This morning I get in the good ol’ red Renault Clio, put it in reverse and start backing out, when the car emits a persistent beep.
I stop and scan the dashboard, and there I see a message on the alphanumeric display: Select Park. I do put the gear in Park, and everything is back to normal. I try to reverse again – beep and message return.
This makes very little sense, so I stop, pull out the owner’s manual and look for error messages. There is a pageful of them, but no mention of “Select Park”. I feel like those brisk officers in action dramas that say to their panicky men “Talk to me!”… but the car isn’t talkative, merely cryptic.
After a while I notice the overhead lamp is on, so I realize the door isn’t fully latched; I slam it shut, the car is happy, and I’m off to a day’s work. But the Select Park message is now a nominee for worst car error message ever. Consider:
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With the same display they could’ve made it say “Close door“, or “Door open“. Could’ve? Heck, should have!
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Note the lower display, which does indicate an open door. Problem is, the Select Park message is so much more prominent and puzzling, that the second display failed to register in my mind altogether.
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The beep and text alert only work when you’re in reverse motion. This makes no sense, and had me looking for a cause to do with this specific mode.
Bottom line: error messages should explain causes, either directly (Door is open!) or indirectly (Close the door!). A message that essentially says “Freeze! Something is wrong!” is no good.
I sent a friend an email with an attached Zip file. It bounced, with a message from “System Administrator” that read
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The following recipient(s) could not be reached: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx …
552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines. u14sm9443132gvf.20
I figured maybe the note is from my friend’s system – maybe the file was too large? So I resent it to him to another mail address, with the same outcome. Then it occurred to me to mail the file to myself… long story short, eventually I went to the source of all wisdom – ironically, Google – and discovered that Google Mail, through which I was sending, has a policy forbidding any zip file that contains an executable (which my attachment, quite lawfully, did).
So I sent the file via yousendit, and that was that. But it did occur to me that I would’ve saved a lot of time had Google Mail elected to phrase their bounce message in human-friendly informative terms, such as:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
- – -
It was blocked by GMail’l outgoing mail server, because it has a zip attachment containing an executable file. GMail does not allow this. For more info, see http://…..
Not as succinct as u14sm9443132gvf.20, but rather more useful, don’t you think?
Here is a photo from a parking lot. As you see, one parking spot has been mutilated – apparently, as an afterthought – by sticking two poles in it.
The intent, clearly, is to keep a clear path to the stairs leading to the sidewalk above. A valid idea, but ill-executed in so many ways…
- This is a normally full lot. Given that, most drivers would much rather have an extra parking space available, and wiggle their way in between the cars on their way out.
- Possibly the idea is to allow access to people in wheelchairs or with baby prams, but if so, they should’ve built a ramp, not a staircase!
- The two poles are just far enough from the right edge of the space that sub-compact cars can and often do try to park anyway, thereby blocking the passage even worse than they would have absent the poles. If the designers wanted to ensure free passage, they should’ve used four poles, fencing a passage from the stairs that is wide enough for a person and definitely too narrow for a car.
- Of course, if they did that, they could’ve used much less width than is being wasted now…
Not rocket science, but it isn’t only in rocket design that it pays to think before doing things.
I called someone in the US and he wasn’t at his desk; the system helpfully informed me that the guy was not available but that I could
…please leave a message – or, during business hours, press zero for assistance.
It was during business hours.
I pressed zero.
The system cheerfully told me:
Please hold! Someone will be with you shortly!
It was, technically, right. Quite shortly afterward, a nice woman picked up and I told her who I needed to talk to. She said:
All I can do is transfer you to his line, sir.
Which is exactly where I came from.
Whoever designed this flow spared no effort to integrate humans and machines into a single loop of helpless helpfulness. Or is it helpful helplessness?…
My account on a social networking group froze me out, so I wrote their support an email explaining that I can’t log in, with details of how this came about. I got a wonderful reply indeed:
Please follow the following steps:
1. Log in to your account
…
Wonderful! I replied “You’re joking, right?” and reiterated the situation. This time I got a reply from a real human (she signed it with a name, not “The help team”) who politely apologized for the automated response and proceeded to help.
