it constantly impresses me how humanity manages to end up creating experiences for the end-user which just outright suck. i went and got a used copy of Far Cry Instincts for my old xbox. either they sold me a disc that is nothing but a long movie advertisement demo of the game, and not the actual game itself, or the people who made that game are the ones i'd put first up against the wall when the revolution comes, since i can't seem to skip this 5+ minute intro movie bullcrap.

[update: many minutes later... it is the real game. genius!]
[update: somebody says that the game is doing that to cover up the fact that it is doing a butt-load of setup work. (of course, other people don't believe a word of it.) so basically they are doing the worst thing possible (screwing the user) with for the worst possible reasons (because they chose a stupid approach technologically).]

i went back to play some old xbox games. i was playing Crimson Skies and rediscovering that while it is a pretty great game, at the same time there are some real hum-dinger screw-ups in it. for example, my plane was like 99.9% damaged and then a check point and cut-scene happened, at the end of which my plane is always put right in front of the enemy so that it always gets shot once and immediately dies. so the whole thing ends up being a groundhog day infinite unescapable loop of the cut-scene followed by instantaneous death followed by restarting at the checkpoint which is the cut-scene.

now, that's what the Danes call play testing.

here's a recipe for terrific customer service, direct from Acer: make sure that people who send items in for repair have to call and wait on hold for a long time to get the status of the repair - don't have anything on the web site or any email notifications at all.

i find that pretty much any interaction with a web site that needs to have security only leaves me with a powerful desire to take a nail-studded baseball bat to whoever created said site. i mean, there's the basic usability issues (e.g. putting everything IN ALL CAPS FOR READABILITY AND LEGIBILITY) which are then nicely compounded by the utterly hateful lame wrong broken useless arbitrary 'security' stuff (e.g. having a 'security question' which can be answered by any hacker who has one more IQ point than a lobotomized dog turd).

a certain web site i might use on occasion makes use of my SSN. it doesn't do it as a password field, so it shows up as the real numbers until i move to the next field at which point some javascript changes it to *'s. the kicker is that of course if you don't have javascript enabled a) they don't tell you b) so it doesn't hide the numbers and c) when you click to log in it just does nothing at all. wonderful security, wonderful user experience.

at the risk of sounding like i don't hayte absolutely everything in the world, i must say that while apple's disk utility kinda sucks, at least it sucks less than fdisk or the windows xp setup utility - the best way i could get this old 200GB disk set up for windows was to attach it to my mac.

you'd think apple could make a gui disk utility program that wouldn't suck the way things like fdisk suck. but, unfortunately, while you are right that it doesn't suck in exactly the same ways as fdisk, it somehow manages to invent all sorts of new ways of sucking. as if they wanted to be able to patent the suck.

my new-old favourite un*x-ism is (paraphrasing fdisk), "dial m for help".

i love calling tech support only to have the person on the other end say things like "oh, i don't believe this! i'm having the worst day" because their system for tracking issues is flaking out on them.

good thing when i publish a post, blogger doesn't just show me the post excerpted right there and then. no, i have to click "view blog" to go see it etc.

i pretty much hate all GPU companies (nvidia, ati).

i wish somebody would make a software tool that would hack advanced graphics down to old-school ones. so that way i could play dx9 and dx10 games on an old dx8 graphics card.

the epson scanner software requires me to do a preview scan before doing a full scan. but i can change out the paper being scanned with no penalty, as long as i leave the old preview image up. whatever!

it. still. kills. me. some day, in some parallel universe, companies and groups which put out software will also always have an auto-updater tool to show you exactly what you need to update, and then will get the stuff and do the update for you. as opposed to how everything really mostly sucks a lot right now, other than os x update and windows update. oh and i guess virus checkers. and things like firefox and acrobat reader which have really annoying ways of telling you about updates. so i guess it would be nice if in that parallel universe, the updater system also didn't suck like those do.

