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I have a friend in Japan who used to own a small seafood restaurant. At the end of the day, before closing up shop, she would send a fax to her supplier at the local fish market with a list of things she needed for tomorrow. Take a printed form, circle the necessary ingredients, fax it. Got any additional notes? Just write it at the bottom. Only took a minute.

A modern solution for this use case would be a custom website or a mobile app. Now, even if you disregard for a moment the cost of developing/running/maintaining those things, the UX and reliability of paper and pencil for this use case is far superior to mucking around on your phone or PC.

3 comments

A modern solution could be as simple as an email or a whatsapp message. You could reuse the same form and send an image with your phone. I agree that it's more of a "side-grade" than an upgrade.

If it’s just a shopping list, what does fax offer that SMS wouldn’t?

Circle items VS awkwardly typing on a tiny screen where you can't see the whole form Ask a 50+ person to choose between large "screen" and manual big circling motion vs phone typing

The equivalent to circling things on paper is selecting check boxes next to items on a touch screen. Which is just as easy, if not even easier (easy to cancel a selection which is not so easy once something is already circled on paper).

easy to cancel

Easy to throw a paper away.

The equivalent to circling things on paper is selecting check boxes next to items on a touch screen

Form and fax he already has. The app, and server infrastructure of the provider, he has not. I would have zero incentive to change a perfectly working and cheap system.

My Dad who has Parkinson's despises small mobile phone touchscreens that require him to awkwardly press tiny areas. A4 Paper rules the day.

So he would presumably struggle with a piece of paper the size of a small mobile phone too.

Why contrast a small phonescreen with a piece of A4 paper when touchscreens also come in A4 size?

A hard copy for your filing cabinet.

Yeah but data aggregation and accounting aren't linked.