Every time I decide to pen a rant about some user experience issue or other, I feel a bit guilty. Guilty because I know it’s hard to be positive, easy to be cynical, and makes me look nasty. But I’m going to justify this one on the grounds that if countless hoards of designers are bleating about how good something is even if it’s objectively full of holes, I have a duty to counter-balance the situation by pointing out this fact. Apple’s dominance…
Tag: stupidity
On January 5th, 2010, The Independent published a photo as a backdrop to a feature inviting readers to submit pictures of the snow and cold weather. But they never asked the photographer if they could use his work. Newspapers and magazines have of course from time immemorial sometimes used work without either attributing, asking or paying the creators. There are a number of reasons for this, and cock-up is certainly one of them. Were it, say, 197…
Angela Epstein is unbelievably pleased to have been able to “bag poll [sic] position” in getting a national identity card. While she is apparently aware that the cards are “hotly disputed”, she says “everyone is entitled to their view”. Epstein (the Jewish surname not without some grim irony here) may think that ID cards are to be debated at the level of the colour of soft furnishings or who should win The X Factor, but amid all the blinkered adm…
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long, long time: if you’re going to put information about something on the web, PUT A DATE ON IT. It’s not hard – it can be automated, fun even. As it is, I have to ignore stuff like this because I don’t know if it was posted yesterday, last year, or 10 years ago. What was the author thinking? For all I know, the article is completely irrelevant. Breathtaking. Somebody is now going to point out that there i…
Just so wrong – and you have to dismiss it with a mouse click as well. Possibly an even worse violation of the principle of avoiding user distraction than Windows networking trumpeting its wireless connections. Why should I care? It’s so hard living through the dawn of interaction design. All I can hope for is that we will see a day when people who are responsible for design decisions like this are burnt alive on a pyre of unsold copies of Acroba…
… mdja Spot on. mdja So google’s now allowing people to vote on search results… is this the end? Jonathan Possibly disastrous, but I would hope that in Google’s case, the voting is simply supplementing their other methods of determining rank. (BTW not seen it yet – they’re multi-variant testing I think)…
Southern Electric are total muppets. Accessing their site using FF3 under Linux shows nothing but the Flash background (I hardly ever find sites that are completely broken these days). Not only that, when I try to update my profile, they tell me to choose a “proper” surname! Could there be a less effective wording for an “invalid character” message? When it comes to something as sensitive as people’s names, if you can’t parse characters in them, …