Bad Interfaces
Jan 21, 2010 General Nonsense |
The other day I tried to change my address through a company's web site and it wouldn't accept my new address because I "already have a phone number." WTF??? I tried various workarounds including no phone number, and a fake phone number, but it insisted that once you have a phone number, and the system knows it, you can never change your address. So I asked myself, am I the first person who ever owned a phone and wanted to change his address?
On a daily basis I am astonished by the bad design of things. In my last home, the switch for the garbage disposal was on a panel with a light switch, and looked just like it. Approximately 50% of the time I turned on the light when I wanted to dispose of something, and vice versa. I tried to memorize which switch was which, but I always got confused by my own memory tricks. Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick.
So now we have a button on the countertop for the disposal. It's obviously not a light switch, which is good. But when you press it with your inevitably food-dirty fingers, I imagine debris falling into its little well hole until someday the button just decides not to work. I wonder how that meeting went when someone suggested putting the button where it would be guaranteed the most slime. Did no one raise a hand to suggest that might be a bad idea?
Our new light switches have light indicators to tell you when a switch is turned off. That's right: The "on" light indicates that the switch is off. At least that's how my brain has interpreted it nine hundred times in a row. I understand that they want to make it easy to find the switch in the dark. But did they ever test how people use these things? And while I know the off indicator light uses almost no power at all, I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day.
Perhaps my biggest interface pet peeve is alarm clocks in hotels. I stare at the controls for about ten minutes, give up, unplug it, and use my BlackBerry as my alarm clock. I have to unplug it because the last guy might have accidentally set it for 3 AM.
What is your biggest interface peeve?
On a daily basis I am astonished by the bad design of things. In my last home, the switch for the garbage disposal was on a panel with a light switch, and looked just like it. Approximately 50% of the time I turned on the light when I wanted to dispose of something, and vice versa. I tried to memorize which switch was which, but I always got confused by my own memory tricks. Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick.
So now we have a button on the countertop for the disposal. It's obviously not a light switch, which is good. But when you press it with your inevitably food-dirty fingers, I imagine debris falling into its little well hole until someday the button just decides not to work. I wonder how that meeting went when someone suggested putting the button where it would be guaranteed the most slime. Did no one raise a hand to suggest that might be a bad idea?
Our new light switches have light indicators to tell you when a switch is turned off. That's right: The "on" light indicates that the switch is off. At least that's how my brain has interpreted it nine hundred times in a row. I understand that they want to make it easy to find the switch in the dark. But did they ever test how people use these things? And while I know the off indicator light uses almost no power at all, I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day.
Perhaps my biggest interface pet peeve is alarm clocks in hotels. I stare at the controls for about ten minutes, give up, unplug it, and use my BlackBerry as my alarm clock. I have to unplug it because the last guy might have accidentally set it for 3 AM.
What is your biggest interface peeve?
Votes: +45
Comments
0
Jun 18, 2010
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+2
Mar 8, 2010
haven't read all the comments yet, but I had to add *one* of mine...how about when web page designers KNOW what they want your input data to look like, but they don't tell you until you guess incorrectly!!!
example: Webpage: Enter your Phone Number:
Me: 999-999-9999
Webpage: No, idiot, enter the 1 and no dashes, now try again!
0
Feb 13, 2010
Setting your Internet Options, Preferences, or whatever to "Confirm before closing multiple tabs" or similar, can help you avoid accidentally closing the window and all its tabs when you only meant to close one tab.
-1
Feb 13, 2010
I open many tabs on my internet browser, and sometimes, without thinking, i would click on the big white x in the red box at the top right corner, with the intended purpose of closing one tab, but (naturally) the entire browser window closes instead.At least, I've gotten more or less used to middle-clicking the tab window now.
