you have to remember, the world is imperfect
There’s a story about designers building medical software. The software would beep and alert doctors whenever vital signs were critical. An important function, and one that would save lives. But critical isn’t the only thing to worry about, so the designers would warn when the signs were just generally low, and going even further, they added warnings for when the readings were outside of normal, at all.
In a perfect world, this would have saved even more lives, but of course, doctors are human, and they started ignoring the warnings subconsciously. Even when a sign was critical, the doctors wouldn’t check, assuming it was just another random message about nothing.
I love this story, because it sort of unifies the following related thoughts:
- that's the way the world is, not the way it should be (the designers built their system off of “what should be”)
- communication is a two way street (when the doctors ignored warnings, the designers blamed the doctors, instead of taking their own culpability)
- correctness isn't the end (yes the designers were “right”, but should have continued questioning)
