Change Blindness Presentation: Paul Curzon Change Blindness: Milan Verma & Peter McOwan, Queen Mary University of London Design solutions: Harold Thimbleby / CHI+MED at Swansea University With support from Google, D of E and the Mayor of London In collaboration with CHI+MED A joint research project with Swansea, UCL and City Universities

Change Blindness In the following images something changes every time the picture flashes How quickly can you see it? The first is designed to be easy to see The second should be much harder

What’s happening here?

Just because it is on the screen …doesn’t mean the nurse will see it - even if he’s looking As a computer scientist you must design it so they do! Medical device design?

Based on a real case … A nurse intended to enter a dose of 5.5mg/hr She pressed the decimal point twice typing 5.. DEL 5 –The device deleted both decimal points. –The nurse didn’t notice! –55mg/hr was actually entered –The patient was given a x10 overdose & died. The nurse went to prison –its easy to blame the operator What should a device do if an invalid number is typed?

A simple improvement Why don’t calculators do that??? Think again… Is there a completely different way?

Digit keypad is fastest, but is there a safer way? 5-key keypad is safer –Fewer big mistakes made –Eyes on screen all the time –Not on the keys

Lessons People make mistakes –you have to design the system both to prevent it and to help people recover Understanding people matters! –To computational thinking problem solving –It’s important that both the algorithm and interaction design work well! Change Blindness by Milan Verma & Peter McOwan, Queen Mary University of London Design solutions by Harold Thimbleby and the Swansea CHI+MED team

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