Posts tagged “usability”

Lovely Phone; Ugly Software

David Pogue reviews some new phone in Lovely Phone; Ugly Software. I’m mostly interested in the headline, though.

I’m so sick of this as the status quo. Aren’t you?

Award-winning, or attractive industrial design is achievable. Usable, joyous, lovely software is achievable. Why is the combination so damn hard? When will companies figure out how to do better? As advanced as we think we are in these fields, it seems big companies are still launching stuff that wrecks your life while making you look hip. We can blame it on organizational silos, or increasingly complex design problems as screen sizes gets smaller and usage gets more advanced, but I think there’s a cultural problem (of course) in organizations, as they still don’t get it. They aren’t figuring out how to work together and they aren’t setting high enough standards for what’s good enough to launch.

Sure, this is Motorola in this article, but the story seems so familiar, this could be anyone. I don’t propose simple solutions here, but I do feel so very tired of the problem.

Poor gov’t usability

Some bad government usability on a notice we received from the county

The aplication requests an Off-Street Parking Exception to allow for 1 uncovered tandem parking space within the existing driveway, where 1 free-and-clear arking space is required for a second dwelling unit. The application has requested this exception to allow the required parking space to be located in tandem to existing covered parking spaces.

I read this several times, looked at the diagram on the back of the page, walked over the house in question, read this again, and I’m still really confused. Really confused.

Cottonelle dumps



Spotted on BoingBoing is this special toilet paper just for kids. It’s printed with a puppy paw path that spans five sheets (and then begins again). It’s portion control for toilet paper, presumably there is a need to have kids learn how much to use? I’m a bit confused as to the actual need, and how this solves it. Wouldn’t the amount needed depend on what is being wiped? And who is being wiped?

I’d guess you’d want to teach kids to wipe until they are done – to pay attention to the bodily and other cues (visual?) to ensure that the hygiene need has been handled. Making it such an inflexible system doesn’t teach anyone anything!

And if you use a different amount than five sheets, ever, then the system breaks until you sync up back to sheet zero with the happy puppy. A training system that is intolerant of (highly likely) user error is not a good training system.

You must always use five and only five sheets. Regardless of what’s going on with your po-po! Cottonelle has forgotten that they work for us, not the other way around.

And their site includes this lovely FAQ (which is such as misnomer, since these are not likely to be frequently-asked-questions, but rather info they wish to convey) that suggests some product problems besides the obvious usability failures.


Why is my toilet paper printed on the inside? How do I fix this?

The good news is that this is an easy fix. The toilet paper isn’t actually printed on the inside. What’s happened is that the two plies have become separated, and the inside ply is wrapped around the outside of your roll (you’ll probably also notice that the perforations on the two plies don’t line up). To fix, first make sure your toilet paper is positioned so that it unrolls from the spindle with the sheets coming over the top. Next, steady the roll so it does not move in the spindle. Take the top ply (make sure you are only handling one ply) and unwrap it behind the roll. The print should now appear on the outside, as intended, and the bottom ply should now be longer that the top ply. Tear off the excess bottom plies (approximately 3) and you are ready to go.

and When I tear the toilet paper, the perforations on the two plies do not line up? How do I fix this? which offers the identical answer.

Now we’re taking on toilet paper maintenance tasks? Who the hell wants to fix their toilet paper? This is way too much work and this company hasn’t a clue about addressing real people’s needs.

Starwouldn’t

After my recent challenges booking with Marriott, I encountered a similar level of weirdness with Starwood. I was trying to book a room (for a conference, using their conference-rate link) and couldn’t seem to log into my account. I haven’t used it for a while and naturally don’t have a clue as to my username and password (more specifically – I can’t remember what format they require my username and password to be in; if I knew that I could probably reconstruct them both). I went through the various helpful links (Forgot your password? Forgot your username?) to try and resolve it. When asked for my membership number I pulled out my Starwood Preferred Guest card and entered the number, only to be told that something to the effect that I needed to enter a number in the proper format. I’m looking at the screeen, I’m looking at my card – the numbers are exact. But no, not valid. Okay, I try something else – I give ’em my email address and they email me a new password and remind me of my username. I go back and try to log in using the newly issued/reset password. Nope, it doesn’t know who I am.

What the hell?

I finally contact them for help, after screwing around for way too long with this.

The website was not accepting your above Starwood Preferred Guest account number because your account had reached an expired status as of March 31, 2004, resulting in any remaining Starpoints being forfeited.

Starpoints do not expire for active accounts. Accounts are considered active as long as you have earned Starpoints as a result of activities at participating Starwood Properties or as a result of use of the Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card from American Express during the previous twelve months.

I am pleased to tell you that your account has been reactivated to enable you to view your above Starwood Preferred Guest number online.

Whoah. First of all, their technology is absolutely complete broken. If the account is suspended, then the error message should say something like that, not simply reject the account number as not being valid. Or the failure-to-logon info should provide some information that suggests they know who I am but won’t let me on for some reason. And they shouldn’t reset my password and then refuse to let me log on with it.

But really, WTF? Why would they de-activate my online login for inactivity?

And beyond that, it gets really punitive! I have forfeited my Starpoints? The language is just so wrong, so haughty. This is not service, and this is not going to encourage loyalty. Did I have any Starpoints? I have no clue, I don’t care. I’ve held onto their damn card for years, but that isn’t enough of a committment to Starwood, I’m not active, so I’ve been forfeited and also deactivated.

The net effect here is not to motivate me to toe the line and be a good Starwood customer, but rather to vote with my feet. They’ve got my money this time (and it’s actually the conference money but whatever) but next time, I will look for someone else.

Oh, and even though my profile indicated I don’t want to receive marketing email from them, by making a reservation with them they reset that and bury a line about opting-out in the confirmation email.

