Doors and Affordances

The classic example of affordance from Norman is the door. Specifically he talks about door handles — how a well-designed door affords grabbing. We just do it instinctually: no thought needed. One other thing door designers must think about is which way they swing, in or out or both.

Top Pot Doughnuts in downtown Seattle, for all its loveliness (their treats are the BOMB), has a door problem. When you enter the store, you push the door in. Presumably you’re empty handed when you do so. However, when leaving, some of the time your hands will be full of donuts and coffee and the like. However, when you leave the store, you must grab the door handle and pull it in — a very trick maneuver when you’re juggling treats. Bad usability, Top Pot!

A better solution would be to have a door that swings outside. That way when your hands are full, you can simply lean into the door to escape to the sidewalk.

(Next time we discuss Top Pot’s website.)

Good Error Messages — Not Just for Software

I tried to make a pot of coffee the other day. Here’s what happened:

Apparently, I caused error 4 to occur. What is error 4? No idea. I could have consulted the manual… except it went in recycling some time in the last year and a half since I got the coffee pot. Err4 probably means something to someone somewhere — an engineer or designer, perhaps — to my bleary-eyed brain on a Sunday morning, it simply means “huh? Uh, hit button. No. Hmm. Hit this button? Nope. Restart? Maybe.”

What could they have put? Four letters is pretty restrictive. Maybe one of these:

• POWR
• RSET
• OnOf

None of these are that helpful, but at least the user might get that he should cycle the power. A better idea would be to allow for 5 or 6 characters, and then use a slightly more verbose message.

Email Attachments: Bad Usability Only You Can Prevent

Why put something in a Word or PDF file and email it, when you could simply include that information within the email body itself? Case in point:

A particuarly egregious offense — not only is the information within the PDF something that could be included in the body (a list of the our paid holidays), but the PDF is a scanned image of the the printed sheet. Thus, an email that should have been 4kb, and required no extra clicks, no weighs 200kb, and requires us to open Adobe Reader.

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.

Bud Light Downloads

Well, I hate to harsh on someone giving away free stuff, but unfortunately Bud Light commits two sins in giving away its free music:

First, age validation requires you to enter your date of birth to verify that you can drink beer. Fair enough. But form fields fail to clear when you click in the field:

And then once you get to the download page, the MP3 file is stored in a zip file:

Zips are fine when you have many files. They did it here because they’re include a thumbnail image with the MP3. But really, who wants a thumb for a single MP3? They’re optimizing for the music nerd here, not the 90% of us who don’t care about an image — and the extra work to extract the MP3 is prohibitive.