Drug dosing errors arising from incorrectly entered numbers account for a significant portion of the adverse drug events in hospitals. This study compared two different types of number entry system to see which resulted in fewer errors. While having their eye movements tracked study participants were asked to enter a number using either a numeric keypad (like those on calculators) or an incremental entry system which uses up and down arrows. With the numeric keypad, users must focus on the keypad itself (in order to find the next key to press) and may not notice errors on the display, whereas with the incremental interface, users tend to monitor the display resulting in higher error detection and consequently better entry accuracy. The incremental system produced significantly more accurate entries although entry took longer
Oladimeji, P., Thimbleby, H., COX, A. (2011). Number entry interfaces and their effects on error detection. INTERACT 2011: 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Author URL
