What if.... Ponderings over technology

At work we have a copy machine that you have to sign out of when you are done, by clicking buttons on the Touch screen THREE (3) times.  First, click your name in the upper right corner, then select Log Out from the menu, then a new menu comes up asking: Are you sure you want to Log Out? and then you have to hit yes.   Isn't it amazing that something as simple as logging out is made so convoluted?  They can't blame it on safety. 
     When you drive a car and turn left, nobody stops you and wait for you to confirm once or twice that YES, INDEED, I want to turn left.  Imaging the number of accidents that would happen if you had to confirm every little action while driving a car... and response times would increase as would frustration and road rage.  What a waste of time in front of the printer.

At home we have a printer that stops working as soon as one of the colors is finished, even if there is black ink left and you only want to print in black and white.  It just won't print.  It is on strike until you have bought new, expensive color ink (or photo gloss, or whatever it might be), that you don't need for that particular print job. 
    When you drive a car, and the windshield washer fluid runs dry, the car just doesn't stop working and waiting for you to fill up more of it, regardless of where you are.  That would be inconceivable.

Sometimes when you surf the web and look at stuff, the network gets clogged, or the software slows down, and even sometimes, the program or even the computer just crashes, and you are forced to restart the computer.  
   When you drive a car, it suddenly just doesn't stop randomly or goes at tiny speed because of some outside force field or sluggish connection.  That would be pretty dangerous.

Many times you look around on the web and try to find a good restaurant so you browse their web pages, but when you go to their website you are met by 'the intro' - some awful music, slow things (usually photos) moving across the page, and you have to sit there and waste your time unless you can find the tiny semi-hidden text called 'Skip this intro'.  After that torture and time-waste is over, you can start to look for 1) opening hours, 2) address and directions, and 3) the menu.  You would think those three things are the most important information to get to your potential customers, and that at least 1 and 2 should be listed on the opening page of the home page. Oh no, you often have to guess where it is, maybe under 'Contact Us", or 'About Us', or some other non-direct heading.  And often you have to scroll down because the bottom of the page can't be seen at first sight.  For the menus, those are often under a tab, but many are hidden under headings that are tiny, and on extremely slow-loading pages (including the crashing pdf-format), or just small.
    If you drive a car, it doesn't play unwanted intro music when you start it.  It starts up, then it immediately shows you if anything is wrong with the car on the dashboard (any Check Engine light on? Doors open? No, good!).  All information is right there, ready to check out and react to.  Restaurant web pages are like Lego Men hidden in pizza dough, you can't find them or you find a little piece but you can't see the rest.

Who designs these things?  I thought designers' jobs were to make things that WORK WELL and LOOK GOOD.  The first of those things, i.e. practicality, user-friendliness, and usability is as important as that it looks great.  The funny thing is that often the companies insist that their way of doing things are for our convenience, when in reality these things cause us inconvenience, frustration, or just waste time.  Books never fail to open.  Compasses never run out of batteries. Simplicity and ease-of-use means just that, simplicity. 

Will it take 50-100 years to make the internet, printers, copiers, and computers as user-friendly and reliable as cars?  I hope not.  Of course cars break down at times, but they are far more reliable than most of our other home electronics.  I love things that work and that even if complicated, are easy to use. Don't get me started on the design of remote controls... you would think they get paid by the numbers of buttons they put on them.  How long did it take for cars to enter the phase of user-friendliness?  And maybe cars are now on their way to become less user-friendly again?  I haven't mastered the GPS in PP's car at all, because it is not at all intuitive. 

PS.  OK, you want examples of bad design offenders? Here is one...
Prune Restaurant, New York City   
You have to CLICK to enter their website.  What did they think, that you got to their website by accident and need to confirm with them that you actually want to be there?  And then click on Menu and see if you can see their partial tiny menu in a scrolling window... The prices on the lunch menu are about 4 mm tall on my screen.  That is about half as big as a black pepper corn.  Anybody that can read the ingredients on the Bloody Mary menu online ought to get a free drink, or two. Prune, shape up, and fix your website please...

I think Steve Jobs got it right in this quote:

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Modern life, with a smartphone in hand...?

 " Everywhere I looked people were detached from everything around them.  From the beautiful produce, the delightful pastries, the never-before-in-the-history-of-man selections of great wines and cheeses.  The guys were not "checking out" the plethora of beautiful girls flowing like spring water thru the aisles.  The women weren't even noticing the displays of chocolate.  Instead, they did the "thorazine shuffle" with their carts aimlessly navigated with one hand and the rest of their being concentrated either on staring like zombies at the screens of their iPhones or Blackberries, or wandering without a compass while listening to something at the other end of their cell connection, eyes staring off into the middle distance.  "  [by Kirk Tuck]

From this fantastic blogpost, read the rest of it, it is worth at least 5 minutes of your time. The blog is called Visual Science Lab and is written by Kirk Tuck. Lots of great thoughts there! (and thanks PP for sending the link to me)

This is so true.  And as an owner of an iPhone, which can be incredibly useful at times, I am happy to admit that and I use it more often than necessary, I also see the horrible addiction possibilities.  I often think that it is the software opportunities, apps, and 'things' on the technologies that pull people in, more than the technology per se - things like texting (instant), Facebook (instant), twitter (instant), and the need to be connected, to whatever that might be - the instant feed of stuff you haven't asked for.  I am sure there are situations where these instant feeds can be a good thing, but if 95% of it isn't, then it is a problem. And it just pushes more people just to think about me-me-me or superficial snapshot moments, instead of less self-focused things with deeper reflections.