Feb 11, 2010
There is a new hand towel dispenser at the sink in our break area. It has a diagram on the front instructing you how to use it. It says "To pull towel, use both hands", and it has a second diagram crossed out showing a single hand pulling from the dispenser. Here is where the design fails:1. I and everyone else I've ever seen pulls towels from this dispenser using one hand, not two.
2. No one (but me, apparently) reads these instructions on the front, and I still use one hand.
3. People usually have something in one hand (they're standing at the sink cleaning out a cup or bowl), so they'll naturally pull using only the other hand.
4. Even if both hands are free, everyone I've seen still uses one hand.
5. If you only have one hand because you've lost the other hand or arm, you have no choice but to use one hand.
In addition, requiring use of one hand would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (I guess resident aliens are out of luck). And this is in a government building.
Seems like all of the above could and should have been foreseen by the towel dispenser's designers, so why not simply design the dispenser for use one or both hands in the first place?
/s.
0
Jan 30, 2010
I don't see why the code for a webpage can't remove any punctuation I put in telephone numbers or credit card numbers. 16-digit credit card numbers are a lot easier to enter and check with the spaces in them that appear on the credit card, for instance. It seems really lame to have be instructed to enter them without spaces or whatever.The next thing is from your registration page. Why can't I just enter my birthdate? I'll even go along with mandated punctuation, like mm/dd/yyyy, in this case.
Why can't I use any character, including spaces or any other type-able character, in passwords? I notice I can do this on your registration page and Gmail's, finally.
Also, at a minimum, why can't the password be displayed, or there be an option for it to be displayed, when I'm registering. That way, I don't have to wonder if I've somehow entered the same wrong password twice, by some trick of my messed-up typing. I think it would be a good idea all the time. For a lot of people, It's fairly rare that anyone can peek over their shoulder.
While we're talking about passwords, why do both passwords have to disappear when I'm registering if I've made an error in another field, especially the user name which I have no idea whether it's already in use or not. Again, that's the way your registration page does it.
And if there has to be rules about what can be entered in a field, like a password field, could you tell me about it in advance, not when it fails to validate?
I do run on, but I have one more thing to add. Never allow someone to do something that they aren't allowed to do. Like what just happened to me here. The add your ADD YOUR COMMENTS box was open was open, so I added them, pressed POST, and lo and behold, my comments disappeared and a message telling me to log in to post a comment came up. Fortunately, I'd already copy and pasted my comments against that very eventuality.
Finally, and this applies to clear the password and dropping my comments, no interface should ever through user input away if it can possibly be helped.
+2
Jan 29, 2010
@NCResident - when you encounter a drop list you can still type your choice. Depending on the browser/software/etc you use, you can go N, N, N to get to the third entry that starts with N, or typing NC will also sometimes work.
0
Jan 28, 2010
"YOUR PASSWORD SHOULD BE MORE THAN 4 CHARACTERS"Taking 26 letters 4 at a time with 10 numbers ....ie 36 P 4....aren't they enuf...atleast for the office network!!
0
Jan 28, 2010
You receive a SMS on your Nokia mobile.You choose reply. You enter your reply. Then you press send.
Then you get a screen showing you the number you received the message from. Message is sent when you press ok.
Who wants to see the number of the person he is replying to? Can anybody reply to a message by sending it to somebody else apart from the sender?
Why not simply send the message when you press send.
Jan 27, 2010
Try changing your name on a Delta ticket after getting married. Even with a marriage certificate.
+5
Jan 26, 2010
Most common peeve is enter your state on a web form.I can type my state's two letter abbreviation in about 4 tenths of a second. You type your city on your keyboard, move your hand to your mouse and select a state from a drop down menu with at least 50 entries, then move your hands back to the keyboard and enter your zip code.
Who exactly is being helped by a 50 state drop down menu? Why not put all valid zip codes in a 100,000 element drop down menu too?
+1
Jan 26, 2010
Your blog; once I open it from GG Reader I see the most recent comments first. Each to his or her own, but quite often the later comments make reference to earlier comments. Read it in non-chronological order and you miss it.
