Human Experience

Yves Behar takes us on an amazing journey from carpets to condoms in his extempore at TED.

The line that sticks with me is "the design is never done..." the ellipsis being the most important word in the sentence.

 

 

BTW, Aditi is part of OLPC and proud of it....

 

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Talkative antivirus

 

I have had Symnatec running on my laptop for several years now (corporate policy).  An anti-virus, which is what Symantec is, should  ideally work in the background, making every important decision independently and pulling the user into the loop only under super catastrophic conditions.

Symantec quite often does just  the opposite.

For example, look at this dialog box that pops up every time my computer boots up. 

The dialog box exists to inform me of existing risks and actions that I can/should take. 99% of the time, there is no risk to be reported. The dialog box still pops up with an empty grid which (1) leaves it to me to figure out the status and then (2) making me take a worthless action (of clicking the ok button) to dispose the window.

Either Symantec should not show the dialog box when there is nothing to report or very, very explicitly share the good news that my computer right now is super safe!

 

Here is another one.

The error message from hell.

A critical application (an anti-virus) is telling me that a critical task (remediation meaning weeding out the virus) has failed.

Now that my machine is probably infected with a hazardous virus written by a ravaging psychopath, all I get is an OK button.

No information about the failing task, or its criticality, or the reason for failure and most important. What should I do next ?

 

There are others that Symantec keep bludgeoning me with. Watch this space.

 

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Sigh-n

Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam.

Departure signage listing the departure time, flight numbers, destinations and gate numbers...sorted on ...uh....departure time.

Imagine trying to find out what time the delayed flight to Seattle leaves.

They might as well sort it on gate number, it will require a part table scan anyway...

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A dentist with yellow teeth (or recursive bad usability)

I have always wondered.

Would a customer select a usability expert company whose website has a bad user experience?

I followed the link that Vinodh has pointed out in his earlier blog. Here is a screen grab.

Notice...

1. Using the typical (and a tad boring) Web 2.0 pattern, the designer tries to create a three step process to obtain the calendar. So step one, select the language, step two select the size and whoa.. where is step 3? Is translating the third step?

It is right there, blind boy, the green box - the one that looks like an ad - is actually the action button

2. The "translate the calendar" link takes you to a landing page for YOU to translate the calendar and send it to THEM. It has no relationship to the step 1 and 2 described above

3. And what's with the grammatically incorrect sentences? Surely, this not part of the causal English syndrome, is it?

Sad. BTW, had this not been the output of a usability expert company, I would have let this one pass

Here is one of my earlier rants about another user experience magazine.

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Raising the (scroll) bar...

 

The scroll bar on the iTunes website with labels in the "shaft" for "aimed" scrolling.

Awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And while on the subject of scroll bars, I have never really like the way the control renders and behaves.

1. The scroll bar is window centric and not document centric. For e.g., clicking the down button or pulling the elevator down, scrolls the document up while the action is called scrolling down.  Dyslexic.

2. Unidirectional arrow buttons on either ends of the scrollbars. So while scrolling down, if you miss the spot on the document you were looking for, you have to navigate all the way up the screen to scroll back up. I wish both ends of the scroll bars had arrow pointing up and down.

BTW, notice the scroll bar in Word 2007 (figure to the right). The page up and page down controls are (correctly) bunched together, and not laid out on the periphery of the control for symmetry

 

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Bad Usability Calendar 2008

NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last couple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.

This year's calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.

You can download this year's calender here.

Interesting way to portray UX and design bloopers!