if you want to know how much your CSS sucks, my personal experience suggests that you can use an old G3 white iBook running OS X running Camino to find out - seems like every site i go to these days turns up looking like crap.

people don't know what is best for themselves, in may situations. take the success of ergo computer keyboards that still have numeric keypads, so if you are right-handed your mouse is way out in right field and you end up with bad ergonomics, even if you have some fancy-pants ergo keyboard. or take something like the auto-hiding ability of the mac os x dock, or the windows xp task bar: if you watch people with such a setup you often witness them getting into a totally stupid dance where either they are trying to get to the menu, or more often and more obviously stupid, they are trying to get to something which is close enough to the edge to cause the menu to suddenly appear, preventing them from getting to what they want.

it is impressive how blogger most of the time doesn't give me the version of the top menu set for somebody logged in, even though i'm logged in.

it always saddens me when i come across a new reason to hate everything. like, i vent and think i'm feeling better, and then some dumb-ass has to go and publish charts and graphs that suck (i have the physical magazine article, dunno what it looks like online). like, they have bar charts and never say if a bigger bar is better or worse. basic stuff like that. and while reading the article text to try to figure out the answer, their text seems to be contradictory. or at least not un-confusing at first. so all in all, another banner day for the likes of Huff and Tufte.

hey, here's a great usability trick: have a telephone system (e.g. your customer support) where it is hard to hear what people are saying, but when they do any kind of transfer have it done with touch tones that are really damned loud.

it is like some new kind of horror movie: what happens when you cross DHL with Office Max? one answer (although at the moment I think it is mostly the fault of Office Max) is that you get a receipt print-out which is designed so that the $ insurance coverage is clipped in the print-out so you don't have any indication or physical receipt of it. literally, it says "Protection: Declared value US $..." where the $ is half-clipped and the actual important part, namely the actual numbers don't show up because there is a bar code overlaying that area. is this on purpose? or is it just a lack of actual testing of the freaking system?

[udpate: ha ha. even though the tracking number now works on the web site (hey, how about a screed about how you can be given a tracking number that doesn't yet show up in their web site?), apparently the billing hasn't happened and is a really slow process, like possibly weeks after the item has been delivered would they get paid by Office Max, which means I still can't find out what the coverage is.]

i love how when you want to send a google URL to other people, a lot of the time it has all sorts of extra crap in it, so the URL gets really long and hateful. sure, you could use tinyurl or something, but it would all just be infinitely better if google didn't put in all that crap in the first place.

wow. in this day-and-age, and 23hq doesn't give me an obvious and easy way to rotate a picture 90 degrees?

[update: apparently you can't do it from the thumbnail view, only when looking at the picture on its own. freaking genius. hayte.]

i have not been impressed by 23hq since i went through a lot of suck to get things uploaded. then it freaked out and said i didn't have any photos. so i re-logged-in. then it showed some. then i clicked "next" to see the next set and it said there were none again. i re-re-logged in and now it seems to be working. uh, yeah, great. worth every penny.

[i also like how they don't expose an obvious, simple way to control the formatting of thumbnails.]

i have seemingly become apple's enemy ever since OS X when it comes to usability and guis. more often than not i completely do not grok and pretty much loathe whatever ui they've come up with: iTunes, iPhoto, the Finder, Preview, you name it, they all suck ass as far as I can tell. maybe there was supposed to be some kind of liquid crack that seeps into your skin to make you think apple is great, but since i only use old, old hardware that never got to me?

windows, although i haven't used vista, is such a terrific piece of excrement when it comes to usability. for example, there really isn't any good consistency in how the file system is represented. why is it that when i log in i see the desktop, but when i go to save something i often have to navigate into C:\Documents and Settings\username\Desktop etc.? maybe because everything and everybody sucks?

hey, i know! instead of saying it is a Customer Support center, we can call it a Customer Interaction Center. that way when all we do is waste your freaking time with hold messages and bad service, we technically won't be lying.

