Design

Medical differentiation

In Design, Rants on 4 February 2010 with Comments Off

At Christ­mas, Al’s Grandma brought two boxes of Ibupro­fen with her — 200mg and 400mg. The ques­tion was, which was which? Al’s Grandma is eld­erly, often con­fused and has prob­lems with her vis­ion. Given that she was nurs­ing a broken thumb at the time, adequate pain relief was neces­sary, so we explained which was which and how many of each to take, set­tling the mat­ter. But it niggled at me that the mat­ter wasn’t even slightly settled — as soon as she got home, she’d be straight back to square one: one of these dosages is higher than the other, and I don’t know which.

So this art­icle from Futur­ity, “Cau­tion, may cause con­fu­sion and mis­use” has me think­ing about why med­ic­a­tion dir­ec­tions, both pre­scrip­tion and over-the-counter, are so dif­fi­cult to follow.

“Half of adults mis­un­der­stand com­mon stand­ard drug warn­ings on pre­scrip­tion labels, put­ting them at risk for using the medi­cine incor­rectly or even hav­ing a life-threatening event.”

The inform­a­tion on med­ic­a­tion is overly com­plex and often dif­fi­cult to fol­low. Instruc­tions are mis­lead­ing, abstract and word­ing used just because it always has been, even when there is no evid­ence of its effectiveness:

“A lot of the cur­rent warn­ings were phrased very abstractly and were con­fus­ing. For example, we changed ‘For external use only’ to ‘Use only on your skin.’ We moved from the intan­gible to the concise.”

A sim­ilar pro­ject was under­taken by a graphic designer for Tar­get in the US in 2005, com­plete with identi­fy­ing col­our labeling for fam­ily mem­bers. As far as I’m aware, noth­ing sim­ilar has made it over to UK phar­ma­cies yet.

The photo to the right is the label from some nose drops when I had a sinus infec­tion (let’s skip over who pre­scribes med­ic­a­tion that needs you to hang upside down four times a day to someone with a bad sinus infec­tion). One drop to be “instilled” four times a day for “esven” days, later con­tra­dicted with mildly ter­ri­fy­ing warn­ing “not to be taken”. The instruc­tion is in small, blurry, badly prin­ted text, with the name of the phar­macy as, or more, prom­in­ent than any of the directions.

I take a lot of med­ic­a­tions, and there is noth­ing con­sist­ent about them. While they all come in boxes (apart from the odd ear/nose drop) almost all are gen­er­ics, so there’s often very little pack­aging dif­fer­ence between one and the other — it’s brand­ing for the gen­er­ics com­pany, not the med­ic­a­tion, so get two from the same com­pany and con­fu­sion ensues. If I hap­pen to go to a dif­fer­ent phar­macy to pick up my pre­scrip­tion, then I’ll more than likely get a dif­fer­ent brand of gen­er­ics from them than my usual phar­macy, with a dif­fer­ent box and dif­fer­ent brand­ing. As for the actual pills, they can vary so much between brands that there is no real point in try­ing to identify them by shape, size or colour.

I’m lucky. I can read without prob­lems, and I have no prob­lem remem­ber­ing what the GP has told me about my med­ic­a­tion (or ask­ing them to repeat it until I have no prob­lem remem­ber­ing). I can pull out a load of pill boxes, men­tally sort them, and remem­ber which ones to take when — when I remem­ber to take them at all, that is. I’m bolshy enough that if a medi­cine isn’t work­ing as it should I’ll go back to the doc­tor and whine until they change it. But what if I couldn’t read well? What if I couldn’t remem­ber? What if I’d had a stroke and couldn’t com­pre­hend writ­ten lan­guage well but lived alone? What if I for­got why I was tak­ing any med­ic­a­tion in the first place, let alone what it was or how many to take? What if I was too embar­rassed to ask for help? What if I didn’t know where to go for help? At least one, if not all, of these things will hap­pen to me in the course of my life. You too.

So why is labeling so bad here in the UK? Why is there so much vari­ation, odd Eng­lish and so little help? What would help? If I could, I’d go back to Christ­mas and make some large colour-coded stick­ers to label the ibupro­fen with. Even if she struggled to read the digit some days, Al’s Grandma would soon learn to asso­ci­ate the pink with the pills she takes two of. Why can’t she walk into a phar­macy and say, “I’m not sure how many of these to take as a stand­ard dose” and have them sticker the packs for her?  Why can’t she get large-print, colour-coded labels on her pills, and why can’t the doc­tor print out a timetable for her detail­ing which of her pre­scrip­tions to take when?* I can Pho­toshop up a giant pink 2 icon in less than a minute (and poten­tially print it out and stick it on a box. I’m a grafter, me.), but ima­gine what could be done for labeling with a bit of research, some user test­ing and, most import­antly, some consistency?

*When think­ing about this, I planned a web­site which luck­ily already exists: MyMed­Sched­ule. It is US-based, so most UK drugs will have to be labor­i­ously typed in, but I can’t find a UK equivalent.

