Shitty Software Kills People
I just spent 6 hours volunteering as an usher at a pharmacy doing about 1k vaccinations in a day. The number of people over 60 who didn&#x27;t understand the difference between a text message and an email was around 30% (out of a sample size of 600 during my shift).<p>About 10% of the people who showed didn&#x27;t have smartphones or text, 4 people did everything only with phone calls. I wonder how many people who only did phone calls were NOT able to get vaccine slots?<p>Working with my aging mother, modern UIs are very complicated. Ever changing gestures, hidden menus, differences between machines, passwords, multi-accounts, etc. Heck my mom can&#x27;t figure out the volume buttons on her iphone so she holds face time to her ear to hear. Heck even the default apps are hard on her. iMessage keeps getting moved to the home page and SMS to the 2nd page. So she sees the blue bubble and uses that to message us, even tho we are sending SMS. She needs to use the green bubble from the second page.<p>This is not to mention how bad all of these apps or websites are and the loss of a person to call to get clarification for anything not written on a website.<p>95% of my time yesterday was spent just answering nuances to  the basic questions. For instance we were giving Moderna to the first dose people. Every time I announced that to the line, half of the 2nd dose people panicked and said &quot;I need Pfizer&quot;.<p>For me as a programmer, keeping it all in my head was easy, it&#x27;s just a 8 branch 3 level deep if&#x2F;else statement.<p>For aging people with phones the information became inaccessible.<p>Those with paper printouts of everything were able to just breeze through and paper doesn&#x27;t reboot, loose battery, or forget, and you can easily hand paper to other people.<p>The rate of vaccinations actually crushed the brand new system in place (which was there because the old system melted at 300 people a day). So paper was great. They just did all the data in put at the end of the day.<p>I&#x27;m actually quite worried with our current hodgepodge of low quality software we&#x27;re greatly isolating older people, or people who are not using tech heavily every day.<p>And this is not just for crappy government software. I saw as many people unable to use their iphone and android basic software. With my mom, netflix, why does it even have a password she has to remember? Device authorization between her roku and a laptop is confounding, they&#x27;re 2 totally different devices. It&#x27;s basically impossible.