11 posts tagged “ui”
Oh, hi PSP! I just wanted to check on my PSN account info real quick. AN UPDATE IS REQUIRED BEFORE YOU CAN ACCESS THE PSN NETWORK. SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FOR DETAILS. The documentation? Really? I could have sworn there was just some easy downloadable update thingy I could hit. Hmm, let’s look around for it. Search search search… Where is that update thing? I’ll check that message again to see if it said anything useful. AN UPDATE IS REQUIRED BEFORE YOU CAN ACCESS THE PSN NETWORK. SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FOR DETAILS. Ugh, can’t you just say “Press Circle to update now” or something? Why do I have to look around for it myself? Ohh, here it is, Network Update. Okay, let’s do that. INSERT A MEMORY STICK™ WITH 52MB AVAILABLE BEFORE UPDATING. Whoa, I don’t have a Memory Stick™ inserted? Let’s check the slot… Oh! I see! I do have one inserted, but you just didn’t bother to check for me. Is it really hard for you, being a computer, to check whether you have access to storage media? DOWNLOADING SYSTEM UPDATE Okay, good, now install it please! BATTERY IS LOW. CHARGE THE BATTERY AND TRY AGAIN. Uh… How about I just plug you into the wall? Surely that’s good enough for you to update the system? I promise I won’t unplug you! Plug… BATTERY IS LOW. CHARGE THE BATTERY AND TRY AGAIN. Really? But you’re plugged in! That’s even better than a battery! Urgh, okay… Charge charge charge… Okay, now your battery is full! I guess if you insist on using the battery, I’ll unplug you from the wall and bring you to the couch so you can update there. RESTARTING… RESTARTING… … YOU MUST PLUG IN THE AC ADAPTER BEFORE UPDATING. …Really!? Fine. Back to the wall. INSTALLING… INSTALLING… INSTALLATION COMPLETE. YOU MAY NOW DELETE THE UPDATE FROM THE MEMORY STICK. Uh, thanks, I will… But why didn’t you delete it?
Mac OS X's new Cover Flow feature seems to be doing some interesting analysis of your icons. Normally a Mac OS X icon has a shadow below it; if the icon were drawn normally, there would be a gap between where the main element of the icon ends and its reflection begins. Instead, Cover Flow apparently analyzes the bottom of your icon, looking for the beginning of pretty opaque pixels, and then cuts off everything below them. In most cases, this results in finding the bottom of the icon's imagery and chopping off some shadow:
There is a big list of sounds to choose from for when an alarm goes off. If you tap one, the sound starts playing so that you can hear what it sounds like. If you then decide that you like the sound, and tap to go back to the alarm screen, the sound stops playing. But it doesn't just stop dead. It fades out.
Sure, hearing a sound stop dead is not the most jarring experience you could ever have, but it's just a bit unpleasant and unrefined. Someone thought to put in the extra line or two of code to make the sound gradually fade away, like you're stepping away from the sound selection screen and back to the alarm screen, as the two screens slide across the display.
Yeah, iPhone deserves the central position it's claimed in my life: Within the space of 15 minutes I found myself looking up a restaurant, calling the restaurant to make reservations, reading comics online, and timing my banana waffles to crispy perfection.
I went to weather.com and tried to find out how much it's supposed to rain tomorrow. After typing in "seattle", then clicking a little "Seattle, Washington" link buried in a big page of nonsense, then scrolling past another page of nonsense, I found three little boxes telling me the weather for tomorrow. And a map.
- Big red shiny non-button in the upper left that says "Click to INTERACT"— as if "interact" is a meaningful and desirable verb, and someone might be thinking, "boy, I sure would like to INTERACT, but I can't figure out how!"
- A reiteration of "Click to Interact!", this time in a box following your pointer all around, just in case you forget how to INTERACT and you don't want to move your eyes more than nine pixels to be reminded. By the way, neither clicking nor dragging seems to do any kind of INTERACTING; instead it just takes you to another page with another map.
- Microsoft and Weather Channel logos, Enhancing Your Meteorological Enrichment Experience and Getting In The Fricken Way
- Usability-through-dopey-questions: a "What´s This?" link that'll sit there long after you've learned that This is a Weather Map.
- Changing the pointer to a hand when it's over the map, so you discover that you can drag it around. A zoom slider. The interaction is obvious and natural.
- A useful map directly on the page, wherever it's embedded, instead of a link to some other page where you drop your context, wait for it to load, and then use the map.
- An attractive, Googly style that is immediately recognizable, and a little copyright notice in the corner to reinforce the suspicion that "ah, this must be a Google map".
- No superfluous explanations or justifications; just a fun and useful tool that explains itself with subtlety as you try it.
