A while ago I took HP to task for their tendency to fill your hard disk with hundreds of Megs of software when all you need is a printer driver. I am happy to report that they’ve improved their ways… sort of.

Back then, I wrote:

It is not good manners to sell someone a printer, and then to blast hundreds of megabytes of software onto their hard disk, without so much as a pretty please.

So now I bought a new HP printer and this time it did say pretty please. It asked me whether I wanted a full installation or a minimal installation. Hooray! Of course I opted for the minimal one… I would report happiness, except that the minimal installation – the bare essentials, according to HP – filled 461 Megabytes of my hard drive. Want to guess what a full install would have required? 

What would they need 461MB for? Well, I haven’t even begun to explore the content of this unwanted bloatware, but I can report that the installation process included animated videos showing how to plug the darn machine into the power socket, and so forth (and these are still on my drive, in case I might forget how that is done…)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, I guess…

People who design forms never cease to amaze.

This was very obvious in the era of paper forms. You’d get forms with fields that are patently too small for their content; like this snippet from one I recently filled:

Name ______________________________ E-mail ___________

Cellular: _____________________________________________

What were they thinking?? Many email addresses won’t fit on that short line; and the next line is far too long for a phone number. Why not switch the slots?

This situation is very common, especially when it comes to addresses; you often end up overflowing the allotted space, which can result in barely legible data. Which is really weird, because with a five minute effort the form’s designer could have made things right for thousands of users later on. Don’t they see how ridiculous it all is?!

Another problem is forms that get photocopied and/or faxed so many times that they’re barely legible at all; strangely, bureaucrats seem not to mind getting back forms whose fixed portion is smudged and illegible. Evidently it’s the act of forcing us to submit a formal form that counts, not whether you can read it…

And now, we are paperless; you’d think all would be well with electronic forms… but no. Some organizations I deal with actually mail you a scan of a smudged photocopy of a paper form, and ask you to print it out, fill it with pen and fax it back, adding to the smudging. And even when they send an editable electronic version, they never use the features available in the  Word or PDF formats to steer the filling of the right fields. Instead, they just send around a plain document and expect you to type in the data; and since they use underlines to denote fields, we end up with forms like this:

First Name __________John Smith________________________

Address: ________100 Main street_______________________

and so on…

At least in this last case, you can put things right – put the word processor in Overwrite mode and replace the underlines with your text, or just delete the underlines, ending with:

First Name: John Smith

Address: 100 Main street

Then, if you import a scan of your signature in, you can send the filled form back as an attachment and be done with it!

I was visiting an office where they had one of these delightful Espresso machines, an Espresso Point by Lavazza, and tried to make me a cup.

I put in a paper cup and a coffee cartridge, pushed the button at the right of the panel next to the size I wanted, and instead of that steaming coffee, I got a blinking red light at the left (marked below with an arrow).

I tried to puzzle the meaning of this light. It had the icon you see, with a coffee cup and an X. What did it mean? Obviously in a large beverage dispensing machine it would stand for “I’m out of cups”; but this machine did not store cups. It might mean “You forgot to put in the cup” – only I hadn’t. What else? “Smash a cup before I agree to make coffee”?

After much futile experimentation a local came and said “Oh, the machine is out of water”, and she proceeded to pour some in at the top. I could finally enjoy my coffee.

But what a stupid design choice… the cup with the X has no relation to missing water; and indeed, the fact that the cup looks identical to those in the icons at the right side of the panel only reinforces the mis-interpretation.

Shame on you, Lavazza designers!

I’ve discussed before the silliness that results when overcautious lawyers and thoughtless designers cooperate to create silly “serving suggestions”… and here is a lovely new example.

In itself this salad may be a good serving suggestion for a package of cucumbers (or of parsley, perhaps)… but this is not what this image is displayed on. Instead, it is shown on the package in the photo at right.

Yes, this is a package of plain table salt!

I can’t wait for a producer of mineral water to think up a “serving suggestion” for plain water. Until then, this one will remain a winner on my list of pointless package legalese.

We got this new Samsung flat panel TV, and when I first turned it on it went straight into a “first time setup” sequence. The first question that appeared on the OSD (On-Screen Display) was which language I wanted for the OSD; I started scrolling among the options, and my finger slipped and hit the “enter” button when the option “Russian” was selected. The OSD obediently changed to Cyrillic script, and presented me with the next setup dialog. In pure Russian. Yay.