This is a bad company.

When Good Memes Go Bad – Very Bad

From Psych Central “one of the top 10 mental health and psychology
websites, providing reliable and professionally-reviewed resources since 1995” comes a strange piece that claims to be about Web 2.0. In fact, it’s sort of a poorly designed and executed usability/findability test of del.icio.us (or whatever) and flickr. But Web 2.0 is clearly the hook/lede/headline to get the Psych-oriented reader to dive in.

He starts with Web 2.0, which then means tagging, which then means flickr and del.iblahblah.us, which then means findability.

But this is Pysch Central. Not web/design/interation Central. Clearly. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go look at AskMetafilter for some help with my personal life.

Little lies by focus groupies are costly

Nice article about people that lie in order to qualify for market research studies

Researchers call these truth-stretchers focus groupies, a sneaky cadre that adopt multiple identities in order to secure paid seats on the dozens of focus groups that meet every week in the Bay Area.

Firms pay $50 to $100 cash for an hour or two of work that usually involves a moderated discussion about a new product or service with up to a dozen people gathered in a room equipped with a two-way mirror.

The allure of easy money leads hundreds of people every year to treat focus groups as a source of nearly work-free income. Get-rich-quick schemers even advertise focus groups as a source of cash.

And if it means telling a few lies along the way about your favorite brand of frozen pizza or the number of times you have already participated in a focus group, well, it’s no crime to fib to a marketing company.

Researchers go to great lengths to weed out groupies, including the use of exhaustive database cross-checks to ferret out the ‘cheaters’ and ‘repeaters,’ along with detailed screening interviews. Competing firms even share groupies’ names in the reverse form of a ‘do not call’ list.

‘It’s bad for the whole industry so we cooperate with each other,’ said Nichols Research Group Vice President Jane Rosen, whose Bay Area firm purges several hundred groupies a year from its database.

How far will people go?

They sign up with aliases, usually derivatives of their real names with different initials and middle names, Rosen said.

They may use a post office box address under one application and then a home address for the second response.

‘We had a woman sign up for two focus groups on the same day and after she finished the first session, she went out to her car and changed into a new set of clothes and put on a wig,’ Rosen said. ‘Fortunately, one of our people thought something looked wrong about her.’

Q&A Research in Walnut Creek recently foiled a woman who claimed to own a particular brand of luxury car, but the name on the automobile registration she provided did not match her own.

‘We had another man who used his first name for one group, then his middle name for a second group the next day and then a third one the following week,’ said Eric Tavizon, Q&A’s focus group project manager. ‘One of the clients caught him because he mistakenly signed up for events by the same sponsor and they recognized him.’

Of course I’ve encountered this on a much smaller scale; so much of what I do is predicated on a basic foundation of trust (and trust goes in two directions, of course) and it’s lurid and disturbing to consider how that trust can be violated (when do we read the piece about the rapist who posed as an ethnographer to gain access? yikes).

I’ve started a discussion thread on Discovery about this; we’ll see if anything develops.

10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year – New York Times

Here’s a year’s best gadget list from David Pogue who skips overall gnarylness to consider “small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives” such as a digital camera with automatic bracketing in self-timer mode, downloadable TV episodes, and front-side connectors for everything on TV sets. It’s a bit of a relief to see a best list that deals with features and usability rather than form, finish, technolust, or cool.

30 must-have PC skills

30 must-have PC skills

Here’s the top 10, just to make the point

1. Move and copy files
2. Navigate using keyboard shortcuts
3. Use shortcuts in Word
4. Install and remove new hardware
5. Send image files as attachments
6. Search your hard disk
7. Hard disk maintenance (including disk cleanup and defragmenter)
8. System restore and backup
9. Update software online
10. Create desktop shortcuts

How many can you do? To me, this list suggests how daunting a lot of this stuff is. I know several PC users that don’t understand file systems – where files are stored when you download them or save them. To ask them to attach something, say, by finding it somewhere on the vast structure of files and folders, yikes. They’ve managed to use apps without building that level of knowledge. So doing these tasks, I dunno, it’s pretty challenging without getting a sense of the underlying model of the system that these tasks all require.

I’d opt for things like “cleaning up the desktop” “knowing what the start menu is” “choosing a printer” – some real fundamental stuff that you can build on to get to these skills.

But anyway, the fact that the 30 things they picked are actually pretty hard just confirms my sense that computers are still too hard to understand/use.

Update: A reasonable-looking intro/tutorial on Windows XP can be found here.

Where’s Pochacco?

Sanrio Locations 4 21 2005 9 35 54 AM.jpg
Here’s one of those store locator interfaces that maybe you’ve seen before. You can type a city into that field at the bottom and pull down a state, or you can click directly on the map. Those little pink/red dots are so target-like, and it’s easier to click than type, so my instinct was to just click on my area. Here’s what I get:


It’s extremely precise; I somehow clicked 38 miles north of San Francisco, though I was just thinking “in and around San Francisco” when I aimed (and there are indeed so many little dots that it’s pretty hard to aim for a really tight region). But the results are assuming you meant to click EXACTLY where you clicked. Try again and you might end up 11 miles south of San Francisco and a totally different list of stores.

Clicking ends up being useless. The map is too small and expects more-than-human precision, at least given the enormous density of stores in many regions. Entering the city name is the only way to go for my situation.

It’s further hampered by the ridiculous results – it seems that any store that has any type of product from the Sanrio people anywhere on their shelves qualifies for this list. They sell a lot of stuff, but not all of these stores are going to carry similar ranges of inventory, so you’re going to have to do some more legwork – either visit many, or phone (yuck) many and ask, or simply give up.

Warning, live without warning

Today I received this email

To: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
From: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.

Series

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