what i think i look forward to about technology is when there is that fine, fun, smooth, enjoyable, rewarding experience of having several different components make various assumptions which then all get conflated to make the end-user experience one huge festering pile of poo. for example, uploading to 23hq i am getting a dialog box in Camino every like 3 minutes asking me if I want to kill the flash app because it is running too slowly. and i have a lot of files to upload. so i'm turned into a manual happy dipping bird sorta like that Simpson's episode. except for how i don't actually have a dipping bird.

all i'm saying is, i could design a better OS GUI. there are so many blatant unaddressed pain points with Windows, OS X, Linux, you-name-it, and heck yeah i have some ideas about how to ameliorate if not outright fix the problems.

why does it take seemingly bloody for ever to format a flash memory card on my PC, but only like 3 seconds in either of my digital cameras? (usb 1.1 vs. 2.0 maybe? or just general Windows suckage?)

ah, yes, always something new to drive me batty: blogger re-orders the list of your blogs so that the one you just posted to is on top. (i'm talking about the management view of all your blogs, not the view of postings in a given blog.) like the hateful thing in Windows XP where it re-orders things in menus as you use them so you cannot have any motor memory help at all. talk about making me want to go postal!

it is cool, right, that Acer says things like you shouldn't return anything other than what they tell you to return because they won't send it back to you (e.g. if you include some random CD-ROM when you send back your laptop, they won't guarantee returning whatever that disc was)... but then they don't ever explicitly list what it is you should be returning in your particular RMA case.

well i will be dipped in excrement: I called PQI to find out about returning an item under warranty and they answered the phone quickly and they were real nice! what on earth is up with that?

i went to Accidental College, although with tuition prices so high I wonder if education will go the way of the dildo. here were are, descendants of homo eroticus, out of our caves, but unable to afford what we've created. (i wonder what the entymology of the whole 'higher education' thing is, anyway?)

large non-commercial vehicles are selfish in all sorts of bad ways, but i'd like to hilight one in particular from the vantage point of usability: namely, that a large vehicle prevents other drivers from having context in which to make decisions because it blocks out too much from sight. that's clearly bad. note that there are vehicles which are considered socially redeeming which yet have been designed such that I still have a hard time seeing through or around them to the road in front, or the car in front - take the 2nd version of the Toyota Prius, with a really rather bad visibility-through-to-what's-in-front because of the way the hatchback section is designed. ditto something like the PT Cruiser. suck, suck, suck.

a friend - who will remain nameless - wants an RSS feed of my blog. go figure. they didn't see anything obviously offering that on blogger. so that's a great way to really push the web envelope: by not offering standard now-old-school features. yup.

oh and apparently even if they did it might not be RSS, anyway? the fact that i'm getting at all side-tracked into this issue is just a clear indictment of the feature set and usability of blogger.

but, hey, it sure is free!

[update: I did the feedburner thang.]

[update: and, of course, their experience with the feedburner and RSS thang turns out to be a whole long story of technological suck in and of itself. neat how we've generated enough suck for everybody to have enough material to do their own blog of tech heck.]

i like how ubuntu/gnome won't start the desktop if the machine doesn't have an ethernet connection. like, what the frig does the network have to do with a bloody desktop GUI? hayte!

am i really that far out in some crack-smoking left field by thinking that a support web site should contain copies of the product warranty text? apparently so when it comes to Acer.

hey, all you would-be icon designers. here's a free clue: when it comes to things like full vs. empty, don't assume that more or less ink is going to be universally understood by everybody at a first glance. some (large) portion of the audience will see the opposite of what you see, so when you think you have a "full" icon they will think it is empty. what's the solution? use something like + and - rather than any kind of "filling up".

it just freaking kills me that people don't know this kind of thing. in my dictatorship, it would earn you some hard labor.

good thing i can't just do a free text search through my visa bill statements in the on-line banking system. i mean, why would anybody actually want to take advantage of computing power to make anything better than crappy old paper?

