[title blatently stolen from 37signals.]
Over at Yahoo, it seems some people just don’t know where they are:
Fuzz, on the other hand, has a sense of humour, gently prods its users to fill out their profiles:
My favourite Canadian bank, PC Financial added a brilliantly designed feature to their ATMs:
No more addition mistakes. Enter checks one at a time, and let the ATM do the math. So smart! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
Wells Fargo does this now, too — they scan the checks and read the amount in automatically. And they no longer require envelopes.
PC Financial’s relatively low-tech solution is something that can work with all existing ATMs, and doesn’t require new hardware or banking laws.
On the other hand, take a look at the work of a clueless Canada Post graphic designer:
Canada post’s ship-in-a-click, part 2
No wonder Canada Post is so slow at delivering things — all their mice are upside down.
Jakob Nielsen, look out. Parker Mitchell has a few things to say about the importance of understanding user needs:
In particular, we will propose that the efforts of people in this room ensure that technology development efforts better incorporate the
- functional,
- economic and
- social/culture
realities of prospective users. In my case the “users” are rural Africans, in your case they may be different, however I think the same focus and principles apply.
1. Understanding the user’s cultural/social context
Let’s take the example of an improved brick press, a technology we were working with with a partner in Zambia.
This technology produces a compressed earth and cement brick that is as good as a cinder block yet as uses 1/16th the cement and so is much cheaper. Our partners were trying to determine why more units aren’t selling, as there are innumerable walls for which this compresses earth brick would be perfect. It turns out that users and engineers have a different definition of wall. To an engineer it is a structure preventing people getting from A to B – in which case the new, cheaper brick is much better. To Zambians, it turns out that a wall is a status symbol; having a concrete wall brings more prestige than any other type of wall. As a result, homeowners aren’t interested in this brick maker.
Here’s a feature suggestion: I’d like the ability to pause and resume a post on Craigslist.
Here’s the scenario:
It would be nice if I could pause the ad, either until I resumed it, or for a fixed period of time (1, 12 or 24 hours).
I emailed Craig a few months ago. Perhaps if he gets more requests, they’ll implement this.
At this year’s SXSW Interactive festival, I’ll be moderating the panel Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think. The blurb:
Predictable and consistent software is much easier to use. This session explores interface consistency, examples of consistency failures and their consequences.
This is going to be a really interesting discussion. I have three fantastic panelists:
We’re going to explain what consistency really means to you and your users and show what it can do for you. What happens when you’re not consistent? We’ll demonstrate examples of failures from the silly to the catastrophic and list the obvious (and hidden) costs of inconsistency.
Sometimes, however, you don’t want to be consistent. We’ll explain why.
Come to this session and be the new best friend of your performance, security, accessibility, tech support and product documentation teams. (Then, go to the session on managing social networks and information overload.)
I’ve proposed a panel for SXSW interactive 2007, “Getting to Consistency: Lessons Learned from Big Cats.” The panels will be decided by an online vote. Head over to the 2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker and vote for me. :)
Here’s the description:
Making software predictable and consistent makes it much easier to use. This session will explain UI consistency and point out examples of failures and their consequences. We’ll discuss when it’s appropriate to break consistency, and how to build tools and process to ensure applications are consistent with human interface guidelines and real-world practices. Specific attention will be paid to consistency in your everyday tools: Mac OS X and Adobe applications.
So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service.
Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions:
And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing about WAP, and how cell phone companies keep failing to insert themselves as toll collectors because they’re so darn clueless about how the Internet works, and about the value of many-to-many networks instead of broadcast networks.
Needless to say, the phone sucks, and Power Vision sucks too. Is Power Vision a 3G service? Why do phone companies have to brand everything in some incomprehensible way? mMode? MEdia Net? Vision? Power Vision? Vcast? Stop, my head hurts.
Now, on to the good part:
the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.
And one more:
A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.
According to Fox Interactive’s new math 1 + 2 - 2 = 2:
When you use the Kelley Blue Book to price your used car, you go through a series of steps: Year, Make, Model, Value Type (Trade-In, Private Party, Retail), Trim and Condition.
It’s pretty straightfoward, but there’s one usability blunder that bugged me:
This screen is a waste.
If there’s only one possible trim, well, just select it for me automatically and save a step. Thanks.
Apparently MySpace is using the the same algorithm as the Diebold voting machines:
