But I ran across a brochure for the Museum of Contemporary Art. And its even open till 8 pm. Great!
Easy walk. And it looks promising. And… its locked. I am wrong, and its open till 8 on Tuesday, not the next day when I actually can go. But, to not make the whole trip over there a bust, I visit the museum store. Naturally, its open every evening.
Find some neat things but the one thing I leave with is this:
Not much of a story, but its something else Alison will love. Short version is we have the duck from the same people for the upstairs bathroom. The downstairs one, with the rubber frog in it, clearly needs the frog clock. I didn’t know till then that the frog existed even.
The trip back is expected to be harrowing, as all these flights are delayed, but ours seems to not be. There’s a moment when I worry as my boarding pass is… not a boarding pass. It’s a note that I need to talk to someone about it. That takes a while, but its fine. I have a seat, unlike thousands of others.The plane leaves only like 30 minutes late even.
Security also always worries me. Not excessively, as I am not really a worrier, but because the security rules are so arbitary I worry I’ll inadvertently break an arbitrary rule. This time, I’m worried about the toothpaste I bought and forgot to have a plastic bag for. Turns out not to be a problem.
So, I’m in line, shoeless. Tony sticks his red bag on the conveyor and it stops. Huh. The security guy must have found something. Interesting. At least two minutes pass before the guy behind me asks if the bag is on the conveyor. Of course its on the conveyor, and I push to assure everyone.
And it moves. Turns out there is a lip specially designed to hold up the line. The x-ray inspector hadn’t stopped, he just had nothing to look at. So, I load my stuff, move thru the magetometer, and wait. Tony is all dressed, and practically impatient by now.
The x-ray inspector guy calls out to me: "Is there a frog in your bag?"
Me: What?
X-ray: Is there a frog in your bag?
Me: [I could swear he’s saying “frog” but how would that look like a frog on x-ray; and why does he care?] What?
X-ray: Is there a frog in your bag?
Me: Are you saying “frog”
X-ray: Yes. Is this green bag yours?
Me: Yes. X-ray: Is there a frog in your bag?
Me: Yes. Why?
Another security man has come up by now: "Don't worry about it. He’s just … interested. In stuff."
And the second security man shoves the bags thru, tells the x-ray guy “push the green button” and we get out of there. That was so surreal I am not even going to try to come up with any commentary on what this might mean about security, or society as a whole.
Okay, so you click it. And... well, its not worth giving them crap about every bit of the interface. Its not clear right away (the most obvious part to me is the "forgot something" function, which I STILL do not understand) but eventually you see the pulldown. Its also weird, but you get there. And its reasonably contextual. At least its about the "movie links" page as opposed to having you drill thru everything.
So, you get to the ability to add items by line. Its a bad sign that it needs to have four paragraphs of text in front of it. Probably hard to use. And way too many categories, but my issue is around the "other title" field. So, I want to add a link to Homicide. I go to the correct page for it, and add the title straight out of their search results ("Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993)) and get this:
Hmm. Okay. Its not obvious there even /are/ episode pages to me before this. For example, I went to another site to confirm the episode name, because its so unclear. So, we go to find that. Which is hard. A search for the episode title leads nowhere. Eventually I see the "seasons" links at the top of the series page leads me to a huge list of all episodes in all seasons. I find the right one, and it even has a link. Click it and what do ya know, there's a whole page about that episode. Not super-clear that there's a superordinate series or anything, but there it is. So, I grab that title removing the carriage return, so it looks like ""Homicide: Life on the Street" Homicide.com (1999)" and try it. I even remember to remove the episode info from the description.
Not even close:
In fact, we're getting further away. Now it doesn't even know what that means! I sigh. I watch more TV. I eventually try again. Maybe its web-centric. Try the URI "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0604379/"
Nope. Even worse (I won't show any more screenshots). Okay, maybe its all using codes. How about the value for the title "tt0604379." Again, not a finger. So I think, maybe they are as bad as some of the developers I have to work with, and stare blankly when you say "parse out irrelevant characters." Because its a title field, maybe it never occurred to them to accept anything but numbers.
Yup, that's it. It works. I submit it. But by the time you are entering secret code numbers, not available anywhere ON the page, we might as well be using command line interfaces. Now that I know, its not that bad at all (like command line interfaces, really). But who would be able to get thru this process otherwise? I only finished out of a sense of self-sacrifice as an interface designer.
I feel the post needs to end in some great, or at least witty, big conclusion. But there's not much to say. Its bad, in a way that's so bad it points to a cultural issue. And its easy to blame IMDb but my company has dozens of customer-facing web applications at least this obtuse. I suspect I'll write about it more, but clearly its beyond the scope of just designers. There needs to be a cultural change for developers, and business stakeholders. I'm just not sure when that might filter down to this level.
