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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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)

My current frame of mind is most probably related to the distinct lack of cupcakes in my life. [Painting by Etsy seller, jennysbakeshop.]

Kangaroo mug available from sunny-style.com So far, my attempts to circumvent the Japaneseness of the checkout process have failed miserably, but I can’t even begin to tell you how much I want this. There must be a way!