From the monthly archives:

November 2007

Facebook privacy issue may be a usability issue?

by Richard Pak

I am not on the Facebook wagon but I found the controversy over Facebook’s Beacon interesting. Users were inadvertently displaying their online purchases to their friends on Facebook. Facebook claims that users could opt-out of showing this information but many users said it was not obvious. Here are some before and after screenshots [from the NYT blog [...]

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Why Human Factors is more than providing safety equipment

by Anne McLaughlin

The new math and physics building is going up outside my window at North Carolina State. I see the workers out there each day, and as the building gets higher they are obviously required to don different safety gear.
The fuzzy picture below shows two workers on the top level (7th floor) and the green highlight is my outline of the [...]

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Team Training

by Anne McLaughlin

Enjoy this video of expert team performance. I note that the post-er says these Marines “cut a lot of corners.” I’d be very interested to know how this differs from what they “should” be doing and what is optimal.
This from comments on the video: “Chief, what are you doing?! That was one jacked up fire mission. Are you trying to [...]

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Legal Interpretations can be the Bane of Good Human Factors

by Anne McLaughlin

Verizon wireless interpreted an accessibility requirement to require they trigger a notification when the user dials 911. Verizon chose to do this audibly… exactly what you DON’T want when you’re calling the police during an emergency!
“The tone our customer experienced is our interpretation of Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act calling for a provider of telecommunications service to offer [...]

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More medical errors–Operating on the wrong side of the patient’s brain!

by Richard Pak

There sure seem to be lots of medical errors in the news lately. No mention of human factors:
The most recent case happened Friday when, according to the health department, the chief resident started brain surgery on the wrong side of an 82-year-old patient’s head. The patient was OK, the health department and hospital said.
In February, a different doctor [...]

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Patient record mistakes

by Richard Pak

LOS ANGELES – The recent chatter on a popular social networking site dealt with a problem often overlooked in medicine: mistakes in patients’ medical charts.The twist was the patients were doctors irked to discover gaffes in their own records and sloppy note-taking among their fellow physicians.
…
Errors can creep into medical charts in various ways. Doctors are often under time pressure [...]

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“From the Doctor’s Brain to the Patient’s Vein”

by Anne McLaughlin

It appears that HFB needs an entire section devoted to medical error. This is not surprising in light of the thousands of Americans who die from preventable errors each year.
The latest comes from Tanzenia where confusion about patient names earned brain surgery for a twisted knee, and knee surgery for a migraine sufferer.
Mr Didas who had been admitted for a [...]

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Eye-tracking in web design

by Richard Pak

Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your webpage.
[link]

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Warning compliance

by Richard Pak

[nytimes.com]
Authorities on the densely populated Indonesian island of Java concluded in mid-October that the threat was imminent enough to require sending troops to forcibly evacuate tens of thousands of villagers living on the mountain’s slopes, directly in the way of volcanic ash falls, mudslides and perhaps even lava flows …
… that didn’t come. The government said on Thursday that the [...]

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