User interface, WTF

[Richard]

Blindfold all the sighted.

[Paul Sture]

Tim (the OP)later also posted this:

"During the 90 mins or so I was sat there waiting..."

What kind of queue are we talking about?

[Scott M]

We had a new car park built in town. OCR cameras grabbed your number plate on the way in, you parked and walked out. On the way back you stagger to the machine which asked you to enter the digits of your registration plate. It then presented a list of matching plates, you select yours and it asks for the relevant cash.

Six months in and they ripped it all out and replaced it with boggo ticket barriers on the way in as people couldn't use it.

I'm torn. On the one hand it's added complexity for no gain; but on the other (having watched people try and thump in whole reg plates, random letters, postcodes, etc) it shows that great chunks of the population are as thick as pigshit with little or no ability to process simple instructions. (And who ought to be fed through some sort of grater.)

[Bob Eager]

You have to tell us where this is...!

[polygonum]

The Oxford Eye Hospital has nicely coloured lines on the floor - for same purpose.

[Mark Bestley]

the Southern ones are also difficult to use as they often get out of alignment so that pressing on the letter does not work and you have to poffset where you press. Also it does not register a touch then after

10-15 seconds you get the letter multiple times.

[GMM]

Somehpw reminds me of the old snooker commentary: "For those of you watching in black and white, the pink is behind the blue"

[Bob Eager]

It asks for your gender. That's usually enough to identify you, it shows the details of your appointment. You confirm, and sit down.

[polygonum]

I have to use a car park like - but using company vehicles I always forget to check the number plate...

First time I used it, the OCR had failed to identify the vehicle I was driving - only had variations none of which was right.

Last time I used, the machines had broken between going in and coming back - notice said not to even try to pay.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

I think that they should have been presented in descending order, 31, 30,

29... That way anyone would surely realise that they offered day numbers rather than single digits.

[Dave Liquorice]

But wasn't that the first question?

So it's happy to accept an invalid date?

[meow2222]

5% of the population is retarded - 3 million in the uk. And we can all be dense when dealing with new things we havent given even 1 second of thought to.

NT

[Clive George]

I think ours is month then day, so it ought to be able to restrict the day choice appropriately. Maybe I'll try it next time :-)

(there's possibly first letter of surname too - can't remember. It all seemed very straightforward.)

[polygonum]

An obvious way of doing this would be to display people's names - would usually be easy enough to identify your own.

Of course, issues of privacy would obviously preclude this ever being done.

So why do they display full names on the LED display when you are called for your appointment? Or call your name across the waiting room? After all, those link your name to you as the person who stands up. The list would only identify that someone with your name has an appointment in that session.

[Calvin]

You can't (at least on the one in our surgery) because it asks for the day only. That combined with the other information, gender I think) is all it uses to make a stab at identifying you.

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 04 November 2013 21:43 Calvin wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Sounds likme the system in Pembury Hospital.

That has the option to just scan the barcode on the appt letter.

Except we throw that away after logging the time in Google Calendar!

[Dave Liquorice]

inclusive

well...

How big are the buttons? I find with my phone the bit of finger I think I'm touching the screen with isn't the bit of finger it thinks I am using. With nice big buttons, at least 1" square, that shouldn't be a problem.

Must be running under 'doze... I hate systems that:

Queue user input Don't acknowledge user input Lie about acknowledging user input Lie about their abilty to accept user input

[David in Normandy]

I find touchpads unuseable for the same reason. I had to hunt the internet to find a way to disable those on my last two laptops. Downloaded some Symantec touchpad software that allowed me to disable it. A mouse is much more practical than the touchpad - too many false positive clicks; plus they randomly throw the mouse pointer all over the screen while I'm typing.

[Paul Womar]

I'm not visually impaired so I'm mostly just guessing but maybe it's not that rediculous given the other options, i.e. I would think people that are impaired enough to find it difficult to read signs may generally have sight good enough to recognise much larger brightly coloured objects.

[Nightjar]

Ours simply asks for the first letter of your last name, then the month of your birth. As it only has to sort people from the sub-set of those with appointments that day, that is probably enough to identify more than 99% of patients and the others can be told to report to reception.

Colin Bignell