Error from @annblandford

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Went to County Hall instead of City Hall. Misdirected by event info. Great 40 min walk… #errordiary http://t.co/EuRjkMEeKF

Comments:

  1. More from @annblandford: I was an hour late for a meeting this evening because I went to County Hall when I should have gone to City Hall. I just reconstructed how this happened. Looking at the map on the eventbrite page (see link to pic above) the ‘target’ blob is right by County Hall. I can only assume that I was the only person who actually used this map to get to the meeting as other attendees went to City Hall.
    Which leaves me with three questions:
    1. What information did everyone else use to get to City Hall? Did everyone else know where it is without a map?
    2. What did the person who set up the eventbrite page do to generate the wrong map? (The answer seems to be that the error is with Google, because very slight changes in the Google Maps query changes where it points to. I won’t bore you with the details.)
    3. Why did no-one spot and debug the error before the event?
    I think this is an interesting error because it’s clearly an interaction between an initial user error, a programming/system error, and another user error. Though whether any of these should actually be called an error is a further topic of discussion.
  2. It’s interesting that the address is the correct address below the pic, i.e. City Hall, but the map points closer to County Hall. This suggests to me that it wasn’t an initial user error.

    So did you look at the incorrect map, skim read the address very quickly and primed by the map understood it to be County Hall rather than City Hall.

    If the above if correct I think I would be less likely to make the same error as the map and County Hall have less meaning to me, i.e. I would be more reliant on the actual address and so more likely to head to City Hall (I think).

  3. Both are on The Queen’s Walk. Just at significantly different points on that walkway. I don’t know where number 110 is, so the address doesn’t actually help disambiguate…

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