The impact of design: How design influences outcomes
summary
Design decisions can kill: a call-routing system from Intrado uses a hardcoded identification counter that rejects new calls once it hits 40 million, causing nationwide 9‑1‑1 busy signals and at least one preventable death, so the built system fails under a realistic scale it never imagined. Everyday UX choices like alarm sounds that confuse evacuate now vs prepare to leave show how error messages, thresholds and edge‑case handling actually determine whether a system works.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 0:59Primum non nocere
- 2:17Emergency procedures
- 3:01911, what's your emergency?
- 4:29It's easy to cast blame.
- 4:49A failure of imagination
- 5:49Design for all scenarios
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