Trivia from a quiz show

[mbarker]

On one of the Japanese quiz shows recently, one of the questions concerned packaging for medicine. At one time, the blister packs that most medicine comes in were pre-scored so that you could easily tear it into single pill chunks. However, nowadays, the blister packs are scored so that you can only tear off chunks containing two or three pills. Why did the manufacturers change the packaging?

The answer, according to the show, was that too many people were being told to take one pill, and tearing off one chunk, simply swallowed it -- paper, foil, plastic, and all. The show mentioned one hospital having to treat something like 600 cases of people swallowing the packaging in a year. So the manufacturers switched to two or three pills in a chunk -- and now people figure out how to push the little pills out of the packaging.

I would think the discomfort and bad taste would help you realize that you're doing something wrong? Although I guess medicine isn't supposed to taste good, particularly.

I wonder if I can include this in a class as a problem in user interface design? :-)

Comments

[dialyn.livejournal.com]

As hard as we try, I don't think we can protect people from being stupid. I'm sure there were lawsuits by idiots who swallowed the packaging, and they probably were settled out of court for millions of dollars, which is even more depressing. Stupidity rewarded. It's the name of the game.