leonardo
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Subject:User interfaces and explicitness
Time:07:54 pm
This is the receipt containing the results of an exam to the eyes:



PD may be the interpupillary distance, and index may be the refraction index of the crystal or cornea or both. But most of the other numbers are a mystery for me. I think such kind of printed output is very bad, and dangerous too. Why don't they print more explicit data? Are such doctors hiding data from their patients? I think such data presentation is dangerous too because all people (doctors too) can't see in a moment what's abnormal in the results, so they too can miss something if they don't look carefully. Printing machines that print graphs and colours may cost too much, but I am sure there are many cheap ways to show the same data in a way that most intelligent people can start to read, and everyone can see if the examination has found something bad in the eyes.

An example of a danger coming from a similar situation is the small receipt printed by a simple electronic machine that measures the amount of draws (and the composition of exhaust/intake gas) of home boilers (in Italy there is a law that requires one of such tests every year). The simple results are printed on a small receipt, and

I have seen a model of such machines that prints the data in quite bad and obfuscated way, so it's not easy to see the most important thing: if the pipe that releases the exhaust gases is open enough to avoid dangers. To present such information you may need a single line of text with a word like DANGER CLOSED, or OKAY Open, or something the like. In some cases the technician has failed to see the bad numbers, and has given the okay to a boiler with closed exhaust pipe. This is just a simple example of a dangerously improper data visualisation.

Post scriptum: the exam receipt isn't relative to my eyes.
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leonardo
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