Unfortunately, there was no “Back” button with a universally understood back arrow, so there was no way I could go back and un-choose Russian; or if there were, it was described in Russian right in front of me – and I don’t know this language. I tried mucking around the interface at random, but to no avail. I thought of reverting to factory settings, but the manual said I need to find the option “Plug and Play” – and I really couldn’t say what that phrase looks like in Russian, even if it were written in Latin characters, which it wasn’t.

And there things stood, until I remembered that Samsung had delivered the TV with three copies of the manual, in English, Hebrew and Russian. By carefully using this as a Rosetta Stone, I managed to find the equivalent Cyrillic words and finally found them in the UI. Once reset, I was back with an OSD I could read.

Poor interaction design, Samsung!…

In times of old,  intrepid European explorers who ventured into remote countries like China or Africa would return with travelers’ tales of amazing creatures such as have never been seen. And apparently such wonderful animals still exist in far away lands, reflected in the meager evidence that filters back. Take this sighting…

I saw these small figurines – and dozens like them – on display at a souvenir shop in Ben Gurion International Airport. Nothing surprising about camel figurines in an Israeli tourist trap, after all we do have camels in this country, though you’d need to travel far into the desert to find any. The price tags said these were made in China – no surprise there either, everything is these days.

There were two models: a kneeling animal, with the unmistakable hump, thin legs,and small-eared head of a camel; and a standing one, with the hump of a camel, and the short thick legs, long ears, and stiff mane of a… donkey. Indeed, other than the hump, the Chinese craftsman has done an excellent job of capturing the anatomy of this patient beast of burden. The travelers were right: wondrous chimeric beasts must exist in China, and they seem to inspire Chinese product design!

I was in a shopping center and I saw these two signs on different floors, pointing out the emergency stairs’ entrance.

Now, the sign on the left is well drawn and clear – the guy is purposefully descending the stairs. But the sign on the right has something very wrong…

It’s a bit hard to say exactly what it is with this poor chap on the sign… does he have a broken arm? A bad knee? Is he climbing the stairs or descending them? Perhaps the best description is that he’s drunk and wobbling about on the stairs.

Oh well…

When we spent a while in the US in the eighties I was amazed and amused by the silly warning “serving suggestion” found on food packaging. I mean, what were they afraid of… a flood of lawsuits by people that opened the soup powder sachet and failed to extract a steaming soup tureen?…

Like many a silly idea this practice hit Israel a few years later, and I stopped noticing it – until this caught my eye:

This has the ubiquitous “Serving Suggestion” in fine print; what makes it unusual is two incongruities:

1. Slicing one tomato in half hardly counts as a serious serving suggestion.
2. These tomatoes would require a Magician to be served in this way. You see, the caption on the green stripe says “Crushed Tomatoes”!

I don’t expect the marketroids at Yakhin food products to be fluent in the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, but even they must know that you can serve a whole tomato by crushing it, but you can’t make a crushed tomato whole again.

Bon Appetit!

People who design signs ought to be careful, because thoughtless signage can so easily lead to confusion…

Public restroom signs are a case in point, because people who see them make assumptions. For instance, as someone once pointed out, if one sees a WC sign of the opposite gender and the one for one’s own use is not next to it, one can go seek it at the opposite end of the same floor, or in the same position on the floor above or below… there is rarely a sign to tell you which is the case.

And here is another example in this domain: I saw the sign on the left near the door to a single restroom in a large building lobby. The immediate assumption of the user is that this is a handicapped-only room, and they go looking for the Gents’ or Ladies’ room. Which is not there, because this is the only restroom in the place. The intent of the sign, no doubt, was to indicate “here is the restroom, and it is wheelchair-enabled”.

The sign on the right is far better – it is again a single facility, but there is no mistaking the fact. Though it is interesting that the fellow on the left seems to be levitating…

You need to speak Hebrew and French to detect the hilarity of this photo:

Here’s the thing: the package contains a local make of  Petit Peurre cookies, a timeless biscuit design. However, someone decided to brand it as PTIBER GADOL – literally, “Large Petit Beurre“. Except that Petit, of course, means Little…

Oh, and incidentally, neither the package nor the biscuits deviate from the standard size we’ve had for ages. The only large thing about this product is the silliness of the branding.