90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Some call centers tend to treat you, the caller, like a document. You call up with a simple piece of information (e.g. “You’ve over billed me this month”) and then you get bumped between different staff members like an unwanted email. The thing about email is that it doesn’t get extremely pissed off if you keep it waiting for ½ an hour.

This ‘treat the caller as a document’ practice is expensive for the call centers too. I can understand sacrificing customer experience to save money (that’s what call centers are about after all), but doing this and costing yourself money at the same time is unforgivable.

World Usability Day 14th Nov 2006

Apparently a great way to get involved is to organize an event in your own city. I suggest we all dress up as bad user interfaces and parade through town. I bagsy dressing up as a Flash pull down menu!

I’ve just found out that I’ve been charged over £100 over the past year for a subscription-based polyphonic ringtone service that I never subscribed to. I am very pissed off. I managed to track down the perpetrating company, Stream Group who allege that I explicitly subscribed via SMS on Tuesday May 25th 2005 at 23.05. 

Looking back I do remember getting SMS spam but I never realized I was getting charged for it. After a bit more digging I discovered there is a premium rate services regulator called ICSTIS. Fat lot of good they are. This kind of “single SMS fire-and-forget lifetime subscription” should be illegal. You can subscribe by mistake, and then can forget about it - as I did, for months or years, since it is hidden in your bill. A purchase should always involve an “are you sure?” confirmation. In other words…

(more…)

In an intriguing article in Wired about the new Darren Aronofsky film The Fountain, I spotted this nice quote from the chap responsible for the (non computer generated) effects:

“The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they’re forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they’re not limited by their imaginations. I’m incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”

So much of the creative software I use gets it’s most impressive use from people that have found ways to misuse features intended for something else. From Kai Krause’s abuse of early versions of Photoshop to get chrome’s and liquids to the way drum and bass depended developed out of the use of audio editing tools (meant for fine tuning recordings) to create an entirely new way of writing rhythm parts.

It’s often the most automated, algorithmic tools provided by software that enables an artist to layer complexity on complexity often to the point where the results are as surprising to the person using the tool as it is to their audience…

Do Not Push Button (via Adam Kalsey)

A fair chunk of my work is involved in producing training courses to teach people software and systems that their employer has had developed.

If people need to read stuff to figure out how to use your system then this is a symptom not a cure…

Apparently I can write my blog posts in Google’s online word processor thingie. That would be much nicer (read my ‘Lost a long post‘ post to see why. In brief - I need autosave or else I can’t be trusted…)

It should be noted that I found this out by just looking around the Google interface. No need to read the docs. That’s called ‘discoverability’ that is… My spell checker doesn’t think that’s a word but it doesn’t think ‘thingie’ is a word either so is obviously deficient.