100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

86. People Make Errors When they are Under Stress

On a trip not too long ago I found myself in a hotel room outside Chicago with my 19-year old daughter moaning in pain. She’d been sick for a week, each day with a new symptom, but that morning everything got worse—her eardrum felt like it was going to burst. Should I cancel my client meeting and take her to an urgent care clinic? Because I was traveling, I was “out of network,” so I first had to call my insurance provider to find out if there were “in network” doctors we could go to and still be covered by our plan. The customer service representative told me to go to a particular Web site, and said that any doctor we picked through that site would be considered “in network.”

Using a Web Site ...