Usability Hell

The Swiss Army Knife.

They’re shit. But somehow have become a metaphor for usefulness.

Have you ever tried to open a bottle of wine with one? DON’T.

Some personal favourite tools:

• Saw (wow thats a REALLY SMALL tree)
• Screwdriver (for microscopic phillips head screws)
• Tooth pick (GROSS)
• Tweesers (soldiers gotta have perfect eyebrows right?)
• Nail file (the Swiss army must be HELLA Metrosexual!)

New tools for 2010 include moisturiser dispenser & pedicure set - no swiss troops would be seen dead with dry skin or unsightly feet this season!

I can only imagine you’d ever find carrying one useful if your level of planning were comparable to Nazis planning a winter holiday in Stalingrad.

Your tool should either do lots of things well (iPhone) - or one thing well (Kindle) - but 100 things badly? WTF?!?!

So if anyone ever describes something you’ve worked on as “the swiss army knife of…” - just punch them and move on.

Starbucks, Planet Earth

You’re thinking what I’m thinking right?

The only toilet in a cafe in Clapham, London. The top is taped; it wont stay up itself.

We’ve all seen some variation on this…

1. Female uses toilet. Situation Green.
2. Male with circus experience manages to relieve himself and hold seat up *at the same time*, with no mistakes. Situation Green.
3. An average dude enters the room. Situation Orange.
4. Average dude tries same trick. Fails. Magic happens. Situation Red.
5. A female enters the room then runs screaming, never to be seen again. Situation Red

The cafe’s owner thought:

“Taping up the lid is fine, it looks great & women having a moist time in here is OK - the state of your toilet facilities doesn’t matter.”

It does! Why do so many restaurants / cafe’s etc get this wrong?

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman looks at the importance of designing objects well - it’s a must read for anyone into usability.

Sign in Sunspel, an underwear shop, East London.

What the f*** is a “Sale Advisor”?

I’m sure you think that your shop is special. That your customers deeply consider their underpants and spend hours contemplating - and being ‘advised’ on which pair to buy.

They don’t. They’re underpants. What you have is Sales Staff.

Everyone will translate ‘Sale Advisors’ into ‘Sales Staff’.

We don’t even need ‘sales’; thats obvious. “Staff Wanted”; much better.

Lets look at the rest of the sign:

“Only those with previous retail sales experience need apply”
so “Experience Required” then - 2 words instead of 9.

Are they paid by the word?

“Recruiting now”
No shit!

“Please contact the store manager”
You show contact info - this serves no purpose and may even confuse (is Jade store manager?).

New Sign (Sunspel you’re welcome to use this):

Staff Wanted

Experience Required

19 words become 4.

Why does this matter?
This kind of ‘official tone’ is like a virus, spreading through business. The public sector and legal profession are worst hit - but as you can see - nowhere is safe.

People are overloaded and need simpler, shorter, more readable text.

To be noticed, be brief!

People wont read your waffle; the more you write, the less they read.

The time wasted reading too many words & translating stupidly elaborate prose into plain english is staggering.

An excellent book on this, also recommended by Jason Fried of 37 Signals & Basecamp fame is: Revising Prose by Richard A. Lanham (Click Here) (affiliate link) - it introduces ‘Lard Factor’ - a measure of text inefficiency, and some techniques for rewriting broken language. A must read!

Less is More!

Menu at the not bad Troubadour Cafe, west London.

Grids are key in graphic design for both ease of reading & beauty. This is as true for a menu as it is for a website.

I guess Troubador didn’t get the memo.

That menu is an extreme example; literally *nothing* lines up on it. We can all see it looks wrong.

Problems

• No grid - no structure at all.
• Low contrast (background image makes text very hard to read).
• Schitzophrenic colour & styling.
• Little logic to the layout of any kind.
• Illogical order, breakfast at the bottom?!
• Text alignment consistency - some things left, some centre.
• Margins - far too tight - some touching text.
• Small / no gap between boxes.

A clean, logical grid would make this menu far quicker and simpler to work out. I’ve barely scratched the surface of why its so bad.

Remember: Grid is God.

Herbal Essences Shampoo & Conditioner Bottles

Crack is great fun, probably. But - if you have to be productive, think logically or design bottles you should probably stay off it until the weekend.

Is it REALLY that hard to differentiate shampoo & conditioner bottles? (notice text & lid orientation - confused yet?!)

Green transparent bottle on left - says shampoo to me. Middle and right probably conditioner? (I use conditioner - get over it).

Here is their thought process -

“I know, lets put the text on the conditioner bottles upside down - that makes it obvious.”

Clearly this ‘creative’ was a bald idiot, surrounded by other bald idiots, in a company headed by a bald idiot who can’t read.

When I’ve got shampoo in my eyes am I going to remember an abstract notion of which way up the text is?

A clear bottle says shampoo - a solid colour conditioner. The blue bottle on the right is actually shampoo - I reached for it too many times by accident (its slightly opaque).

Solution: In addition to obviously clear shampoo & solid conditioner bottles - make them totally different shapes. Upside down text -are you nuts? + get off the crack (I have no evidence they’re on crack - but it’s obvious no?).

Oh and for an extra laugh - check out the white text on day-glo green label - nice contrast, not. Good job its just marketing drivel….