So, instead of blogging about a silly support person, I’m blogging about a silly automated surrogate of a support person. Of course it’s hardly news that machines shouldn’t be trusted with solving our problems – remember:
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Oh well… all’s well that ends well (though not for Frank Poole).
A couple of weeks ago we saw a poorly designed twin mains socket. Whoever designed that one wasn’t very bright, but he was a genius compared to the person who mounted the socket strip we see here:
I found this setup in an office building. Ignore the shoddy execution of the cable conduit below, but ask yourself, what was this electrician thinking, when he mounted the power strip in this specific position above the conduit?!
If the issue isn’t obvious to you, The photo at right shows where the problem is. This one goes beyond poor design, beyond incompetence, to open entire new vistas of poor craftsmanship.
Here are two mains power sockets from around our home. One is a standard grounded 220V socket. The second is obviously much better: in the same space, for the same trouble, it takes two plugs! In the USA this is of course standard practice; all wall socket panels have two sockets. Here, though, this is less common, perhaps because our plugs are larger. So – isn’t that twin socket neat?
Well, it would have been, if the designer had been thinking. You can see the problem in the next photo: most grounded mains plugs have the cable coming out the side – and this means the second socket in this panel is obstructed by this cable. All it would take to fix this is to build the panel the other way around, with the ground connections on the outside rather than facing the center, or better yet, place the two plugs side by side with the cables going down towards the floor. Cost and complexity of production would have been identical; usefulness would have doubled.
Shame!
Last year I reported on the inefficient design of a teleconference system, as far as respect for the user’s time is concerned.
Today I sat through a really lovely case of this design issue. This system, speaking with a booming, ebullient voice, took me through the following:
System: Welcome to the conference center!
System: Please enter your passcode followed by the pound sign!
[I did]
System: Please hold while your passcode is being verified!
System (1 second later): Your passcode has been accepted!
System: You can press Star-Zero At any time during the conference to receive additional assistance!
System: At the tone please say your name then press the pound key!
[I did]
System: At the tone, you will be placed into the conference as the third participant!
Obviously, it would’ve been enough if after the second line – once I input the correct passcode – the system had connected me. All the rest of this monologue is useless (OK, in some situations, asking me to say my name may be useful too; but none of the rest).
And in fact, when I was placed into the conference, another participant who had just run this gauntlet of useless chatter said “I wanted to yell at the system “Just SHUT UP!”“
Not that the system would have listened… 
I already praised my Nokia E71 smartphone, that marvel of miniaturized power. Well, today I tried to update Nokia PC Suite, the software that runs on my notebook to allow it to sync with the smartphone.
And as I was clicking through the installation process, something caught my eye in the dialog below:
It was the number in parentheses: 290MB. That’s 290 million eights of binary digits.
And in case anyone thought this tool can calculate the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything, or something equally formidable that might justify a size that not long ago would have sufficed for an entire operating system, the dialog explains: with this tool, you can connect your phone to a PC and access mobile content. I remember a tool I had long ago that did the same sort of thing; it was called LapLink and had fit on a floppy disk.
To be fair to Nokia, they aren’t the only ones pushing bloatware with their hardware; but the irony of a cool, tiny phone coming with a huge piece of support code is hard to ignore.
Used to be, at the beginning of every (face to face) meeting ten minutes would be wasted on getting the slide projector going. Today many meetings are virtual, but the same time is still wasted while people try to log into the shared meeting workspace…
A case in point: I’ve just participated in a meeting using WebEx to share documents across the world. Nice. But the meeting started ten minutes late, because it took me that time to wade through the invitation email and figure out what I had to do. Now, I’m not perfect, but I’m an experienced IT engineer… so what was this delay about?
The meeting invite email (which was quite lengthy, and included no less than seven links, of which I only needed two) told me to dial into a tollfree phone number to join the audio part. When I did that I was cheerfully welcomed by a machine that told me to dial my “access code or meeting number followed by the pound sign”. I started to scan the email frantically looking for a meeting number or an access code; none were to be seen. The message contained various long numbers, mostly inside the link URLs, so I tried those in random order. The one that finally worked was the last one I tried (naturally) and it was the number the message referred to as my “Session number“.
So yes, maybe I’m naive, but if they want me to dial a session number, couldn’t the recording say “Please dial your session number“? Or, better yet, “Please dial the session number found near the top of your invitation email”?