There's a long story or two to it, but basically i think the whole idea of good customer support is one which hasn't really been implemented here on this particular earth - at least not at most of the places i've had to frequent recently. Hobee's sucked, the Pancake House sucked, and Acer sucks. The thing is, I don't think there is actually anything mysterious about how to have good customer service in terms of the features you want. Maybe it is hard to get those features implemented by your staff or something, and maybe you don't really care since customer service in many places is not seen as a profit center, apparently even for restaurants these days. I mean, I really think I could define good customer service quite easily, with a laundry list of specific features, action items, goals, metrics, etc. It isn't rocket science which only proves to me that no company really cares about it at all.

turns out it isn't just hobee's that sucks. the original pancake house also has really pathetic service, and horrible acoustics to add injury to insult. max's opera cafe was, on the whole, a better experience. and this country is supposed to basically be converting to a nigh-completely service sector economy? shyeah, right.

maybe Hobee's is in fact a good thing because it so easily gives me something to hate. hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate. haaaaaaayyyyttte! they all kinda suck, but probably the cupertino one is the least hateful, and the palo alto el camino one is the tops. but any which way i look at it it is perhaps unsurprisingly a look of hayte.

hey, IE, thanks a lot for saving the post i was working on. not!

good thing blogger works so well with Opera. or even IE. shyeah, ha ha ha, right!

while this is a sincere hope which itself seals my fate with St. Peter (in a bad way), i have to admit that sometimes i really hope that people who write bad user interfaces have a circle of heck reserved for them. to wit, the 3DMark06 program has no menu bar, and instead the first "tip of the day" dialog box which comes up when you run the program for the first time tells you that you have to right-click to get the menus. like, because that series of design decisions and events really did make my user experience oh so much better.

so getting a new laptop has led me down the garden path into the hell that is customer support. now, instead of having to wait on hold to get somebody who is clueless, i instead get to go through the phalanx of support web site pages which are completely and utterly broken, apparently explicitly designed to prevent you from getting any service. really. (this is Acer and ATI i'm talking about, lest you wish to gain from my pain and avoid them?)

i love how all web sites that want you to enter in your phone number pretty much utterly suck. the typical thing of forcing the user to conform to the machine, rather than the machine being able to just take whatever number you give it e.g. (123) 456 7890 vs. 123-456-7890 or whatever.

how's this for a good way to do information architecture? first, have a bunch of categories. then, have an "all categories" category which shows all of those previous categories. then, for bonus points, have a final category called "more". just! freaking! ship! it!

wtf? yesterday when i typed "grieferz" into google this blog was the top hit. today it is nowhere to be found. was google playing favourites until today? or did something else suddenly get really popular?

nice how the google calendar has you enter in "date, time" for the start but then "time, date" for the end of an event. whatever.

hey, here's a great e-commerce tip for your site where you are presumably trying to make money: shove the information way deep down in the information hierarchy so that people can't see thumbnails even though you have all that data available. try to put in as many levels and mouse clicks as possible, because you wouldn't ever want somebody to be able to actually peruse your stock to find exactly the thing that suits them. no, you want to make them think, "wow, this is really suckful" and walk away.

hey, let us all in the technology world suck together now.

i. really. don't. get. the. facebook. ui. like, it just completely doesn't work for me and seems really broken and wrong and hateful and... stuff. weird.

this is nice. i've been adding blog entries and blogger has never said anything was wrong - only i don't actually see any of my posts on the bloody main view of the blog. are the posts lost for ever? are they just delayed? does blogger suck? do i hayte?

i dunno about anybody else, but it drives me nuts that when i tell LinkedIn to log me out, it presents me with another screen that has a button saying something like "really log me out". i mean, what part of me clicking on the logout link don't you freaking comprehend, jerks?

i don't know which is worse: phone support where they've obviously been forced to smoke crack+xtc and read a script of Happy Customer Supportitude, or where you get somebody who is basically mentally challenged and/or incarcerated and just all-round grumpy.

