Heparin: Bad Product Design is a Public Threat

I keep saying this for years and some people think I’m exaggerating: “Bad information and product design can main and even kill.”

Here is an amazing recent example of how badly-designed products can cause needless injuries and pain, as it happened to movie star Dennis Quaid and his wife who almost lost their newborn baby when an abnormally high dose of Heparin (a blood coagulant) was given to the poor infant.

I’m not referring to the claim that Chinese-made Heparin bottles contain contaminants.

I’m referring to the lunatic label design that, in the hectic conditions of an emergency ward, makes applying 10,000 units of Heparin instead of just 10 a very simple mistake to commit.

Just look at these bottles…

The one on the right is 10 units and the one on the left is 10,000 units!

Same size bottle. With almost same shade of blue label! Perfectly designed to commit a 1,000-fold error...

Is it a wonder that many nurses ended up injecting the wrong doze and thus inadvertently endangering lives?

Who can blame them when a critical product has this kind of totally unacceptable label design? I don’t.

To its credit, the company that manufactures Heparin has changed the packaging of these two different dozes. I understand now one of the bottles has a bright RED label. Duh!

Whoever designed these unbelievably-close blue labels should be fired and never allowed to design anything again. Period.

On Radio, Have a Domain Name that People Can Remember

I always have my radio on when I drive.

Here is a law office commercial I heard today, followed by the instruction to visit their web site:

"Visit us today at Kimmel, Wellerstein, Zimmertwolds..." etc etc, one of those long typical law-partnership names (I made up this particular one).

And then comes the kicker -- the anchor actually starts to SPELL OUT each and every letter in the DOMAIN NAME!!!

"... that's, double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, K, I, M, M, E, L, W, E, L, L, E, R, S,..." on and on and on...

Good Lord! What do some people think when they put together these incredible commercials? That we have an IQ of 300?!

Who can remember such a loooooong string of letters? What a waste of money.

My advice: get a domain name that people can actually remember when they hear it for the first time. Then forward it to your existing site.

Surely www.lawyer.com is taken. But what about "www.yourlitigationexpertsinnebraska.com" or something like that?

Some of those domain names I'm sure are also taken but you can find one that's available and also easier to remember than that dreadful "double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, K, I, M, M, E, L, W, E, L, L, E, R, S, ..." disaster.

Use your common sense and ask yourself if you could've remembered your domain name if you were driving in your car and heard it on the car radio?

If you can't, perhaps it's time you select another easy-to-remember domain name for yourself and FORWARD it to you existing domain. That way you don't need a new web site either.

Perfect Copy Fuses Function with Benefit

Perfect copy that I saw today on the side of a mobile document-shredding truck:

"Cut identity theft!"

The verb CUT here is both function and benefit.

Function: this truck physically cuts (shreds) documents that carry information about your business secrets or identity.

Benefit: it therefore cuts (diminishes) the possibility of a stranger reading your documents and stealing your identity.

My score: 10 out of 10!

How to Generate Whitelisting Instructions?

There are zillions of mail servers out there.

If you are an email publication publisher, you have no idea who is using AOL, who is using EarthLink, or MSN, etc.

How can you make sure that your mailing won't be chucked away as worthless spam?

Here is a solution:

This web site can generate whitelisting instructions for an amazing variety of mail servers.

Just fill in the blanks and click the button and BINGO! It generates an HTML copy that you can post to your page and then direct your recipients to check it out to see what they can do to whitelist your emails, regardless of what mail server they use.

Neat huh?