I went to sign up for a Yahoo account, so I could try out Pipes. The Sign Up link is more than half obscured by an invisible and unnecessarily big clickable area for the "Prevent Password Theft" link:
That's doopid!
I clicked a "Get Video URL" link on an ABC News page.
- No, it wasn't copied to my clipboard. I checked and it was still something I copied earlier this morning.
- If it had worked as intended, it would have blown away some data I had found important enough to keep, without asking me.
- The URL is the same one as in my browser's location bar. It's not the URL of the video; it's the URL of this page that has the video on it. Why does this feature even exist?
If you try to close the Vox Compose page while you have unsaved changes, you get a handy dialog that asks if you really want to go away. But the UI of it is kind of unpleasant:
There are six things going on here:
- A big Firefox icon — This doesn't help. It's actually kind of misleading, because this makes it seem like Firefox generated the message. This is Firefox's fault, not Vox's.
- Confirm — Okay, it has the word Confirm at the top, for some reason. This doesn't get me any closer to understanding what's going on. It just says Confirm.
- Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page? — A question. The problem hasn't really been presented yet, so I can't really come up with a meaningful answer yet.
- You have unsaved changes. Are you sure you want to leave? — Aha, there's the problem. And the same question again, worded slightly differently. Okay, now I know what the problem is, kind of (I don't know whether I'll be able to retrieve my changes if I come back later), and I know what kind of decision I have to make.
- Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page. — Danger! If I just read the first half of this sentence, I'll press OK, to "continue" editing my post. Whoops! It actually meant to continue leaving.
- Cancel and OK buttons — I don't know if this is possible in JavaScript alerts, but you should really, really label buttons with the actions they represent. If I have to look back and forth between the message and the buttons to figure out which button does what, I'll just get confused. There's a reason buttons have labels: it's so we can find out what they do!
The alert icon is stolen from OmniWeb, but I don't feel too bad since I made it in the first place. :D
What do you think? Is it better? The rewording is certainly possible; I don't know whether JavaScript has access to the icon or the button labels. But if not, could they make their own pop-up in the page itself, like most other interfaces at Vox?
I don't mean any ill will to Vox; I'm just playing. The interfaces around here are pretty great, so I thought I'd point out a way things could get even better.
You may have seen these things used on people's blogs, or news sites, or product sites, or anywhere that people want to be hip and Web Two Point Oh:
http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/#example
The supposed benefit:
- You don't have to navigate to a different file to see the image at full size.
- The site looks, like, super cool funtimes!! Everyone who clicks will be amazed!!!!!¡
- The whole page dims. Then the box appears. Then the box grows vertically. Then the box grows horizontally. Then the image fades in. Then the controls extend out. Wow. You just waited three seconds to look at a single 300x200 pixel image. When you're done, you get to wait another second while it fades out and the page comes back.
- While the image is open, all you can do is look at the image. The whole page is faded out, and the image can't be moved to reveal text underneath anyway. So staying on the same page isn't very useful at all.
- Forget using your keyboard to navigate. On a normal web site, you can click a link to an image, check it out, then hit, say, Command-Left to go back to the page. If you want to see the image again, you can hit Command-Right to go forth again. If you want to save the image, hit Command-S. With Lightbox JS, all you can do is find the close button and click it.
- Some implementations put the close button in one corner, some put it in another corner. Who knows where the close button will be? Chances are that it won't be in the same place that close buttons happen to be in your GUI of choice. So you just wait for the button to appear, then click it. Sometimes, controls don't appear at all until you mouse over the correct part of the box!
- There's no Option-click to download, Command-click to open in a new tab, or any of that usefulness. You have but one way of accessing such an image: by looking at it in the lightbox thing. So forget looking at an image side by side with the page that mentions it, or looking at several images together, or any of the other things you should be able to do with your browser.
- There's no way of knowing whether an image will open in a lightbox until you click it; the URL just looks like a regular, innocent image file.
- Go to Apple store to buy printer for printing out hipster-PDA cards for GTD and dealing with important documents
- See that Apple is pushing the Photosmart C3180, which seems to work for index cards; buy
- Set up printer according to instructions
- Insert driver disc
- Disc is scratched; MacBook can't read it
- Check if drivers came with OS
- Apple's UI makes the pop-up menu seem disabled
- Finally realize it's not disabled, and get a list of printers
- Nothing resembling this printer is on the list
- Start writing a bug report to Apple about the UI, but HP's site hangs the browser, losing the bug report
- Go back to HP site; try downloading drivers; they are not there
- Google around for drivers; they are not there
- Try to get on HP's support chat; Mac is not supported
- Wade through HP's support structure to send an e-mail
- "You'll get a response within 1 hour"
- Get a machine-generated form e-mail within 1 hour
- Try Tiger disc; it's no good on Intel MacBook
- Try MacBook disc; it doesn't have the driver
- Try HP disc again; no good
- Try HP disc in Mac mini; it works
- Mount HP disc over network and start install
- HP installer sprays thousands of files on hard drive
- HP installer steals the UI focus every 5-15 seconds, preventing use of any other application during the installation
- HP installer hangs
- Start over
- HP install finishes this time
- HP puts its dumb icons in the Dock without asking
- HP printer appears in printers list; printing works!