One of my students said 'I have to check Facebook all the time, I might miss out on something otherwise'.  What that something might be, was less important.  I think this me-me-me generation that is growing up now (and that includes people of my age too), are actually horribly afraid of being alone, being unimportant, or being self-sufficient without input from other people.  To lay in a sofa and read a book during a Saturday is considered weird.  Go for a walk?  Weird.  Try to produce something thoughtful or beautiful over a longer time, not an instant opinion or just reaction to something, is unusual. 

Life in the internet and wi-fi age has turned into fast, fragmented, and furious.  My best thinking time and planning time is the early morning walks, just me, a friend, and a quiet morning with hammering woodpeckers, sunrise in dewy grass, and right now, shining white flowering dogwoods in the forests.  No interruption, just one hour of walking and talking and thinking and figuring it all out.  Without any digital technology, but the iPhone is in the pocket if a photo is needed, but usually the photos turn out so bad on it, that it isn't worth taking one.  My old digital camera is a lot better, but heavier, so it stays home. 

The truth about bacon...

Bacon is a rainbow of flesh and fat., originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Quote of the Day: rainbows

Recently heard in our kitchen:


"Bacon is like a rainbow of flesh and fat..."

(from someone that really loves bacon)

A sports quote and some ponderings

Football has the same relation to education that bullfighting has to agriculture.                                
           Robert Maynard Hutchins (President, University of Chicago)

This is of course about the crazy college sports that are going on here in the US.  Players that are like slaves, using their bodies for a few years, end up with injuries for the rest of their lives, and earn a lot for a short time, and then nothing maybe.  There are billions of dollars in college sports here in the US.  In Sweden the sports are private teams, unrelated to colleges, like other parts of Europe.  How did US sports come to be so associated with educational institutions?  There are students here in the US that pick their college based on how the football team is doing, not how good the academic programs are.  That is just crazy. 

Toothpaste for dinner shows it best in his cartoon, Sports Aren't News.  [OK readers, you may like sports, that is OK, I am not outlawing it, I just think it is ridiculous that more money and attention is spent on sports than making this a better world to live in for everybody.]

Source and copyright for image: www.toothpastefordinner.com

Quote of the Day: autospeak from customer care agents

I called the Wells Fargo bank about our mortgage, and got to the wrong department.  The friendly, human but slightly automated person offered to transfer me to the mortgage department and I said 'of course, yes please'.  She then continued with this phrase:

"If I connect you, will that take care of the reason for your call?"

My mind did a double-take, went into reverse warp speed, hiccuped, and then I said "what?", since the logic didn't work in my brain.  She repeated her question, exactly like before. By then I had figured out what the sentence meant and how stupid it was, so I just answered:

"I don't know yet."

Whoever is writing these scripts for customer 'care' people who are answering the phones for companies really need to think a bit more human and logical.  How in the melting snow of Antarctica am I supposed to know if a transfer will take care of my problem?  How many stressed out people don't even bother to think and just automatically answer 'yes', when confronted with this an unanswerable question?  It seems like that the question is there just to provide some positive feedback to the customer 'care' agent.

A while ago I had to call the internet company and was on the phone with someone in the Philippines for half an hour.  When the call ended, he entered into the auto-stupid-written-down-speak and said 'thanks for calling Comcast, we are happy we could help you today..', whereby I interrupted and said 'actually, you didn't, the problem is still here and you couldn't solve it'.  He then admitted to that at least.

Quote of the Day: calling the smart people at the Collegeboard.com about SAT

I had reason tonight to call the CollegeBoard, the people that administer the SAT, the big dreaded test taken by all American highschool students that want to go to college. These are smart people asking tiny, detailed questions about grammar in their tests.

In the automatic answering system, which guides you to the right place when you call I got this question:

"Are you a parent or a student? Answer yes or no."

OK, I am a parent, but not a student.  Do I answer yes or no?  I bet someone thought this was a very straightforward question, but I don't think so...

Weird real quotes: Waiter

While having lunch here in New Jersey a few days ago, the waiter came up after we had received our food and said:

"How did everything come out so far?"

Excuse me, but I am not in the bathroom. I am eating!

Quote of the Day: from Mad Men about Swedes

PP and I are watching Season 4 of the Mad Men TV series about 1960s advertising executives.  Fascinating and good.  And the set is so right, down to the wall paper and cereal boxes. No sloppiness here.

So, in today's episode Peggy said this:

"You are never gonna get me to do anything Swedish people do!"

(episode 3, season 4)  Won't tell you more, the rest you have to see. :)

Quote of the Day, heard in our kitchen

What is the cannibal motto?

"To serve man."

Our brains are lying to us

I just read this:

"the human mind is superb at seeing pattern, even when it doesn't exist, [...], and the human mind in contrast often has trouble seeing actual patterns in multidimensional space"  

[Curtis Clark on Taxacom]

...and it is so true.  Examples are sayings such as 'bad things come in three' (they don't, statistically).  Our brain is fooling us at times, and other times, we cannot just grasp the immense patterns in 3-dimensional space and time.  Just try to understand the universe...