The types of errors we make can be instructive – particularly if we want to design better systems to protect us against their effects (see When technology design provokes errors). Dr Dom Furniss from CHI+MED and colleagues at the UCL Interaction Centre are encouraging people to share their errors, via Twitter, using the hashtag #errordiary – the tweets are collected together at the dedicated Errordiary website.
Errordiary is designed to raise the level of debate around human error internationally. Too often human error is cited as a cause for an accident and someone is used as a scapegoat to appease the people who have suffered and to show that action has been taken. Sometimes the system or design needs to change rather than the people. With Errordiary we see the same psychological principles behind funny everyday errors and errors that lead to harm and fatalities. Errordiary examples and screenshots can be used encourage debate: e.g. on whether errors are ‘normal’; on how we can best learn from errors as individuals, organisations and society; and on what contributes to an error.
About Errordiary – How it works
If you’re not on Twitter you can still join in by commenting on individual tweets (perhaps you’ve done something similar yourself) or by starring your favourites.Here are a couple of recent examples from @sjjgo
See and comment on this tweet at Errordiary | See the original tweet
The following examples show how a similar type of error can lead to an extremely serious situation (where a police officer used live ammunition instead of blanks to fire a series of ‘warning’ shots, injuring a suspect)…
From @FaintSignals: “Police ammo mix-up ‘terrible mistake,’ chief says http://www.kptv.com/story/15014464/police-ammo-mix-up-terrible-mistake-chief-… #errordiary“
See and comment on this tweet at Errordiary
…or a more comical one (mistaking juice for milk and ruining a bowl of breakfast cereal).
“Orange/milk Mix-up” from Flickr user DomFurniss
Apart from giving everyone a good laugh, the collection at Errordiary is already being used in a teaching setting, particularly with students on the Masters course at UCL in Human Computer Interaction with Ergonomics. A wider goal is to encourage everyone to think of errors as ‘normal’ rather than ‘abnormal’ and that they need to be taken into account when designing a new system. #errordiary lets people share their (usually quite amusing) daily mistakes, highlighting that no-one is immune to an occasional ‘oops’.
“The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.”
Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle: a cubicle’s-eye view of bosses, meetings, management fads & other workplace afflictions (2000) p3.
“I think this story pretty much tells itself #oops” from Flickr user wil.linssen
- [VIDEO] Human Error, Resilient Strategies and Device Design – CHI+MED scientist Dr Jonathan Back talking about errors and how to prevent them.
- Resilient Medical Systems – CHI+MED’s research into the ways in which people and systems can be protected against errors, including selected publications.