Comment by beckler
7 years ago
I used to work for a company that made EHR software. Doctors have very little patience for computer issues; most don't enjoy using them. My job at the time would involve me talking to most IT folks at hospitals, and they would have some crazy stories.
My favorite was how this one doctor would call IT almost daily. He would complain that his computer was slow, so this IT guy would walk up to his office and do something random. Like unplug his Ethernet cord or mouse and plug it back in, or turn his screen off and back on. The doctor would evaluate if it was better, and always said "thanks, that fixed it".
> Doctors have very little patience for computer issues; most don't enjoy using them.
I would say that this is true of people in general. Sadly, a lot of the people working in this industry seem to be completely ok with, if not outright love the bullshit computers put us through. Just look around man, everything is ridiculously slow and unresponsive considering the hardware behind it, there are so many hoops we have to jump through for no good reason, software seems to be just as (if not more) fragile as ever, it's awful.
So true. This year, finally, my kids local school system deployed an online replacement for the ~20 paper forms they require at the start of each school year. I have always loathed filling out those forms, especially since there was no checkbox to the effect of "everything is the same as last year"
If anything, the online version is worse. They essentially preserved the same layout and organization of the paper, just converted to online forms. There is duplicate entry everywhere. I entered my address on at least three different forms, my phone number on four or five. And everything had to be repeated from scratch for each kid. And it was all presented in a weird iframe container that didn't quite fit the content, so you had to scroll around to see different areas of the page. If a phone had been my only way to access these, it would have been even worse.
It was so much like what would have been done in 1995, I could not believe they found this in any way acceptable in 2018.
"everything is the same as last year"
Offtopic: That reminds me of a change I submitted for an in-house time tracker which was for a button that did "Same as last week but with some plausible minor random differences".
I was deeply disappointed that this was rejected.
So much awful software and UX is made by taking a paper based process and directly recreating it as a digital process without re-evaluating the process itself.
Until recently (I just checked and noticed it was gone), the web version of Slack had a several-second scroll delay if you had loaded a few pages of history. The power in our machines, yet we still have trouble scrolling text.
Your comment reminds me of this one, which made the rounds on HN a while back: “24-core CPU and I cant use my mouse”
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...
Similar to the feeling of typing with no characters on the screen. Is my cursor in the wrong spot? Nope just lag
We also tend to have the latest technology, or else we choose models we have a particular affinity for. Try working on a random laptop that’s several years old and a 3-year old phone. Your experience will be completely different.
I occasionally work with a laptop that still runs Windows XP (because it also still has a serial port, you see) and it always shocks me a little how responsive it is compared to everything else I work with day to day.
That's how I'm oftentimes serviced when visiting the doctor.
The doctor probably also thought: OMG another one of these clueless bastards who think I'm stupid and don't know how to fix the simplest problem. I'll try again tomorrow. Let's hope they'll send me somebody else.
IT users vs IT support is an interesting line of conflict full of mutual misunderstandings and wrong attributions.
Your story makes it sound like he was dumb. He was probably being polite.
He was given a placebo and reported an improvement. I can live with that explanation.
He called IT with the same complaint multiple times a week.
The IT team realized that they just had to do something to make him happy when in reality they did nothing at all.
Like being given antibiotics for a viral infection.
>> Doctors have very little patience for computer issues; most don't enjoy using them.
It isn't just doctors. And it isn't just computers. Whenever an employee is forced to use a particular system, they will grow to hate that system. When there is only one cafeteria, the food is "horrible". When there is only one ferry, it is always late. When you have to use a particular set of software tools, they are always too slow. It is basic psychology: give people even a modicum of choice and they will feel better about the system. Deny that choice and all you will get is criticism.