements project.

Goals

• To inform students on the periodic table and 5 elements
• To test student on their learned knowledge
• To give help and test balanced equations

Non-Goals

• To have all information involved with the elements in one place
• To present info on all 118 elements

Anti-Goals

• To give out inaccurate information
• To confuse students
• Hide important information from users

Safeguards

• Get information from appropriate and reasonable source
• Test product to work through any confusing parts of product

The authors emphasise that technology can be harmful and cause physical and emotional pain. Technology can be exclusionary by not being accessible enough and frustrating when designed badly. Taking in the impact technology can have it is important we treat this role responsibly.

---

Overall thoughts

I found this book very insightful so far and it is interesting hearing design spoken about in a bit of a different way and in a very serious tone. Design is serious and even though I knew that before you can sometimes lose sight of what important things good design does for us.