hey, pretty neat how the google calendar application doesn't let me set things on anything less than the 30 minute boundaries. at the moment even just 15 minute boundaries would be nice.

neat how AVG anti-virus has dialog boxes with OK buttons with - get this wonderful thing that gosh maybe would be worth a patent it is so perfectly lovable - count-down timers on them indicating when they just fire on their own. so first of all you've put AVG lower down on the Windows window stack and it pops up an OK dialog box over whatever you are doing. that's nice. then, you go to click on the OK button to get rid of the blasted thing, and it goes away before you click on it - so your click is actually on something else.

and you wonder why i keep a nail-studded baseball bat at the ready?

why does firefox want so desperately to make me hate it? now it is removing the finished downloads from the download window so i can't use that to find them or do things to them directly. and i don't see an option to control that behaviour. fun tra la.

the downloads also seem to be kept somewhere other than the final destination folder while they are being downloaded? so i can't easily finish things off with wget?

call me crazy. call me some kind of futuristic wanna-be day-dreamer. call me genius. whatever, but wouldn't it make a shred of sense for downloading files to maybe not completely freaking suck? one particular thing: there should be a format for downloads which includes things like checksums as well as definitions of sizes. that way your web browser / file system / general applications would be able to show you an icon or text saying if the download actually worked 100% or not. and be able to re-start the download from where it left off. instead, we have some super manual super hateful process for doing that kind of thing. yay us, the computing industry!

it would be nice if pc sellers would get any kind of freaking clue one and make an updater for their systems. rather than making me have to figure out how to update all of the disparate supposedly value-added features they've shoved into Windows for whatever machine they sell. talk about how to lower the user fun quotient. gah!

(the kicker is that this particular vendor likes to title their value-add stuff with "empower" in all the names. ha ha ha ha HA.)

i got a new laptop. it should be good, don't get me wrong. i think it will be just fine. however, as with all things, there are some issues with it. things which, as ever, make me ask myself, "gosh, did the designers and developers of this thing actually ever even use it?" since it seems to have some pretty obvious flaws. well, or i'm just a complete alien.

leds are really great and all, but i wish people would put them somewhere such that i wouldn't have to have them flashing in my face all the time. dumb laptop designers.

i think the backspace key should not have any other keys immediately next to it on the right or top. ever.

neat how sometimes things in the WinXP "tray" want you to left-click on the, other ones only work if you right-click on them, and then others still support both actions.

good thing the Apple Menu is unresponsive while an application is launching. wouldn't want to, like, have multi-tasking supporting the user to do what they want.

nice how OS X 10.4 "supports" older G4 and even G3 machines. but then you go to use something which ships with the bloody OS only to discover it basically doesn't really work at all because it grinds the machine to just about a complete halt. specific example: slideshows.

here's a great UI idea i just got from google maps: make something, then when people get used to it add some "feature" that gets in the way of what people want to do. to wit: i get directions between two places, and want to drag the map around to see things. turns out if you click in the wrong place it ends up changing the end-points of the trip, rather than moving the map. that's really a lot of fun. really.

WTF?! when i first edit a new post in sucker, er i mean blogger, it is really freaking slow. it can't keep up with my typing at all. some kind of hateful javascript bull-crap going on.

but if i publish it then go and edit it, it is perfectly usable. as if whatever the hateful javascript stuff was is no longer happening.

here's the kind of customer service i love, care of DHL: a telephone voice interactive system that - like all the ones i've ever used - doesn't understand me, and then says it will transfer me to a human, but then asks me more questions before it will do that, but of course it doesn't understand what i'm saying... turtles (of hayte) all the way down.

