Archive for June, 2009

Parking lot design snafu

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 28, 2009
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

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.

Parking spot with poles

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…

  1. 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.
  2. 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!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Help is also about what can’t be done

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 22, 2009
in Design principles and Improvement
. 0 Comments

Working in Adobe Photoshop CS4, and I just bumped into a menu item I needed that is grayed out. This does happen: Photoshop has a huge wealth of commands and capabilities, and many depend on the context – for example there are things you can only do in RGB color mode and not in Indexed color mode, and so on.

However, because things are so rich and full of complex dependencies, it is sometimes impossible to figure out WHY a given command is unavailable. It can get quite maddening, in fact. So, here is an idea for the folks at Adobe to consider:

When there is a grayed out menu item, please add a tooltip or status line tip or some such that says “This command is unavailable because…”

This would make life so much easier for us. You’ve put considerable effort into providing help for things that we can do, so also give us some advice when we can’t do what we’d like. Of course this is very context-sensitive – the command may be unavailable for a variety of reasons, and the program knows, internally, what the current reason it.

I can think of one software product that does this, though not on a computer: the TV PVR box we have, provided by Hot cable company, announces every now and then that you can’t preset a recording because there are already two others overlapping the same time slot. But it doesn’t just refuse to record; it announces on screen “to record program X you must cancel one of the following two programs [Y and Z]… please select which one to cancel, or ESC to exit”. It explains the issue and it immediately allows you to fix it.

The same advice applies to a variety of products, not just Adobe’s, of course!

Tweeting in a dream

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 19, 2009
in Odds and Ends
. 0 Comments

Tonight I had a dream where I was going through some boring paperwork at some public office and the guy behind me in line asked me if I knew what Twitter is all about. Ever helpful, I took out my Nokia smartphone and showed him how I tweet. I don’t remember what I posted, and my Gravity client only displays outgoing tweets from the real world, so we’ll never know.

A few months ago I blogged about how blogging had crossed over into my dreams, and now Twitter followed suit.

We’re making progress here! 🙂

A loop of helpful helplessness

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 16, 2009
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

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?…

Automated customer service…

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 9, 2009
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

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).

More disempowered power sockets

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 6, 2009
in Bad design
. 0 Comments

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:

Mains socket strip mounted above a conduit

Mains socket strip and plugI 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.

Polaroid photography is back from the dead!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on June 1, 2009
in Design history
. 2 Comments

I recently saw  the movie Memento, whose protagonist had his ability to form long term memory destroyed by a brain trauma. The guy remembers his early life but any new memory fades in minutes. Unfazed, since he is out on a mission of vengeance, he compensates by writing notes to his future self on scraps of paper and as tattoos on his body; and when he meets a person he takes out his Polaroid camera, produces a photo, and – before he forgets – writes on its back notes like “Don’t believe his lies” or “He’s the one. Kill him!”

It’s a fascinating movie, and makes you think a good deal about issues of memory, mind, and self; one other thought that came to me was that if he’d been doing it today, the hero would be at a loss – because Polaroid instant photography gear production died with a whimper last year, a victim to Digital Cameras.

Apart from amnesiac vigilantes, the demise of Polaroid cameras was a loss to us all. Sure, digital cameras are great, and have added many fascinating usage models to our life (think snapping a shot on a cellphone and sending it to a friend in a jiffy), but crowding with the friends you snapped around a tiny LCD screen is a far cry from the excitement of passing a high-resolution hardcopy photo around…

Polaroid PoGo cameraSo I was delighted to see here the news of the Polaroid PoGo 5 Megapixel camera. Going with “if you can’t beat them, join them”, Polaroid is releasing this month a digital camera that produces instant color prints on its patented ZINK paper. I doubt that this will become widely used – for one thing, it’s bound to be rather expensive – but at least the instant usage model will be available to those who need it, or who just enjoy the fun. And there’s a kind of justice in it being Polaroid corporation that is making this heir to its past flagship product…