A zillion years ago there was some Mac software (I can’t remember what) that took the graphical UI so seriously that every control could ONLY be activated by a mouse click. They had invented their own control, a neat widget that emulated a thumbwheel. But, since the user had to adjust these controls constantly, and there was no way to use the keyboard, the reviewers immediately started calling them “thumbscrews” instead.
What I find myself saying at work all too often when speaking of our computer systems: “I, myself, welcome our robot overlords. I just wish they would chip in and help out, every now and then.”
I think that was Apple’s own Quicktime Player.
No, this was many years before Quicktime.
The product I’m thinking of came out in the Mac Plus era.
Try this: I live in Colorado and I have found that, very often, if i hit the ‘c’ key a second time, CO comes up. Of course, CA comes up first.
Bob
I encounter this most of the time, to the point where to get to my state (Michigan) I just hit “M” 4 times.
My peeviest pet peeve is news sites. Very often, I prefer to read the story rather than watch the video that goes with it. The latest thing is, though, that if you scroll down past the video, it will suddenly move into the lower right-hand corner of the screen and automatically start playing. I guess they are so proud of the video that they just can’t imagine that no one would NOT want to watch it.
Hey, HTML5 guys, I didn’t want to watch that video. I haven’t found that this can be turned off. There is a setting in Chrome which stops Flash videos from playing automatically, but I haven’t found anything for HTML5 compatible videos.
Bob
For 20 years I lived in Missouri = MO.
The best way to pick it in a dropdown is to type N - uparrow - uparrow. That’s 40% fewer keystrokes than M - M - M - M - M.
Re: Zip codes and forms. Several years back our zip code got split in two and we ended up in the new code area. The PO specified a 2 year (note) grace period where mail to the old zip code would be processed normally. After that, no guarantees.
After the grace period expired (2 years), I still ran into web forms where my new zip code was listed as invalid and wouldn’t be accepted. I had to enter the old zip code and hope it went okay.
Adding new zip codes is a common phenomenon. Just write the form code to warn, but not reject, codes not in their database.
Teaching Software Engineering I saw this lack of understanding the variety of data and coping with all the ways it can go differently over and over in students. They just seemed incapable of getting this and adapting their code to handle it. (Getting the UI right was a major component of the project grade and usually the worst done part.)
Re: Post office zones crossing state lines. This was pre-Zip code era, but members of my family lived in a different state from their RFD home PO. This caused a lot of problems. E.g., writing to someone in the state government. Ignored since they didn’t live in the state. Which they did.
If CASS certification (or whatever they call it now) is a goal, that won’t work. Only valid ZIPs can be on labels. See my earlier post.
I suspect some of the problems are caused by outdated databases, or by a lag time between updates from official sources. There’s no technical reason why commercial software can’t access the primary database by Internet in real-time, but we are still stuck in batch mode for some tasks.
The Red Cross twenty-or-so questions about you, before you can give blood.
One of the first questions is are you Male or Female. Then, in no particular order, are questions like “Are you pregnant? [YES] [NO] [MALE]”.
Then there are the travel questions – if I didn’t travel out of country, don’t ask if I travel to Europe or wherever in another question.
Oh, and the phone menus. "Please listen because our menus have changed." Yeah, well, maybe five years ago they changed. Do they get a kickback from the phone company for keeping you on the phone to listen to that?I know, I wish I could just say I haven’t been sexually active in the past twelve months and be done with it.
“In the past twelve months, have you had sexual contact with a garden gnome?”
“In the past twelve months, have you taken money to have sex with a horse?”
DirecTV may have improved its online channel guide/schedule grid since I dropped them, but at the time it was awful.
First of all, you couldn’t dock the schedule grid to the browser window, so the only way you could pan and scroll was to use the mouse or touchpad. Even more bizarrely, the grid would only show you three-hour blocks of time, beginning at multiples of three, so: noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm and so on. You couldn’t look at, say 8pm - 11pm, but would have to pan back and forth (using the mouse) between the 6 - 9pm block to the 9 - midnight block.
On vacation recently and we rented first one and then another car. They both had GPS. Both GPS’s had pretty much identical functionality, ultimately. But the useability difference was just stunning. The first one was completely intuitive. Everything was where you would think it would be. Everything you needed was visible when you needed it to be. Every option you were likely to want was highly accessible and options were clustered in a way that made sense. And so on.
And the other one was like someone had implemented the useability manual upside down. You could find nothing without going to some totally obscure menu that was exactly where you wouldn’t think it was. The displays would only show useless things unless you applied well-buried options that it would change back from if you weren’t careful. It drove us mad to the extent that we just gave up and started using Google Maps on an ipad. And we are tech savvy family. My teenage son’s idea of a good time is to read the manual. Even he gave up.
It was an object lesson in how it almost doesn’t matter what functionality something has; it’s about useability.
My local blood bank tailors the questions based on the male/female question.
On the travel one, I think they worry enough about it that ask you multiple ways to make sure is reasonable. Of course, based on the ‘are you a pregnant male’ question, that probably isn’t why they ask more than once.
I was just paying my car registration renewal online and had to come back here to nominate another horrible design “feature”: forms that require you to enter long strings of numbers, like bank routing and account numbers, and hide all the characters while you type. You can’t see or verify what you’re typing either while typing or after you’re done.
Websites that do this need to have a checkbox and option that says:
- I am not in a crowded public space and there is nobody looking over my shoulder *
And if you check the box it would disable character hiding.
I forgot about this one:
There was some extra-moronic version of Windows that required you to type the WEP password in TWICE, before it would attempt to connect to a WiFi access point. The level of stupidity behind that decision is breathtaking.
Or that give just one field, and then after you enter the number, it tells you to use numerals only, no hyphens accepted, so you have to enter it over again. Or vice versa. Or just “invalid value” – guess again.
Or the ATM machine that asks if your account is checking or saving, and you always guess wrong the first time. I once asked my bank if my account was checking or saving, they said it depends on the ATM machine and how it is configured.
My current microwave does have this requirement, but it offers a shortcut: if you touch a button 1 - 6, it starts immediately with that many minutes on it. If I want three and a half minutes, I touch three to get it running, then Start to add :30. That is half as many presses as inputting the time and hitting start.
However, it beeps. I really dislike beeps. My last microwave gave me the option to disable sounds, but this one does not. And it is other-room loud, beeping 5 fucking times when it finishes. I have learned the change in fan noise when it gets to fifteen seconds left, so I can often catch it before the end, just to avoid that damn noise.
Where I used to work, we got a new machine to replace the ones from 1955. Of course it was computerized, and that helped tremendously, correcting production errors on the fly or rejecting irreparable product – all things the old machines just stopped for, to let us do it by hand.
It had a film-over touch screen (this was a couple decades ago) that was mostly laid out in boxes, with an onscreen keyboard, but there were a few functions that involved a small range of options. So how do the implement that? You get a box with a setting displayed in it, and you tap it several times to get to the option you want.
I mean, you have here a 12" screen that can tell where your finger is. How hard is it to give you some sort of pop-up, so that you can select the option you want, instead of having to tap-tap-tap-tap-oops-passed-it-tap-tap-tap, like some kind of one-button watch? I have seen this kind of thing on tablet apps as well. (Normal iPad keyboard? Fuck.)
I still don’t get why those microwaves offer 1-6 for 1:00 - 6:00, but then don’t give you 7-9 (and possibly 10:00 on 0). Why do they all stop at 6?