How many people have a cooker top?

It’s a trend that’s really caught on in recent years; they’re fairly popular.

Why do they all look like that above? (forget the mess - I’m talking knobs).

Perhaps I’m slow; I look at the little symbols next to the knob every time I use one - even cookers I’ve used hundreds of times. This is worse where it’s rubbed off the knob* - which also always seems to happen.

Simple solution - arrange the knobs in a square - like the cooker. Problem solved. No need for symbols at all.

Lets say, conservatively, 100 million people spend 5 seconds looking at these symbols every day. That’s over 6 million working days lost worldwide every year - or the total GDP or Sweden (and Sweden makes some good shit).

Oh the humanity… .

* that’s what she said.

Times Ive Loaded iPhone Search: ~800
Times Ive Loaded iPhone Search On Purpose: 0

This feature might be useful for some people (anyone?) - but I can’t think of any use cases when I’d want to search my whole phone?!

But thats not really the point; the problem is the search implementation breaks the iPhone’s UI.

You get to it by either swiping left or pressing the home button on your home screen. That makes it VERY easy to accidentally enter search.

Before search, doing those things had no effect. That’s good - it affirms that you’re on your home screen. By breaking that ‘no effect’ affirmation its very easy to swipe left too many times or press home before realising you’re already on your home screen.

It’s also very easy to ‘fumble swipe’ to search by accident. I do that daily.

Apple, the iPhone is obviously an amazing device - one small request; please move search to an app like any other. (EDIT - or at least give us that option pleeeeeeeease)

Analysis of Dyson’s Response to this post: Dyson’s Social Media Abortion

Dyson Airblade Hand dryer - a bar in London

I love what James Dyson has done - the wheelbarrow was OK but the vacuum idea was excellent. Dyson is a company that should be commended for thinking different.

It made vacuum cleaners, handdryers & fans sexy - lets see kettles and toasters next?

However - after the initial ecstacy of drying my hands with something cool wore off, I noticed….

The Airblade is actually a bit shit. Here’s Why:

• You put your hands in a tiny gap - its awkward and unnatural.
• Not rubbing hands together feels wrong and doesnt let you spread the water out for even drying. Inevitably part of your hands are wet at the end.
• I don’t want to ‘pull hands up in 10 seconds’ - that also doesn’t seem to work properly (hands still wet). I predict most people wont stick to that either.
• ‘The most hygenic hand-dryer’ - not if you touch the insides and top rim - which I often do as its so tight. See photo for how disgusting that gets - a dirty mouldy looking area that doesnt exist on regular dryers.
• It only dries one small part of each hand at once - it seems slow - 10 seconds doesn’t seem enough to me.

Better alternatives
> XLerator - Seems at least as powerful as airblade - but no awkward & gross tight area, lets you rub your hands together too. Also billed as using 80% less energy than regular dryers.
> There’s a few Airblade like - hands in the top dryers (specially in Japan). One has air jets all the way down (which certainly feels better).

Clearly conventional slow dryers needed improvement - but my vote goes to the XLerator which suffers none of the problems of the Airblade and probably has all the advantages.

Back to the drawing-board on this one James…
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New Fugly Sign - Hackney, London

For me this is now what I see out of my windows every day. When I saw ‘Dave’ putting this up, if Id had a gun, I would have committed murder - no doubt.

Can I preface this by saying - Im sure the Hackney Carers Centre do some great work; that makes this even more sad.

What Happened (probably)

• The work experience boy, told to ‘get us a new sign’.
• Yellow pages, call ‘A+ Signey Signs’.
• Lets call him ‘Dave’ turns up in his white van.
• ‘Dave’, as it turns out, isnt a professionally trained graphic designer; though he did get a C- on a CSE art project in 1972 - so as good as.
• Unfortnately Dave isnt blessed with anything resembling taste either.
• However, he has a copy of Microsoft Word 95, a clip art CDROM from 1997 & has worked out how to plug the sign printing machine in himself.
• “Dont worry” Dave says, “I’ll ‘design’ the sign for you too for only £2000”.
• Dave turns up.
• Dave commits an egregious act of vandalism.
• People come out of the centre to view the sign; many are visibly shaken.

Why This Sign Is Offensively Bad

• Wrong Place: - people  approach this door from the side, no one sees the sign. A small plack on the door would be enough.
• Low Contrast: its virtually impossible to read even close up (white on yellow - seriously).
• Vandalism: Its drilled into the lintel of a beautifully crafted listed building. Did the architect have a vision including a disgusting yellow and blue sign?!
• Gaudy: It’s in a courtyard of attractive listed buildings made of London stock bricks - its bright yellow & blue, it doesnt fit.
• Ugly: Its actually painful to look at, its ugly on so many levels.
• Unprofessional: It makes the Carers Centre look badly managed.
• I Have to Look At It Every Day

If any designers out there fancy doing a good deed - offer to design a new logo & sign for Hackney Carers Centre. PLEASE.

Perhaps designers should need a licence? There is so much ineffective, ugly signage out there - it runis the environment for everyone.

Imagine a world where form and function were this bad. It would make 1984 look like The Teletubbies. Im seriously considering an act of vandalism of my own….