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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

The advantage is the UX.

On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome which can be intimidating.

"Is there a line? I think I see a line? But it's fainter from the last time? What does it mean?"

This is replaced by an algorithm that's written by people who know what are they doing to save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer.

edit: Just Google for "Is this pregnancy test positive" to see how many people are having trouble interpreting the results.

Here is an example from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/comments/4pxghm/confli...

Ironically, on this example the commenters claim that the inaccurate one is the digital one and the tester confirms. Anyway, the point stands: It is hard to interpret the outcome of chemical reactions.

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Your link actually shows you why there is no UX advantage.

OP is only two cycles into their pregnancy. A paper test can pick up on this tiny HCG measurement and show something. A digital test cannot because it's going to pick a higher threshold if it only wants to give you a binary result. A digital test will tell you that you're pregnant when you're far enough along for a paper test to be obvious.

There are so many "can someone interpret this paper test?" questions not because paper is inferior but because they are trying to interpret results 0-2 months into their pregnancy and paper can actually give you a faint reading here.

A digital test could support that by showing "possibly pregnant" which is back to the same UX, and showing "not pregnant" during this time isn't much of a win either.

A digital test can be tuned to a better sensitivity.

The UX advantage comes from giving a definitive answer. The answer can change at later times when the body starts giving stronger signals. You can simply indicate that you need to wait X number of days to detect the pregnancy and problem solved.

This is much better UX than learning biology and chemistry to be able to read a test result. What does a faint line means? Probably means you need 4 years degree in a related field to have an educated guess. To have a definitive answer you need a to have a career in it.

Realistically though, it means you will need to ask someone who already have the degree, which means what good is the test for?

The digital test does guide you how to get to the right answer. Yes, if the threshold is too high and you test too early it can give you a false negative but this is a simple problem that can be solved by recommending a second test in few days.

It should just show the value and have the definition of them written on the box, UI should not be a concern at all if you have to have electronics in this case.

This is correct except the 0-2 months. Even if you accept dating a pregnancy as starting at the start of your previous cycle, these tests will be positive before your next cycle would have started. The typical “is this a positive test” is around 8-10 days post ovulation and a few days before their period is due. They’d get a definitive test 1-3 days later. So the period of “it’s positive but I can’t be sure” is something like 0.9-0.97 cycles into a pregnancy (again, with the weird dating from your last period’s start and complicated by the fact that most people don’t know ovulation dates & cycle lengths frequently vary).

If you’re well into a pregnancy, tests will actually start getting lighter due to how the tests work. It’s called the Hook Effect and can start happening around 5 weeks of pregnancy (https://www.captodayonline.com/Archives/0612/0612f_not_so_ob...).

But this link shows exactly why plain chemical tests are superior, no?

The poster's question was about the conflict, not the interpretation of the chemical test.

>FRERs can pick up hCG as low as 7. Digitals require >40. Try with a digital in another week!

This seems to me like you're replacing an analogue, more precise reading with a binary, easier to read, imprecise reading?

Superior sensitivity != Superior UX.

Yeah, sure if you know what you are doing observing chemical reaction can be much better. It's like the difference between consumer tools and industrial tools.

Full manual espresso machines are superior from the perspective of a coffee nerd or professional. Nespresso machines with capsules are superior from the perspective of the person who wants the coffee but doesn't fancy learning making one.

The whole point of the paper is that it IS a consumer UX for the chemical reaction. It's just analog instead of digital.

It simply means that the paper is not as good as digital from UX perspective. This doesn’t mean that the paper is unusable but obviously creates some confusion that the digital doesn’t.

> The advantage is the UX.

The UX in this case is bad. Unnecessary and expensive fluff that obfuscates reality and gives a false sense of certainty to the user.

> On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome

The part of conducting the experiment is identical, I think, regardless of the type of test. You pee on it. Interpreting the results is not an issue. You simply need to observe with your eyes (a product of billions of years of evolution) if you have || or |+.

> save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer

Again, you don't need to analyze a chemical reaction any more than the device does. The conclusion of the analysis is summed up in [1]. The whole point of the digital part is to read the lines on the paper. Whatever heuristics went into deciding how much reflected light should be interpreted as a | or a + are just as likely to be mistaken as a human eye reading would be.

[1] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301711188904927232

For the old fashioned test, you still have to observe timing. I assume the digital test has a timer built-in?

This is first time I hear about pregnancy test being "intimidating".

The only pregnancy test intimidating reference I knew about so far was "omg, shit I am pregnant shit".

Well...if you’re 20, not at all ready to become a parent, you made a mistake and now you see a faint line-ish line is it really a line is it not just the lighting huh? Yeah then I can imagine being intimidated.

This sounds more like imaginary pregnancy test then real one. The real ones dont do faint line-ish.

Also, for christ people, 16 years old were administrating these tests for years now, without there being massive social problem of confused woman. They just somehow managed to do them, even if their school results were very bad. So trying to claim they are somehow difficult to interpret is absurd.

Forums are filled with people not sure what the test result is. Just Google for "is this pregnancy test positive" to get a sample.

It looks to me that the digital test just makes the situation worse by potentially giving a false negative due to the sensitivity threshold. In many cases being pregnant and not knowing it is worse than the converse. So the false positive may be better than a false negative.

The "analog" version is capable of displaying a value marginally above 0 and lets your eyes and brain decide or at least raise a flag. The digital test replaces your eyes with crappy photodiodes, and your (even 16 year old) brain with a crappy controller that just looks at a high threshold and decides "below=0".

I see people here saying that a digital is better because it reduces confusion. But it does so by discarding data. I'd take the debatable test every time, especially when for the money a digital one costs you can get multiple paper tests to do repeated checks.

That's not a problem with the test; that's people being stressed out.

Taking 5 papers tests is simple.

Early on in the pregnancy the hormone levels are low and the line is faint. Obviously no one is saying a dark line is hard to interpret...

And the majority of those are inconclusive results which should be reported by digital as ... inconclusive. Removal of doubt here can cost you precious time.

I don’t have enough close female friends to hear these worries from, but I’ve seen it as a trope in movies and TV shows many times where the woman tries to interpret the strip, gets it wrong, etc

Those are dramatic setups.

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