Green Screen Terminals

I often think about green screen terminals, they were prolific in hospitals in the 90's. I have collected some thoughts I have about terminals with respect to clinicians and admin teams, which are what I describe as users:

Green Screen Terminals were fast.

Text and input boxes is all there was, it's kind of the same now, but with images and video added.

Green screens immersed the user in the task, there was no multi tasking, pop ups, slack, email, notifications.

Sometimes green screens were slow, but they buffered the users keystrokes, this meant the user could be quicker than the system.

A keyboard was the interface, it is quicker than a mouse, navigation and data entry were done using the same device.

Touch typing is one of the fastest things our brain can turn from thought to action.

Introducing the mouse and UI actually damaged the UX, the system slowed down the users, the system was quicker than the user, who has to deal with added gloss and complexity.

The new systems slowed the workforce down, the people building them weren't thinking about how people used the systems.

Engagement went down, users were no longer able to look at the patient, they were focussing on the system.

Their jobs had now changed, they became a system user rather than a person that primarily engaged with patients.

The system could now capture data about everything that happened within it, this became performance analytics.

The managers were happy, they could now monitor and performance manage people, everyone however got slower for the price of more visibility.

New technology did however give access to the worlds information, which if used correctly can be a good thing, such as looking up medical databases.

We don't want to go backwards, just rediscover some of the things we lost, such as immersing the user with the patient and giving them just enough technology to do their job.

Remove everything that is not necessary. Do not build things for delight or perceived value that does not exist.

Make clinicians jobs faster, you help more people if you do the hard work to make the system simple.