- Connect printer to AirPort Express
- Printer appears in list, but trying to print to it does nothing
- Printer also appears in Bonjour list; selecting it gives the unhelpful error "An error occurred while trying to add the selected printer."
- Go to Apple support site
- Try turning base station and printer off multiple times
- Try deleting and re-adding the printer; get "Error -9672" as if it's 1996 and this is System 7.5
- Go through Apple's troubleshooting steps; the last one is a link to a list of compatible HP printers; this one is not on it
- Remember that this is the printer Apple is pushing at the very front of their retail store, and giving away with new Macs, yet it doesn't work with their printer-sharing base station
- Try installing HP software on Mac mini
- For some reason the input menu changes from Dvorak to US when in the password field for granting access to the installer
- Google around
- Check Gimp-Print and HPJIS; printer not supported
- Check unofficial printer list; printer is not on it
- Try printer sharing on Mac mini; it works great
- Receive e-mail from HP, 2 days later:
Dear William,
Thank you for contacting HP Total Care.
I understand that the installation CD that came with your Photosmart C3180 was damaged.
As yet, we do not have installation CD's printed for aftermarket distribution for the Photosmart C3180. Please continue to monitor our website for a free downloadable version.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline
HP Total Care
Later...
- Get an 8-page IRS document that needs to be scanned
- Put the first page in the scanner and push the Scan button
- HP Scan Pro starts up, scans the page, and then launches HP Photosmart Studio
- Whether doing anything or not, HP Photosmart Studio goes unresponsive for 15-20 seconds at a time
- Force-quit HP Photosmart Studio
- Launch HP Scan Pro again
- It does a preliminary scan of the page, then decides that a black and white IRS document would be best scanned in 24-bit color
- Change the setting back to 1-bit black and white
- The software decides that it would be best to scan an index-card sized area on the edge of the page, instead of the whole thing
- Resize the scan area to include the whole page
- The color-depth pop-up menu flashes 3 times and goes back to 24-bit color
- Try to scan; the scanner halts midway through the scan and the software stops responding
- Try turning off the device; the power light just flashes
- Unplug the device; the software crashes
- Plug the device back in and start over
- Repeat inserting a page, resetting the color depth, resizing the scan area, resetting the color depth, trying to scan, resetting the color depth, changing the preferences to stop messing with the color depth, trying to scan, getting stuck, unplugging the device, restarting the software, scanning again, until all 8 pages have been scanned
- Get so upset you crumple the document in your hand quite involuntarity
I was very excited about the new album art and CoverFlow views in iTunes 7, because they finally let us browse our collections visually, the way H.R. Giger and Roger Dean intended. But:
- When playing music from a connected iPod, these views are disabled. Why? I can view the album artwork on each track, so it's clearly available. This is the main way I use iTunes now, because it's the best way to use one library on several machines. So I might as well not have these views at all.
- That navigating to an album in the CoverFlow view doesn't actually select the album is more and more frustrating. If you're planning to listen to the album straight through, you shouldn't have to hit stop at the very moment the album ends in order to avoid it going on to the next album in the library. If shuffle is turned on, navigating to an album and hitting play just gets you the first song followed by some dang thing somewhere else in your library.
- If you navigate to an album in CoverFlow view and hit play, it doesn't play the album. Instead it just continues playing whatever you had selected before. You have to double-click the album cover.
- The CoverFlow view has no concept of focus on either the covers or the song list, so the left and right arrows never mean previous and next song; they always mean previous and next album cover.
- Album covers take a long time to move into position, and until they finish out that animation, you still have some old thing selected. So clicking an album cover and immediately hitting Return to start playing just moves you back to what you previously had selected and plays that instead.
- Cover art takes a long time to load. In CoverFlow, we got the joy of flipping through our music collections. In iTunes, we have the pain of flipping to a big line of blank albums, waiting for them to load, flipping to another line of blank albums, waiting for them to load again, and so on.
- Every single track without an artist tag or without an album tag appears as an individual blank album cover in CoverFlow.
If I can't go to Apple for an excellent user interface in my media player, where can I go?