Mighty Morphin’ Power Links

In Design, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos, Websites on 11 November 2009 with Comments Off

Because I have a couple of half-written lengthy draft entries that I don’t have the energy to fin­ish before I col­lapse into bed for the night, I’ll share some (admit­tedly work-based) links with you instead.

Typekit
Typekit can be sum­mar­ised as font replace­ment through javas­cript, which in turn can be sum­mar­ised as “magic hap­pens”. I’ve not played around with this as much as I’d hoped, but if you read this on the site (as opposed to the RSS feed), you’ll notice I’m using it for entry titles (and all other h3 ele­ments, too). Dis­turb­ingly easy to imple­ment, this is some­thing I’d genu­inely pay for if the choice of fonts improves.

Brizzly
Man­aging more than one Twit­ter account? Brizzly is the best solu­tion I’ve found, mak­ing it suit­ably dif­fi­cult to announce your per­sonal secrets to your work account. Now includes Face­book integ­ra­tion and has seem­ingly man­aged to get over a bizarre bug where it finds search res­ults over and over and over again, announ­cing them as new every time. This wouldn’t be so annoy­ing had I not pos­ted the tweets that triggered the search find­ing in the first place… (Still invite only, I think. Leave a com­ment or send a mes­sage to @whoopdedoo on Twit­ter if you want one).

Mobile web­site devel­op­ment
Without giv­ing any­thing what­so­ever away about what I’m cur­rently look­ing into for work purposes:

• Smash­ing Magazine on Mobile Web Design Trends. Des­pite my own pre­ju­dices,  Smash­ing Magazine do actu­ally pro­duce con­sist­ently use­ful art­icles, all of which must include the word “trends”.
• Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design Book.
• Jakob Niel­son: Mobile Web Usability

How to Under­stand Your Users with Per­so­nas
PONIES!

Image inspiration

In Design, Websites on 25 September 2009 with Comments Off

Like most people who have to be cre­at­ive for a liv­ing, I go through troughs and peaks of inspir­a­tion. And some­times the troughs are big­ger than the peaks, with my most recent trough last­ing, well, all summer.

One of the ways I store images and ideas that feed the idea machine, though, is on a big folder on my hard drive, not an ideal solu­tion since I’m not always sit­ting at my desk when I need to be inspired, so I was quite excited to find ImageS­park. Free (for now), ImageS­park allows you to upload and share the inspir­ing images found online and, import­antly, give some credit where it’s due. Fun even for those who don’t have to fil­ter everything they see in life into Pho­toshop, I just love to watch the some­what whim­sical trends and pat­terns that emerge in what I like. Today, poster design. Cur­rently, col­our. Always, birds.

The 50 Dollar Logo Experiment

In Design, Odd, Websites on 20 February 2009 tagged Design, links, logo with 1 comment

The 50 Dol­lar Logo Experiment

I turned to the clev­erly named 50DollarLogo.com, a site based in Sri Lanka or some­where prom­ising six logo designs, unlim­ited revi­sions, and a 1–3 day turn­around. Who needs messy things like research, insight, or even a modicum of inform­a­tion about my busi­ness, when I can have unlim­ited revi­sions?

This feels a lot like my life at the moment, only I am the one try­ing to make a decent logo out of cheese and Naz­areth and the people I work for want some­thing with more anthropomorphism.

Bed Head After-Party

In Design, Odd, Things on 28 January 2009 tagged Design, hair, packaging with Comments Off

I have a pack­aging thing. I love pack­aging design. This comes in espe­cially handy to pass time when doing some­thing I really don’t love, like hav­ing my hair cut. All that sit­ting still and not fid­get­ing and mak­ing small talk about Christ­mas (come on, people, it was a month ago. Try harder.) and hav­ing to sit in front of a mir­ror for an age when, for the most part, I’m vam­piric about mirrors.

A big chunk of hairdresser income comes from selling over­priced hair product, and over­priced hair product gen­er­ally has bril­liant pack­aging in order to make people like me buy some over­priced hair product they won’t use but will gaze at lov­ingly.  Depend­ing on the tar­get mar­ket,  pack­aging ranges from classy to fun to, err… this:

… oh come on, it’s not just me, is it? Is it?

Email Standards Project

In Design, Websites on 11 November 2008 tagged Design, email, standards, webdesign, Websites with Comments Off

The Email Stand­ards Pro­ject works with email cli­ent developers and the design com­munity to improve web stand­ards sup­port and access­ib­il­ity in email.

Our goal is to help design­ers under­stand why web stand­ards are so import­ant for email, while work­ing with email cli­ent developers to ensure that emails render con­sist­ently. This is a com­munity effort to improve the email exper­i­ence for both design­ers and read­ers alike.

As someone who churns out spam opt-in email news­let­ters as part of their job, I can assure you that this is way over­due. (via swiss­miss)