Strange signs I have seen

In our quest for signs and icons that don't need words we often stumble (the sign that is meant to signify "baby changing center" but winds up looking like "baby vending machine" springs to mind).

In our quest to make the world safer we often over compensate and solve problems that don't exist.

When we are at our very best, when we really strain ourselves, we manage to hit the nexus of both perfectly.

To whit:



This is inside the trunk of my Dad's new car (pardon the photography, if I'd been really hardcore I could have jumped in, gotten a better picture and tested it out). It's a handle that allows you to escape from the locked trunk of the car.

We live in amazing times.

Lucas and Technology

So we're getting some baby stuff ready to send to my sister in England (0 to 6 month clothing mostly) and we were talking about how to best send it and how much it would cost.

Lucas listened to the whole conversation and then asked "why don't you just throw it into the computer and send it to her like that?"

Gack

I don't like to engage in the "my OS is better than your OS" holy wars, but why is it that every time I launch Parallels Windows needs to update something?

The tenticles of my memory

I've got a bad memory for certain things.

Numbers, postal codes, names, combinations for locks, bank accounts... all elude me.

Stupid details stick in my head like glue.

I read an article recently (god, how I wish I could remember where - oh the irony) about how we're all losing the ability to remember because so much of our memory is stored online and we don't have to remember.

My first thought was "oh great, another "the internet will kill us all and make us dumb and violent and mean" scare". My second thought was "OMG I HOPE SO!".

First it would mean that everyone else's memory sucked like mine. Secondly it would mean that I could start remembering things.

All of this stems from looking in my junk mail folder... all the crap I've signed up for over the years, sites I've visited with cookies on them... my whole range of interests nicely packaged up in spam.

Facebook v. MySpace

Ok, so at the insistence of my sister and some friends I got a Facebook account. I had been resisting because of my feelings about MySpace.

For your consideration here are those feelings:

1. It's ghetto as fuck
2. Everyone is 18
3. Or naked
4. Or both
5. User customizable CSS templates does not = good
6. Usability? What? Huh? OMG THE GOGGLES! THEY DO NOTHING!
7. AUTOPLAY MUSIC IS FROM SATAN!

Compare that with Facebook:

1. 100% less ghetto
2. Many people are young, but there are tons who are not
3. I have not been confronted with anything more than a bathing suit shot (It's not the naked that bothers me per se, its the "of course I just want to be your friend, oh did I mention my porn site?"thing)
4. One template. One look. It's pretty. Much AJAX. Yay!
5. I can find things. It doesn't burn my eyes. Soothing!
6. They might go into music hosting/band pimping. Wanna bet they do it better than Myspace?

The very definition of a First World Problem

The other day I was doing something around the house. And things weren't working out the way I wanted them to. I was getting frustrated and grumpy and snippy.

And then I started to laugh at myself.

Because what I was so pissed about was that running the power supply for my 3.5 year old son's computer was not working out the way I wanted it to.



NB: It's an old B and W G3 with a piddling amount of RAM, but come on.. it's a computer for a 3 year old.

Clearly I need to get some perspective.

Of User Experiences and Banking

I bank with the Toronto Dominion, their close, they have branches all over the place and they do the things I need them to do. Most of my interaction with them is through the web or through their bank machines. I quite like the web banking experience, the UI and the speed are good. The design is a nice balance of functional and esthetically pleasing.

Now, over the years the TD "Green Machine" (as they call their ATM service/machines) has gone through various incarnations, as has it's UI. In many ways, walking into a TD branch to use the ATM was a bit of a crap shoot, you never knew what machine or UI you were going to get, nor which Recently though they've started the process of consolidation to one standard machine and UI.

On their site they have a whole section on it, how it's better! faster! more! WOW! etc.

Now, me, I hate it. Hate is usually a pretty strong word for some design, but it offends me at a near cellular level.

It used to be the process was: Insert card, choose language on some machines [button 1], enter pin [4 buttons], choose what you want to do [1 button], choose account [1 button] and then enter amount [# of buttons dependent on how much you need/have], then ok.

So a max of 10 - 12 buttons.

Now it's: insert card, the language comes up from your account [-1], enter pin[4], choose what you want to do [1], choose account [1] and, if you're depositing, limber up your fingers for a fun filled fiesta of button pushing [10].

I'm not sure it's actually 10, but it feels like it. You input the amount of the first item (because there is now a list) you are depositing and, if you're done you enter ok (if you have more you enter more), both of these represent a button push, then you are asked if you meant it. Then you are asked if you are ready. Then ou are asked if your brain is still functioning.. then you are asked if you want a reciept and then you are asked if you're done....

The thing that really bugs me, besides the obvious extra button pushing is the long pauses that happen between and after each choice. For someone who works on a computer every day I interpret this pause as either a) crap hardware or b) the machine is about to crash. I'm going to guess that it's meant as a time to reflect on your choices or it's meant to not make you feel rushed or some BS. For me it offers me a chance to take deep breaths. So that I don't assault the machine.

I wondered if the whole idea was to make it easier for older/less geeky users to get their money etc. So I asked my Dad what he thought. This is a man who, rather than memorizing how to save Word docs with a new name memorizes what each Untitled document is. This is a man who periodically boots into DOS to run Lotus 123. This is, in other words, the über anti-geek.

So, being very careful not to offend him and suggest that he is anything less than youthful, I asked him how he liked the new machines. It turns out, based on what I extracted from the profanity laced response he gave, that he hates them as much as I do.

So who are they for?

An aside, I find it interesting that Diebold, the manufacture of this machine, can make an annoyingly idiot proof ATM, but can't seem to make a decent voting system.