I have been organising a paper conference for the last few years so naturally I get interested in paper at work. We have a bias towards eliminating paper as much as possible both in population facing interactions (invitation or reminder letters) and clinical contexts (for clinicians or admin staff using software). The latter is the one that interests me most as I think people use paper for lots of complex reasons.
As an example, my favourite (and older) GP has a booklet she writes to-dos in for each one of her patients, using a unique number (not my NHS number I don’t think). I’m pretty sure the user interface she uses has ‘reminders’ and ‘notes’ somewhere but she’s choosing to write things down instead. This isn’t simply because she needs a list.
After someone recommended one of his papers, I met with Sam Gilbert, a Senior Research Fellow at UCL. Sam has been concentrating on cognitive offloading, multitasking and metacognition. I think his work overlaps with some of what we’re doing in Screening as we start to build new user interfaces for clinicians and admin staff. How they use an interface will have an impact on what they decide to offload (and the cybersecurity risks that come with it).
If we don’t have a detailed understanding of what and how people offload using paper, we might miss a trick. Not to force them to stop taking notes, but to acknowledge they need to in order to manage an aggressive and ever changing workload. We might end up categorising different kinds of users, not only by what they do on a screen, but also what they do off the screen. I think it could be very exciting.
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