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Execrable UI Of The Day
Aug. 5th, 2013 06:44 pmI spotted the most awful user interface on the IV pump that was used for my saline today ...
Visual description: The front of IV pump, featuring a smallish colour LCD screen and more than 30 coloured areas which appear to be buttons. The button-coloured areas are not raised or marked in any tactile way but are coloured ovals featuring things like arrows pointing to areas at the edge of the screen, numbers 0-9, and some other generic functions like "clear" and "cancel".
The LCD screen has some fairly generic information like the hospital name, patient number, and the number of millilitres of fluid to be infused. The largest words on the screen, in bright blue reverse video, say "Low Battery <30 min. PLUG IN NOW" in capital letters.
It wasn't until I got the nurse to plug it in twice, taken the above photo and sent it to a friend, and vaguely stared at the screen some more that I noticed that there is a small glyph beside the number 7 which vaguely resembles a power point and has a green LED lit up behind it. It's less than 10% of the size of the large text and it's not on the screen - it looks much more like a button than like the screen! The only thing that clued me in that it was informational, after being perplexed about the UI for ages, was the fact there's another glyph directly above it that vaguely resembles a battery and has no LED behind it.
Aside from being hideously bad UI, it confused both the nurses who I alerted about the message - neither they nor I realised that the machine was in fact correctly plugged in because all three of us assumed that plugging in the machine should make the huge error message go away, when in fact it did not. Eventually it went away about 30 minutes after being plugged in - presumably when the battery charge level reached a high enough level.
Today I am feeling sorry for nurses who have to deal with so many different versions of machines and should not have to be technical whizzes!
PS
"Execrable" is very hard to spell.
Visual description: The front of IV pump, featuring a smallish colour LCD screen and more than 30 coloured areas which appear to be buttons. The button-coloured areas are not raised or marked in any tactile way but are coloured ovals featuring things like arrows pointing to areas at the edge of the screen, numbers 0-9, and some other generic functions like "clear" and "cancel".
The LCD screen has some fairly generic information like the hospital name, patient number, and the number of millilitres of fluid to be infused. The largest words on the screen, in bright blue reverse video, say "Low Battery <30 min. PLUG IN NOW" in capital letters.
It wasn't until I got the nurse to plug it in twice, taken the above photo and sent it to a friend, and vaguely stared at the screen some more that I noticed that there is a small glyph beside the number 7 which vaguely resembles a power point and has a green LED lit up behind it. It's less than 10% of the size of the large text and it's not on the screen - it looks much more like a button than like the screen! The only thing that clued me in that it was informational, after being perplexed about the UI for ages, was the fact there's another glyph directly above it that vaguely resembles a battery and has no LED behind it.
Aside from being hideously bad UI, it confused both the nurses who I alerted about the message - neither they nor I realised that the machine was in fact correctly plugged in because all three of us assumed that plugging in the machine should make the huge error message go away, when in fact it did not. Eventually it went away about 30 minutes after being plugged in - presumably when the battery charge level reached a high enough level.
Today I am feeling sorry for nurses who have to deal with so many different versions of machines and should not have to be technical whizzes!
PS
"Execrable" is very hard to spell.
