Thread by @DrGetafix

A 🧵on #Covid, lollipops & design.

This is a lollipop. Lots of people got one for getting their #CovidVaccine. Everyone knows what they are and how to use them, even (or especially!) kids. Give them one and they know which end goes in their mouth.

This is also called a "lollipop"...

...and you can kind of see why as it bears a physical resemblance to an actual lollipop.

BUT, as I'm sure you can tell, it is in fact NOT a lollipop, but rather one of the many varieties of Covid Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) aka Lateral Flow Tests (LFT) currently available around the world.

But despite both being called lollipops, there is one key difference between them, namely which end goes in your mouth!

Many of you are probably thinking:

"So what? It's obvious which end goes in your mouth!"

But is it? When I first saw the picture on the packet and the word "lollipop" I thought you'd use it like...well...a lollipop. Big end goes in your mouth and you hold the small end.

It seemed a bit weird but I figured it was just a different way of collecting a sample as opposed to the nasal swabs in other RAT kits I'd used. The instructions were hard to read with my dodgy eyes, so I took a photo so I could read them. Fortunately I did!

Mind you, they weren't all that clear either, and they continued to use the broken metaphor of a lollipop.

But again you may ask "Is this really a problem? People will realise when they read the intstructions."

There's a few problems with that logic.

Leaving aside the fact that humans are notorious for not bothering to read the instructions, when we do, we tend to see what we expect to see, so we may not realise it's the stick and not the lolly that goes in the mouth.

Also these RATs are being rolled out across the world to people of varying language, cultural & educational backgrounds, not to mention visual acuities & cognitive capacities so we need to make them as intuitive as possible, esp. given they are a key part of our covid response.

And finally there is a precedent for broken metaphors in medical devices contributing to use errors. The classic example being the Epi-Pen which isn't used like a pen at all & may have been a factor in people injecting themselves & not the patient! joyclee.medium.com/the-role-of-me…

Now a "lollipop" that doesn't work like a lollipop might seem like a small thing, but it's a symptom of the much bigger problem that bad design is rife in healthcare and is a significant, but under appreciated, contributor to patient harm and system inefficiency.

So, remember that design is more than making something "work" or look pretty, it's about making it easy to do the right thing, which includes giving it a name that makes sense! Very often, in the words of @romanmars, good design will often be 99% invisible & go unnoticed. Fin