ed-informatics.org

A good principle for medical software is to design for the ED as a worst-case scenario. If it works there, it will work anywhere.No clinicians are as time-pressured as those in a busy Emergency Department. There, distractions – even seemingly minor ones like presenting a complete CBC instead of an abstract – slow the clinician […]

In past articles, we discussed human-illiterate computers, usability, memorability, learnability, Tognazzini’s Paradox, design integrity, simplicity, abstraction, discount usability testing, and personas. Now, we will discuss goals and tasks. These are similar terms, and sometimes used almost interchangeably. But using the terms task and goal sloppily is, according to expert software designers, an error that leads […]

In past articles, we discussed human-illiterate computers, and we discussed usability, memorability, learnability and Tognazzini’s Paradox: how  changing a single word can make big differences in usability. We also discussed design integrity, simplicity, abstraction, and discount usability testing. Now, we’ll talk about personas. It seems to me that personas are a bit like Critical Incident […]

Redundancy vs. diversity Redundancy with a stock of identical parts to replace failed components is a standard way to make industrial processes more reliable. For an ED mission-critical computer system, which needs to be up and running 24/7/365, one way to implement this is to have a backup server always ready to go, with recent […]