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Progress Blog

"Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality." - George Santayana. There are times when Progress is just plain bad. It kills me when things are adopted with flaws that seem really clearly bad, to me, but apparently not to anybody else.

• 23) While most of the classic communication things we've updated might have have gained content choices (maybe), they have only gotten drastically worse in terms of actual usability. Consider an old radio receiver with basically 2 dials on it: one for the frequency, and one for the volume. Compare that with any streaming internet radio device or software today, and Bob's Yer Uncle of Shame. Even the supposedly wonderful Sonos I'm sure can't handle the fact that gosh, sometimes the network just drops out, ya know? Whereas with radio you might get some static, the audio usually wouldn't just completely disappear.
• 22) Devices with a play but no stop button are, by definition in my world, insane. And hateful. And just plain painfully obviously wrong. It is yet another case of the device forcing the user to conform, rather than the device being at the beck and call of the user, which is what we should be striving for. I mean: duh!
• 21) Why don't laptop screens extend up on some extenders so that you could have the display higher up, so that you don't get the horrible hateful laptop neck-cramp? (I don't mean that the display has to get larger, I just mean you should be able to pull it up so there is space between the keyboard and the display.) Why aren't there laptops with ergonomic keyboards?
• 20) Leaf blowers. Ring tones. Public cell phone conversations. SUVs. Pedestrian cross-walk hardware with zero feedback when you push the button. Traffic light sensors in the street that don't work for bicycles (even when marked as supporting that feature) or even for motorcycles. Soft power switches that stop working. Automatically bathroom fixtures that work randomly or not at all. Software appliction windows that don't remember where they were last time. WiFi drop-out.
• 19) I seriously think I have literally never seen a "print" system (as in, to print out a document from your word process, web browser, whatever) that doesn't completely and utterly suck, and apparently strive to do befuddle and dog the user at every turn.
• 18) Your average person cannot be trusted to either know when something is or is not usable for themselves, or to be willing to invest the time to deal with it even if they did. That's my observation after watching people at work do things that clearly suck when you watch them using it, yet they will state that they think they are in fact being more productive. Like, having too many xterms open and being completely lost. Like, using bad trackballs (this or this): I've owned and used such devices, and eventually realized that a small, light trackball is too sensitive to motion, so your mouse pointer tends to easily get knocked out of position by your own natural twitches, and that trying to control a trackball with your thumb is just blatently stupid because most folks really don't have fine thumb motor control. Yet, people are still making these things, and people are still buying them. It utterly blows my mind. (I haven't owned this one, but it looks more acceptable.) The trackball should be large and slightly on the heavier side, and you should be using your most dexterous finger(s) - has to include your index finger - to control it. I use a Microsoft trackball (as with all things, including my rants, your mileage may vary: I don't agree with the review's comments that the buttons are bad. It did take a while to get used to the device and that is definitely generally a sign that the device is far from perfect, but I have since not had any trouble and introspectively it doesn't appear that I am bending too much to the will of the device).
• 17) I love how we're supposedly making our world oh-so connected what with the Internet and everything, but the technology still kinda sucks ass. The whole One Laptop per Child thing is at least partially going to simply drag everybody in the world into that technological dark night. Share and Enjoy!
• 16) I find the DVD style fast-forward / rewind interface to be inferior to the old tape one, or even the CD "play clicks" style. I appreciate having the other speeds, but I'd like those to be a separate option. The fundamental usability problem is that it doesn't immediately go back into regular play mode when I release the ffwd or rew button. Maybe I am just an old fuddy-duddy who can't get away from the old style interaction, and none of the new kids have trouble, but I suspect that user studies would show that the DVD style control just plain sucks; one ends up overshooting then frantically searching for the play button, and having to do the whole exercise all over again in the other direction. It is a lot like the way I think 30-second-skip is clearly superior to the TiVo style ffwd-then-rewind-a-bit UI for skipping commercials. (Sadly, I see sundry new devices adoping the frustrating DVD style e.g.: MP3 players.)
• 15) The crap we put on computers in a rather pathetic attempt to make them more secure only goes to shove the usability through the floor, into the sewers beneath. The Boy Who Cried Wolf turns out to be a story about usability, go figure!
• 14) Technology pervades ever more, and yet we all miserably fail to create usable systems: "Last month, at Atlanta's airport, a computer-generated image suggesting an explosive - not from an actual bag being screened - was flashed to test a screener's alertness. The screener, after identifying the threat, is supposed to be told it was only a test. This time, that didn't happen, and a frantic search ensued for a bag that did not exist. The terminal was shut down for about two hours, Mr. Hawley said, and the bomb squad was called. The glitch that caused the panic has been fixed, he said." [NYT]
• 13) I forgot my web account password for my bank. They've adopted some new annoying login mechanism which apparently does two things: First, all the log in pages have tiny little font-like images on them which appear to the human eye to be horrible redraw bugs in one's web browser. I suspect they are some kind of 'watermarking' thing. Second, they have forced me to go through some stupid setup, change all the old login info I had, and now I don't recall my password. So I go to try to change my password and it leads to enter my SSN and some account numbers and a PIN, and then forces me to change my login id. I didn't actually want to change my login in, I just wanted to reset my password! But, no, the system pretty much tells me I have to change my login id. So I do that. And then it tells something like, "hello , to change your password you must first enter your current password." The weird thing is that even though I couldn't then change my password, it showed me my accounts. What does this bode for the next time I want to look at things online? (Update: I see the graphical turds everywhere on their site. Turns out they are little teeny text hyperlinks, I'm guessing they must be for folks who are using vocal rather than visual browsers or something?)