(on the other hand, when i did get to talk with real people they were actually pretty nice. i guess the beatings are working.)

it is pretty neat just how completely and utterly broken and confused OS X can get when one is mounting .dmg's. like, where you have to resort to diskutil to eject things, because either they don't appear in the finder or because the finder tells you it is in use and can't be ejected.

cool! about 60 seconds of using monster.com and now i know i will pretty much never, ever, use that festering piece of useless crap again.

state of the art research on computers, but we'll still just have a fixed width web page because that works well on like this guy's old iBook. (I mean, if you design a fixed-width page, i would think you'd try to make it fit in 1024, if 640, but noooo.)

geeze louise, for such a well-known site, you'd think LinkedIn could afford to have their servers not completely suck? like, maybe they could actually be up and generating something other than blank pages of emptiness? it is all so very zen and all, but dang.

gosh, and i used to think it was only Windows that sucked hard when it comes to USB devices. but, apparently OS X also often doesn't notice hot-plugging of USB items. so much joy in the world.

i don't know which is worse: having to use some horrible telephone voice menu system, or having to talk with some poor jerk manning the phones. there are the unhappy phone people, the brusque phone people, and then the phone people who put on a good act of being happy - i think they are the most creepy. i mean, as if they aren't prison inmates somewhere. that's our whole future these days, prison.

getting ui right is hard. Camino lets me tell it to open new tabs "in the background" as it were, so that's nice, but that setting also forces new windows to be opened behind the current window. which isn't what i want at all.

hey, neat how when i go to sign in to do blogging the last thing to render on the page are the login fields, so it mostly looks like a page that doesn't let you log in.

some days, i think pretty much humanity doesn't deserve to exist.

there's a pretty cool super-ajaxy feature of gmail i'd like to note: there is a command to, like, 'delete all spam now' and the nifty thing about how they implemented it is that half the time it actually doesn't delete anything. at all. (the other half the time it works.)

i have to say, hawiian airlines has a web site that suits me perfectly. it does a really good job of punishing the user, which is something i think all ecommerce sites should be designed to do from day one. i mean, ha ha, why would it ever be useful to let me change the number of passengers without having to re-start the entire process of booking, losing the airports and also the dates i'd entered for the trip?

hey, google, thanks for not being able to show any standard cultural holidays automatically at all on the calendar. i mean, that's just cool!

i have always kind of hated tool-tips because they seem to inevitably appear when you don't want them, and be impossible to make appear when you do. so i'm ever so glad that Camino has decided to make ever more things have tool-tips... when i hover the mouse over the back button, for example. which, for me, is a tool-tip i'm pretty sure i don't ever want.

it also kills me that it seems like if you don't have your path set right, then if you set it up you pretty much have to restart every bloody thing. so that's a whole lot of fun.

gosh, i sure am glad they got rid of the "cut" command in the OS X finder. jerks.

it always impresses me how Yahoo! manages to make crap out of potential gold. their free email is technically more my cup of tea than crappy gmail, but i can't use it because of all the hateful ads. similarly, while youtube sorta grinds this poor old ibook down, at least youtube does respond to me clicking on e.g. the pause button - whereas Y! videos just keeps staggering chugging choking stuttering along no matter what i do. utterly hateful.

gosh, att web site, how did you know i wanted to "make a payments"?!

i love trying to fill out the "ask us a question" form on the BofA web site, putting in my credit card number, hitting submit, and getting an error message that my credit card number isn't a valid one. yes, i double-checked it.

it drives me nuts that people don't grok how to do 'paths' right. both 'man' and 'java' want you to specify the full path, rather than being able to easily append to the path, the latter being what i most often wish to do.

the post office sucks. first, the sticker on the local mailbox with the collection times is sun-faded to the point of utter obscurity. maybe they ought to think about, you know, maintenance? second, it is too bloody difficult to get a letter into a US mailbox one-handed.

Have I mentioned (probably, but it is killing me still) how the Mac OS X feature of making "caps lock" [that is how they capitalize it on the keyboard] into another "ctrl" doesn't work all the time? Real fun in Emacs when you do a long sequence of commands only to find out half of them weren't properly modified by the freaking hateful OS.