Apr 25

The neverending refresh

Today while trying to access Apple’s iOS Developer Portal, I got a message that the service was temporarily down. Or at least that’s what I assumed the very terse message to mean:

Screen Shot 2013-04-25 at 10.07.15 AM

That’s fine—I’m not complaining that the site is down; these things happen. The problem is how Apple handles this situation. In particular, rather than returning the message as the response for the requested url, Apple actually redirects you to a static error page (take a look at the url bar in the screenshot).

Now the problem here is that when I’m faced with a “service temporarily unavailable” message, my first instinct is to just keep the page open and occasionally hit the Refresh button to see if it’s up yet. But this won’t work here. As it stands, I’m going to see this static message no matter how many times I refresh the page because that’s actually the page I’m looking at! In fact, the only way for me to properly “try again” is to hit Back on the browser and re-click the link that took me to the error page in the first place, or open up my bookmark again, if I happen to have the page bookmarked. Now neither of these is outrageously more tedious than hitting Refresh, but the point is Refresh is still the simplest and most obvious course of action, and therefore is the more likely action users will take.

Furthermore, there’s no indication to the user (outside of the url) that this is the case. Granted, this is a developer site and its users are likely to be more observant of such things, but that’s not really an excuse to design things wrong in the first place, and I have a feeling if it’s done wrong here, it’s probably done wrong elsewhere as well, including Apple’s consumer-facing pages.

Is this a big deal? Am I going to lose sleep over it? No, of course not, but it is another example of poor UI. Thanks for listening.

 

Apr 11

Nope, Try Again!

Today, a very simple example of a horribly irritating UI that would be so simple to fix. This time, the iPhone “not enough storage” warning:

IMG_2228

The problem is that it gives absolutely no indication of how big the app is you’re trying to download, like it’s something they don’t want you to know. The irony is they give you a nice handy link to your storage management settings so you can start deleting content right away, but don’t actually tell us what we need to know in order to do the job! So here we are faced with the task of clearing off data from our phone, but with no freaking clue as to how much we need to get rid of. How is this considered an acceptable user interface? So I got this warning, and I’m dying to try the latest update to Order and Chaos (with two new lands to explore!) and here I am deleting app after app from my phone, trying again, and continually getting this annoying message.

The thing is, I don’t even know if I’m close to enough free space. I’ve deleted pretty much every app that I’ve deemed I probably won’t need any time soon, and I still can’t install the damn update! So I’ve given up, because there’s nothing more I can easily trim from my phone, and here I am with about 5 or 6 apps gone and nothing to show for it. Had I known I still wouldn’t be able to fit the update after deleting 500 megs of apps, I probably would have opted to keep the 500 megs of apps!

And all this trouble just because Apple doesn’t want to tell me how big the file is it’s trying to download. No clue.

Apr 10

No Apr 24 This Year

Last night I had the strangest dream. Normally I wouldn’t post my dreams to a blog about UI, but this was just so bizarre I had to share it.

It started with a mass exodus of humanity. Scientists had somehow discerned a great astronomical catastrophe was to occur on April 24th, 2013. As far as we could tell, they didn’t know what exactly would happen, except that it would be big, and many took it to mean the end of life on Earth. Humanity was divided among the hopeful and the despondent. There was rioting and looting and mass suicides. But there were a few people still holding on to the last few moments of their insignificant lives with either dignity or fear. These people (there were only about a hundred in our group) were making their way to trains that were already departing for the countdown was on. Where people were going I don’t know, presumably to some last hope shelter in case there was the slightest chance we might survive. But then things got weird.

The trains took us to the ruins of a large abandoned concrete complex, open to the sky and covered in graffiti. It would seem the plan was less to try to save ourselves than to escape the chaos of the city for a more peaceful and civilized oblivion among our friends and loved ones. My mother was there, drinking fresh water out of a spring flowing through a hole in a broken wall. There were many people there, filling cups and bottles full of this water, which was the purest coldest water I’d tasted.

It was night, and the sky was clear. I looked up through the ruins of the building around me to watch the final show.

The heavens ignited. Waves of light rippled across the sky. Strangely I thought to pull out my iPhone and snap a picture. People remarked on how beautiful it was. Then it faded and we were all still there. Things seemed somehow more peaceful and quiet. People were quietly talking among themselves, presumably wondering why they were still there, when I looked up and noticed that the heavens had completely rearranged themselves.

Get this. The stars in and around what had previously been the constellation Orion had completely rearranged themselves to spell, in English, the words “NO APR 24 THIS YEAR”. It was written in stars.

I pointed it out to people around me, who all of course rushed to get a better view and to try and make something of it. Someone had apparently brought a telescope with them and yelled out something like “there’s more.” I rushed over to take a look, along with everyone else, obviously keen to see. It appeared there was some kind of picture, beneath the writing (also in stars, of course) of a spiral staircase with a door opening at the top of it.

Things got even weirder at this point. Suddenly there was a giant spiral staircase in the room. Had it been there the whole time? I couldn’t recall. I vividly recall the staircase. It was very large, and made of solid wood painted a glossy white. It appeared very old, but not damaged at all. It was solid, in that there were no holes between the steps, and it spiraled up to what appeared to just be a wall at the top, also of white painted wood. I started to climb the staircase, with everyone else following behind me. When I got to the top, I half pushed, half banged on the wall at the top when suddenly it opened from the inside.

