- About Donald A. Norman and a mysterious error message on our stove the other evening;
- About a mysterious message on our TV, another problem solved by Google;
- About a hospital visit that didn’t go well.
I’ve long read books by Donald A. Norman, who writes about the interaction of technology and people who use it. Engineers tend to design things in ways that seem efficient to them, but that are not always intuitively useful to many people. An example I remember is about the door handles in public buildings. A horizontal handle seems to invite pushing. A vertical handle seems to invite pulling. But it’s astonishing how many handles in public building don’t work this way; usually they use vertical handles both for pushing and pulling, and as you approach a door with a vertical handle, you’re not always sure what to do.
Another example is how the burners on a stove, and the knobs that control them, are usually not laid out in analogous patterns, which would make the relationship between each knob and its burner intuitive. Instead we usually get four burners in a square, and a row of knobs at the base. So which knob, left or right, operates the front or back burner? Presumably you learn this as you learn to use your stove, but in fact I have trouble to this day remembering which knob is which, front or back. In my case, the knobs are in two pairs, left and right, and the *outside* knob in each pair controls the front burner…
Put the burner knobs in a square that matches the positions of the actual burners, Norman advised.
Norman also had insights into the designs of automobiles, especially those from the 1950s. Those big bullets on the front bumpers of some of them? The headlights? The grill? The hood ornament? Easily mapped to features of the human face, and body. That’s why those designs were popular. They had subtle, or not so subtle, appeals to the human instinct to identify and recognize human faces.
His most famous book is probably The Design of Everyday Things, though I just now that he has a new book, this past March, at the age of 87. And I see his byline now is just Don Norman.
So on Tuesday, making one of our favorite recipes (Skillet Chicken With Tomatoes, Pancetta and Mozzarella), I got to the point of turning on the oven, and could not do it. I was trying to preheat the oven. Here’s a photo of the stove/oven controls:
Every time I hit any of those buttons in the middle, the display said “LOC ON”. What does that mean?? What happened to disable the stove? Unhelpfully, a little note at the bottom of the control panel, as seen in the pic, says “LOCK / UNLOCK HOLD 3 SECONDS”. Hold *what* for 3 seconds? Can you guess? Look at the image closely.
No doubt I have a user manual for the stove somewhere; the house came with manuals for every appliance and device in it. But these days I’ve discovered you can Google almost anything and get an answer. So I Googled that exact phrase. It’s peculiar to GE stoves. The answer didn’t explain why the problem occurred, but it did explain what to do: press the 9 and the 0 buttons — the two buttons right above that note on the control panel — for three seconds to clear the problem. It worked. Did the engineers think their instruction was obvious? Perhaps they did.
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Then the next morning our TV was acting up, switching off and on for a second every ten seconds or so, and displaying a message in the corner, something like “This app will now restart to free up more memory” with an HDMI icon in the center of the screen. Googled the phrase again, and got a solution, if not an explanation for why something was going wrong. Unplug TV, hold on/off button 10 seconds, turn TV back on. Then it was fine.
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This is the CMPC hospital in San Francisco, where I had my heart transplant. More photos here.
I’ve had remarkably good luck with the treatment and follow up of my heart attack, just over two years ago now, at the Sutter facility called CMPC in central San Francisco, on Van Ness, a few blocks north of City Hall and the concert halls and museums near it.
Two years out, I’m nearing the end of the regular checkups every two, or three, or four months, such as electrocardiograms, catheter heart biopsies, and a heart catheterization to detect pressures on the sides of the heart. I did the last of those two weeks ago, right about my transplant anniversary of May 26th. One of the nurses, or assistants, mentioned in passing that the hospital is only about five years old, stands on the site of a former grand hotel, and is one of the most modern hospitals in the nation, costing a billion dollars or somesuch. I had not realized that, but it’s nice to know that I’ve had care at one of the best hospitals in the nation, presumably.
And yet things do not always go well. The day of that procedure was unusually inefficient. (Especially compared to earlier visits where a catheter technician talked about running a “tight ship” in terms of getting patients through their procedures on time.)
The instructions were to arrive two hours ahead of the procedure. We did, 10am for the noon procedure. We sat for an hour before I was called in. This procedure involves taking off all clothes, putting on the gown, installing an IV, and so on. That happened in about 20 minutes. Then I lay in the pre-op room over another hour before the operating team took me in for the procedure. And then, given that the procedure involved partial anesthetic, I had to rest two hours afterward before I could go home. At least two wasted hours there, not counting the rest.
Yesterday was even worse. After some back and forth about the results of my AlloMap blood test, the transplant team decided to conduct another catheter heart biopsy after all. This is where they inject a catheter into your right neck (the worst part is the anesthetic they stick into your neck, Lidocaine I think, like they use in dentistry, that stings mightily for ten seconds or so), then guide a tube down through your vein to your heart and snip out (somehow you can hear the snips) two or three tiny biopsy samples.
The problem Wednesday was that we showed up on time, at 1.45pm for a 2pm procedure, checked in, and then sat and waited, and waited. The status board said my procedure was “in preparation.” At 2:30, I inquired at the check-in desk, but the nice ladies there don’t really know anything. After some time, by overhearing other people in the waiting room, I gathered that there had been an emergency earlier in the day, a Code Blue, someone had had a cardiac arrest in the catheter lab, and so the doctors and nurses abandoned their regular appointments to treat this person, for as long as it took, suspending all scheduled appointments. Unfortunately, no one called or told us that in person. We sat there for two hours, until 4pm, and with no clue as to when schedule appointments might be seen. So we gave up and drove home.
Obviously emergencies happen, probably not very often. But for a modern, world-class, hospital, I think they could have dealt with their scheduled patients better than they did.
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And I’ll wait to write about our obnoxious plumber another time.