0
Jan 26, 2010
My biggest interface pet peeve is Macro$hit Winbloze (yes, all of it).We painted our garbage disposal switch, which looks exactly ilke the light switch next to it, with red enamel paint about 10 years ago. We haven't hit it by accident since. We did the same thing for my mother-in-law about one year ago, and she hasn't hit her disposal switch by accident since. I know: sample set of three reasonably intelligent people, but there ya go. One used to be able to buy red or orange "light" switches at the hardware store, but, apparently, we Americans (at least, in the backwards, backwoods rural area of suburban Washington, DC) aren't entitled to that luxury any more.
+6
Jan 26, 2010
So many to choose from.. I'll just focus on a DVD player for now.Ok.. Everyone knows a standard DVD has paper on top and optical medium on bottom. So you put the silver side down.. indicating that the laser pick-up head is on the bottom... Right? So I get a DVD where both side are optical. Side-A is Full-Screen and Side-B is Wide-Screen, states the package. So I put Side-B down for Wide-Screen, as marked on the DVD hub, and it always plays the wrong side.
Ok.. The DVD movie is formatted for standard screen so they letterbox the movie with bars on top and bottom. Thus you need HD just to restore the original resolution when you zoom the smaller image to fit the big screens.
Ok.. You install the cables so logically "OUT" should go to "IN". But NO!!!!! They marked the product with "Out" meaning you need to hook this (Input) to the other devices "Out".
Ok.. When you hit the Eject button on the DVD player, it takes 10 seconds because it wants to verify that the player may, or may not, be currently loaded. Who cares? Open when I push Open.. dang it!
I'm thinking there are way too many folks out there that buy into the promise of more money to become a Technical Professional, but haven't got the in-born mental capacity to pull it off. But they somehow get hired anyway.. go figure?
Best wishes Scott from Dave :^)
+2
Jan 25, 2010
Am I the only one completely incapable of figuring out how to revive my laptop from hibernate mode? Shouldn't it come back to life automatically after I reopen it?
+5
Jan 25, 2010
"It is state law to observe warning signs." signs.Two questions:
(1) I wonder how many signs I missed while I was reading this one?
(2) If I somehow was daft enough to think that warning signs didn't apply to me, why would I start with this one?
+5
Jan 25, 2010
I have an alarm clock that uses a radio signal to keep the time set correctly. Good Start.
It requires you to set your time-zone with a complicated system worse than would be required to manually set the time. And it is stored in transient memory so if you unplug the clock you need to recalibrate it to the time-zone or do what I do and always subtract an hour because I am -1hr from the default setting. Why not a mechanical switch to set the time zone so it didn't rely on continuous power to store the setting.
Of course, you can put a battery in it so it will remember the time-zone setting in case of power outages. Wait a second. Why did I buy an auto-correcting clock again?
+5
Jan 25, 2010
When they keyboard is locked on my blackberry it prevents my from pocket dialing anyone. Well, anyone except 911. The default button on the "locked keyboard screen" is not "unlock screen", but "Place Emergency Call".
+12
Jan 25, 2010
When you have to type your credit card number into a web form, it always has to be "with no dashes or spaces" so you have to get a solid block of 16 digits right.Would it kill them to have the software strip out dashes and spaces?
Jan 25, 2010
My printer comes with an automatic update checker. Every so often this asks me if I want to update the drivers. The answer is inevitably, "Not really; they seem to be working just fine." But there's no obvious way of removing this reminder without uninstalling the drivers - which might just make the difference between "working just fine" and "oops, no printer".The real reason I would like to remove the reminder software is that, every time I switch my PC on, it pops up a warning box saying that it won't work without "Microsoft Framework for Something version 1.blah". Well, I uninstalled that when I installed "Microsoft Framework for Something version 3.blah", which is why it STILL WORKS and still annoys me.
