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.

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?

Thanks for Nothing, Visio

Software shouldn’t leave you hanging. Right? Unfortunately, Visio just did…

Turns out I had the file open in another application. After a few moments I figured it out… but it would have helped to have been told to close that app.