Linked List: August 16, 2019

Friday, 16 August 2019

Hillel Wayne:

Many ambulances now have electronic PCRs, which fix a lot of these problems. The report is automatically filed with the hospital. The software can enter timestamps and fill in necessary boilerplate. By spellchecking known medications it saves time at the hospital. Nobody has to guess whether you scrawled “100mg” or “160mg”.

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.

It wasn’t even that slow. Something like a quarter-second lag when you opened a dropdown or clicked a button. But it made things so unpleasant that nobody wanted to touch it. Paper was slow and annoying and easy to screw up, but at least it wasn’t that.

I think about that a lot.

I think the difference between UI design and UX design often gets lost in a lot of highfalutin jargon. But at a basic level there is a clear difference: the interface might be well designed and clear, but if it is slow and laggy, the experience of using it will be unpleasant, and people will go out of their way to avoid using whatever it is.

I repeat this point often, but it’s a moral obligation for designers to keep in mind what users will do, not what they “should” do. These EMTs perhaps should use the ePCRs because doing so might reduce errors; but in practice they stick with paper and pen because the ePCR machines are slow.

‘WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company; It’s a Soap Opera’ ★

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for The Verge:

On August 14th, The We Company (the company formerly known as WeWork) filed its mandatory S-1 paperwork to go public, and it’s worth reading in full. I mean, forget the serious stuff for a moment. The thing begins with an epigram: “We dedicate this to the energy of we — greater than any one of us, but inside all of us.”

The energy of we. I get it from a branding perspective — they’re literally calling themselves The We Company — but, you know, normal people would just say “our energy.” I tease Silicon Valley’s tech companies a lot, but New York easily matches them in ego. Look at these kids, literally bending the English language to their will!

Anyway, please join me on an annotated trip through my favorite parts of the mandatory filing.

Lopatto’s piece is a truly joyful look at a wacky company. Anyone who thinks The We Company should be valued at $50 billion is nuts — they’re more like a cult than a tech startup.

Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology ★

Neat project from an anonymous (?) father and son team:

Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives. Much like walking through a real-life museum, this site focuses on the design changes of historic versions of technology, rather than just the written history behind it.

(Via Kottke.)