Inside stood a giant man (think the protohumans in Prometheus, but his features were human) crouched over with the door in his hand. He had short blond hair and was dressed in a white shirt and white shorts. In fact everything in the room was white and glowed with a bright light. His movements were slow, presumably because of his size, but were perfectly fluid and human. There was also a woman there, not hiding exactly, but around the corner, not wanting to interfere. The man said his name was David, and reached out his hand in greeting.

I shook his hand… and woke up.

Apr 3

Woes of Demo Mode

Last night I was cooking some pasta on the stove. I usually set a timer on my microwave when I throw the pasta in so I have a rough idea for when to take it off the stove. I’ve done this many times before, but last night something went wrong… with UI! So how, you might be asking yourself, could I possible have screwed up setting a timer on my microwave? Did I accidentally forget to hit the timer button and end up nuking air for five minutes? No, no, nothing like that. Here’s what happened:

On my microwave, a Panasonic “Genius” (how ironic, just like my “Smart” TV), the Timer button has multiple functions. As in not just more than one, but at least four. That’s way too many functions for one button to start with, but allow me to illustrate what happened. I was aware going into things that the Timer button was also the Clock set button. If you press it once, you can set a timer. If you press it twice, you’re now setting the clock. What happened was I accidentally hit the button twice and put it in clock set mode. Realizing this, I wanted to get back to timer mode (quickly, after all, my pasta is cooking as we speak!) so I pressed the button again, thinking (like any sane UI) it would cycle back to the initial function. The problem is, and what I was unaware of at the time, was that the button is coded such that pressing it four times in succession activates DEMO MODE.

genius

The problem is, when the thing is in demo mode nothing works. Because it’s the mode you set the microwave to when it’s on the store shelf. Trying to cook something just turns the light and fan on, but doesn’t actually radiate anything. Even worse, the timer goes at something like 4X actual speed, for whatever ridiculous reason (because people trying out a microwave in a store can’t just set the timer to 5 seconds to demo it I guess). It also turns out that it’s a bitch to get out of demo mode. I mean, that last part actually makes sense. If only it weren’t so easy to accidentally get it stuck in demo mode in the first place!

I actually had to resort to reading the manual in order to get my microwave functional again. Feel how you will, but I consider that any time I am forced to actually read a book in order to figure out how to use a product, that’s a UI fail.

Mar 29

Samsung’s “Smart” TV

I recently purchased a top-of-the-line 8000 series “Smart” TV from Samsung, and all I can say is expect it to be the topic of many a post on this blog.

Technologically speaking, the TV is outstanding, with as bright and clear a picture as I’ve ever seen on an LCD TV. There are some backlighting issues, very apparent on dark pictures, but the color and clarity make up for it.

But this blog isn’t about specs, it’s about usability. And boy does this TV lack there. My first complaint is that for something called a “Smart” TV, this thing sure is dumb.

Complaint #1: It acts more like a computer than an appliance.

Case in point: when I turn my TV off and back on again, it’s not in the exact state I left it in when I turned it off. In fact it’s not even close. It acts like a computer that is just booting up for the first time each time you turn the thing on. If I’m in the middle of watching a movie on Netflix and I turn the TV off to go to the store (you know, to save power, or the screen), it sure would be nice if I could just turn it back on again and resume my movie. But is that what happens? Well I wouldn’t be writing about it here if it were.

No, in fact, I have to wait for the TV to boot up, then launch the Smart Hub (which itself is an application and takes a certain amount of time to launch), then launch the Netflix app, and then go back into the show I was watching.

Thankfully Netflix itself remembers where I was in the last show I was watching, but many other things on this TV do not, and this is often followed by the step of seeking the video to roughly the time I left it at.

This is completely absurd in this day and age, that my “Smart” [sic] TV cannot even remember what I was doing when I turned it off. There’s nothing smart about that.

I’ll post more (including some pictures hopefully) later. Just wanted to get an initial post on my new blog! Hope you’ll stay tuned and listen to me bitch and gripe about poor human interfaces in this day and age!

Complaint #2: It tells me what to do.

So I turned my TV on the other day with the intention of going into Netflix and watching some Walking Dead. I had my bowl of cereal freshly poured, ready to be devoured when my TV informs me that it needs to update the Smart Hub (which is needed to get into Netflix). That’s awfully nice of it, to let me know there is an update available. But I’m in a hurry and I just want to watch my show while I eat my cereal k?

“NO!” says the TV. “You are not allowed to not update your software! In fact I will not even give you the choice. Oh and on top of that, it’s not a quick operation. In fact, I will take complete control of your TV for the next 15 minutes while I update myself, regardless of whether you like it or not.”

Well that’s not at all what I want. Since when does my TV tell me who’s boss? If the Samsung engineers were standing in front of me I would have slapped them for defying my authority. That’s right, I own you, TV. You do what I say.

Now I vow never to complain about a poor UI without offering a solution. So here you have it: Download the update in the background. Notify me when it’s ready, and give me the option to install it when I next turn off my TV. Just because the screen is off doesn’t mean the TV has to be. At the very least let me decide when to install the update.