Bill Gates Knows Bad Usability

And points it out about his own products.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

ATM Fail

see more pwn and owned pictures

Heh.

All I Wanted to Do Was Look At Refrigerators

When Best Buy’s ecommerce system needs some work they take the entire site offline. All I wanted to do was comparison shop for refrigerators; I didn’t want to order one online (who would order a refrigerator over the internet, btw?) So I spent last night at Sears.com, which some some surprisingly rich, well-done features.

Disambiguation

Software shouldn’t confuse me, and cause me to circumvent it to find out information about what it’s asking me to do. It should disambiguate between similarly named components, and make the results of my actions perfectly clear.

Windows XP doesn’t always do this:

My USB drives have names. Why not name them so I know what I’m ejecting? Instead, it’s back to Windows Explorer to figured what is mapped to Drive(F) and Drive(E), respectively.

.NET Fail

Captured by a co-worker. Classic.

Good Customer Service is Good Usability (and Vice-Versa)

I was in Macy’s the other day buying the girl some earrings. The jewelry department at Macy’s (or any department store for that matter) consists of a number of scattered island, each one of which has a cash register that you can pay at. On this particular day, one woman was handling all transactions in the department — sales, returns, etc. I got in line, and there were two people ahead of me, the first with some complicated purchase, and the second with a return. It was taking forever, and after 5 minutes or so in line to pay, I become impatient. I spotted two sales people at a jewelry counter across the way, so left my place in line and walked over there and asked to pay. “Sorry, we can’t do that here,” one responded, and turned back to chat with his co-worker. Another joined in. They had a nice conversation.

Obviously, I was dumbfounded. Why not help me? You’re the jewelry counter — you sell stuff with the personal touch, and then wrap up the goods and ring up the customer. Why not me? Whatever — I marched my ass back over and waited in line another ten minutes to ring up my purchase, and then trudged out of Macy’s fuming that it took so long.

It wasn’t his fault, of course. The failure was Macy’s departmental design, which followed a system implementation model rather than a user needs model. Either there was no point of sale system in place at that particular counter, or the system was limited to certain SKUs or other product type that limited them selling goods from other departments (in this case, I discovered I had walked into the “fine jewelry” department, but I had goods from the regular jewelery department.) In any case, their reason for failure was systems-based, but could have easily been solved with some usability testing. New system rules could say “hey, when there are a lot of people line line, leave your station to go help them and ring them up elsewhere.” Or, “enable the ability for anyone in the store to ring up any type of item for anyone.”

The latter rule is probably already in case… you can usually buy anything anwhere at department stores. The culprit was likely a rule that said you can’t cross departments to help out in another when that department is slammed. You must always man your station, which is stupid. Inflexible systems are bad design.

Adhering to Global Controls and Patterns

Software should follow common patterns–not just visual design patterns, but interaction patterns as well. For example, in Windows ctrl+c should always map to copy selection, no matter the software one is using.

Foobar2000 is a much beloved music software package, offering a flexible, highly customizable interface for advanced users (and the best response time of any music player out there).

However, sometimes it confounds. For example, I often create playlists on the fly. I would expect “delete” to remove a highlighted item from my playlist.

Instead it does nothing — which is better than deleting the item from my hard drive (which would be beyond bad usability) — but is still bad for two reasons:

1. It breaks with the global pattern
2. Because it does nothing, it leaves us hanging (hit it again! hit it again! Huh? what? Confused!)

Windows Media Player does a better job, conforming to expected behavior. If only it were as fast.

Navigation Without Explanation

Word spread through the blogosphere yesterday that Acer will be pushing Linux options more aggressively for its desktop and notebook computers. As an Ubuntu user, this excited me; my Dell notebook is going on 3 1/2 years, and its screen was damaged in a freak rubbing alcohol incident, so I’ll be looking to upgrade in the next year or so. So, I stopped by the Acer website to peruse the company’s offerings. After selecting notebook computers from the global menu, I was given a single way in which to view the selection of notebooks:

The present one model for laptop selection: product name. This is little help to me, as my criteria for selection is a delicate mixture of price, size, RAM, and hard disk space. But instead of being given the option to pivot on these attributes I must, instead, select one, review it, go back, select one, review it, and so on.

Acer has other problems, too. I encountered a “too many peoplare accessing this page error” numerous times while visting the site.

You contrast that with Dell’s laptop picker (below), and how can Acer expect to compete? Seriously?

Anticipating My Every Move

Some goodness here.

I love Firefox for many reasons (as I’m sure we all do). One reason inparticular is that it believes me when I tell it I download something. So, when I click a link to an MP3, for example:

Downloading an MP3 from RCRDLBL

It starts to download the MP3 before I have even chose a place to put it. Sometimes it has complete downloaded before I click “OK.” Presumably, it downloads to cache, and then moves the file to whatever director I select.

IE does not do this. It patiently waits for me to select my directory, and then downloads the file, costing me extra seconds/minutes/hours. Why? What’s it waiting for? Is it assuming I made a bad decision?

Good, usable software knows us and anticipates our every move. Bad software does not.

Forgetful Applications

My org runs on Microsoft Exchange, which we use for email, calendaring, IM, etc. Two or three times a day I have to stop what I’m doing and reenter my password. Proof:

Of course, this is all tied to my domain log-on. If I’m still logged onto the domain, why must I periodcally reenter my credentials? Bad usability…