Bad Software and Bad Health

Does bad software have an effect on the physical health of the people who have to use it? For example, it seems logical that using bad software would raise your blood pressure but is there any scientific evidence to back this up?

According to an article on life expectancy in The People's Daily the average life span of IT workers is about 3 years lower than the national average and the average lifespan of 'intellectuals' (knowledge workers, such as lawyers, engineers, and the like), at 54 years, is about 20 years less than the national average. The article speculates that this is caused by a bad lifestyle with all the extra cash they earn compared to the national average wage in China. Beijing spare ribs with extra MSG may be worse than we thought. In any case, there is increasing research linking stress, hypertension, and negative hormone changes (cortisol) with cancer and heart disease and if you spend your day getting frustrated with software it is probably contributing.

In the book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman discusses the usability of various products, including software. He explains that people experience much frustration when expected to use products that are poorly designed, especially those designed without the user in mind. In his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper expands on this and focusing on software. In the software industry the norm has been that software has been designed by programmers without users in mind and often at the level of quality that the programmers felt like delivering.

Many medical studies have found a connection between stress and hormones with cancer and heart disease. Of course, the same connection can be made between any unhappy or stressful working environment. However, software is dealing with bad software different than many other stressful environments for several reasons:

Usability problems can be fixed if the software developers just pay attention to their customers needs. Problems can cost money to fix but often less than supporting it. If the support is bad as well then...

A few software developers can make the lives of thousands of users miserable. Of course, the more miserable the software the fewer users there is likely to be. Also, users may be surprised at how many software developers it can take to develop a product or web site.

Many people who use software should have a choice. However, the story in the People's Daily comparing knowledge workers are do not necessarily make the right choices. A knowledge worker ought to have more choice than a farm worker (or a 'peasant' in People's Daily terminology) but they generally seem to be just as trapped in the work that they find themselves in. Why are we doing it? Let's not get into philosophy...

What about scientific evidence? Zhai, et al in a paper titled, User Stress Detection in Human-Computer Interactions measure user stress with Blood Volume Pulse, Galvanic Skin Response, and Pupil Diameter. Computers can stress people just like any other stressful situation. In fact, Alan Cooper points out in The Inmates are Running the Asylum that people relate to computers in a similar way to how they react to other people.

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