• 12) I want to go to a talk. It says it is in room S360. There's a link labelled Map. The link doesn't actually take you to a map of the room, or the building it is in, it just takes you to a generic map of the campus. So that's really helpful. If you type in the building name, it will (through a pretty utterly horribly crappy UI) find the building. However, it does nothing to show you where in the building the room is. So I physically went over there and started to look for S360. I couldn't find it. I saw the main auditorium, it is the first thing you stumble over. But it wasn't labelled S360 so I looked around some more. The only signs I could see on the buildings were things like "1.1", "1.2", etc. on the first floor, "2.1", "2.2", etc. on the 2nd floor, etc. There were, of course, no readily apparent maps of the building or the rooms anywhere. There were no signs saying where information could be found. No, there was basically nothing useful at all. I ended up going to the main auditorium and heard a different lecture, all the while wondering if it was the one I wanted to find. Turns out it wasn't. I still really don't know where the bloody hell S360 is.
• 11) The thing is, while this is funny if you are technically inclined, I cannot fault the people being made fun of becuase technology has become inherently complex, confusing, over-sold and just generally insane. Sure, knowing the fundamental difference between Access and Excel would be something you'd hope folks would really know, but on the other hand why should they have to? Shouldn't they just have to know what they want done and shouldn't technology magically get that done for them?
• 10) Pretty much everything in The Daily WTF is more evidence heaped on, showing how hopeless existence really is in the modern world. The kicker on top of the icing on top of the coup de grâce is that the website itself is a WTF.
• 9) There is no such thing as security. Get over it. (And I suggest just sticking your head in the sand, rather than attempting to read up, it is too depressingly repetitive.)
• 8) The idea of property is killing us. (That's just a mild set of examples.)
• 7) Laptops and video projectors for meetings. There is so much that is broken, hateful, evil, painful, and immoral about the scenario that I can't do it justice. Nevertheless, I'll mention the time when somebody was running MS Excel on a PowerBook and used Excel's "full screen" mode, only to end up with a button in the middle of the screen that says "close full screen mode", overlaying the spreadsheet.
• 6) It kills me that sundry laptops I've come across emit high pitched death sounds. I don't know if it is the hard drive or the power supply or what, but it kills me.
• 5) While I appreciate trying to take care of left-handed folks, everything else about this item screams, "fall of humanity" to me.
• 4) It is great how modern equipment doesn't actually turn off when you press the button, because actually you have to press the button twice, or maybe hold it down for five seconds before anything happens. Particularly eregious suckage comes from video projectors that blast the fan for 30 seconds when you press the 'off' button in a furious attempt to cool the lamp down. Blah.
• 3) I'm old and my eyes are going (but the world's population is tending towards the older end, no?) and I'd like to complain bitterly about the utterly stupid use of high-intensity LEDs for automobile tail-lights. The current implementations show an utter disregard for usability - this kind of thing would lead to beheadings in my dictatorship. The main problems I have with things are 1) the lights are too damned needlessly bright and are painful at night and 2) they turn on and off without any fade, so as people are pumping brakes or being dorks and sorta braking on-and-off again, you get these stupid bright lights flashing on and off in your face, which is really bloody annoying and 3) some of them are on a duty cycle so you get the weird sorta strobing-ghosting effect as the lights go by, or as you move your eyes, which is all very distracting. It kills me that these are, to me, really pretty blatantly bad design choices and yet it seems nobody even remotly has a clue that they suck. I think it must all boil down to the fact that, fundamentally, humans suck.
• 2) SF Bay Area Caltrain is revamping all of it's passenger train cars. I do not like the new design. The main thing that sucks about the new cars are the seats. The old cars had simple bench seats with no arm rests. There were single and double width seats. For the new cars, every single width has a non-adjustable arm rest. So, you can no longer sleep on an uncrowded train, you can no longer let your shoulders relax (because your elbows are kept up by the arm rests), you can no longer have stuff on the seat right next to you that you can reach with no obstructions. It's totalitarian crap.
• 1) SF Muni (of which there is too much to criticize) had old Metro cars. I guess they were not very robust. That might be one of the reasons they decided to go and find some new style of car to buy. It ends up they bought some Italian made cars that are like twice the price of the US built ones. A rumous has it that the new cars were bought apparently before anybody actually paid any attention to their dimensions, so when they started running them Muni suddenly realized they were too wide for many of the raised public boarding platforms, and so large concrete saws were brought to bear. Anyway, that's just an aside. The thing I really hate about the new cars is their motor control. When Metro cars enter the underground portion of the system, they become controlled by an automatic system. The driver is hands-off. The old cars had a smooth acceleration whereas the new ones seem to use some poorly designed pulse-width modulation system that runs at like one, or maybe three, Hertz. So the entire car is constantly pulsing as it is changing speed, sorta throwing all the passengers to and fro. It's really freaking annoying!