I am a huge believer in making systems just work. I have never been more proud of my design than when it gets all the way to production without a help system of any sort. There's just nothing to say!
Still, there are almost always error messages, of one sort or another. Ideally, these are assistive, and actually preempt errors. I am tending lately to call these "exception messages." Some good ones have been messages shortly before Christmas on e-commerce sites stating whether products can be expected to get there in time (sorry, I forgot to take a screenshot) and some bad ones have been
inappropriate use of orange road signs.
Like the street signs, its sometimes helpful to look to machine-world examples of such things. Its winter here, and for some reason a lot of places like to lock one of their two entry doors, all winter. I think they believe that they think it cuts down on the draft, but its pretty dumb to me. Pretend, though, that its just broken. If you wanted one door forever, the right answer would be to board it up; that's a way to avoid anyone trying to use it, so no errors occur. But if its temporary, how do you message it? Well, not like this:
This is actually one of the better signs I have seen on doors in my neighborhood. (Also note its at the front of an airlock. Any draft is already caught by the second set of doors, so its extra inexplicable). Its not very clear, so I end up tugging on lots of locked doors, which just a few weeks before I had been able to use.
On the other hand, take Taco Bell. Our local one (I don't go there, but its right at the end of the street) has been abandoned, and its moved across the street. But you know how fast food joints have an iconic nature; they look like that same place years later. Old Taco Bells still look like you can get tacos, even if they serve Chinese, or are pawn shops. What to do?
How about that? VERY large signs, make sure they are places that matter (e.g. the drive thru menu which is already attracting attention, and an expectation of reading), leave the lights on so the signs can be read, and make the message very, very clear. Its not /exactly/ across the street, but its so close you literally cannot miss it if you pull back out and look. No address, no diagrams, no arrows (typical for moved businesses). "Across the street." I find this to be a wonderful solution.
How else can exception messages matter? How's life and death? This
A310 crash is, partly, the result of not having any useful warning of disengagement of a part of the autopilot. A small light, and unusual operation compared to older aircraft (you can manually control only the roll channel but everything else is on autopilot still) is all that notifies.
As this is considered a feature (not a bug) by Airbus, it makes some sense that there are not horns or anything, but perhaps something more clear would have been helpful. When things go really bad, certain elements simply disappear from the
MFDs. There's still no actual message that something is wrong, much less /what/ is wrong.
The solution, of course, was to just add more procedures and training.
Besides being the only rental solution at the store, its something I had never actually used before so I couldn't resist. Home deck is not bad. Big, obvious choices with no gimmickry.
So I click the obvious one, the "Rent a DVD" option. The expected screen comes up, with a list of movies...
...and that's it. There's no overall count of movies available, location in the list, search box... wait. There's no search box? Really, they seem to think that the limited selection (I didn't count, but like 50 movies) means they think browsing is enough. But its really no good.
And the buttons are so generic, like any bad PINpad. It took me a good 15 seconds to figure out there was a 'next' button. If it was on the side, or had a big arrow maybe it would work.
There is a minor ability to sort, but its not that great. There are two small tabs at the top to sort by release date or title (I guess, alpha, the default).
They are small, the color highlight is vague (I got it, but a friend read it backwards) and they are hard to hit. You can get above it, so the cursor appears to be on it, but its not activated; that's a serious failure of basic design principles.
The tabs are hard to hit at that target size due to the bezel getting in the way and casting a shadow, and the parallax error. Touch alignment isn't perfect.
The scrollbar (used a few other places) is just as bad in the same ways.
Perhaps my favorite is when you press the "Online Rental Pickup" option:
There are clear, animated instructions. Unless you don't want that option.
At which point you have to wait for timeout. There is NO back button of any sort. Nothing to get you anywhere else, to a help screen or anything that is available in the rest of the application.
You'll note I don't comment on the payment, delivery and return processes. That's because we didn't rent anything. As I said, we were somewhat in the mood to get something to watch, but the inability to actually find anything but top-40 playlist items from the Redbox meant we didn't begin to consider getting anything from there.
We actually spent time looking thru the clearance bin (from closing out the store video department) instead. Even not finding something worth buying, that was a more satisfying browsing experience. Aside from the selection, there may be something satisfyingly social about browsing movies on a scale larger than touchscreen. Have to think about that some more.
I have come to realize that, in my time living on my own, I only learned fairly perfunctory washing procedures. There is much more to it if you really care. And like practically all systems used by folks who have to accomplish a specific task with their system, hack emerge.
A favorite of mine is the washing rock. I have seen similar items other places, and not always from people who actually talked to each other previously. This particular hack involves the spin cycle. For reasons that elude me, its nice to be able to soak and agitate clothes twice. But its either unimportant or actually bad (I don't know) to spin between the two soaking cycles.
The machine doesn't mind soaking and agitating with the lid open, but the spin cycle is apparently dangerous, so it will not start -- and if running will immediately stop -- if the lid is opened. So, the rock goes into a hole where some lame dispenser goes, and it keeps the lid closed enough bugs don't fall in, but open enough it won't start the spin cycle.
While "researching" for this post, I asked about a few other's habits, and found something else interesting. Which, again, the wife with her great washing knowledge, already knew. Washing machines by no means always have the same UI. This struck me as quite pointless; they all do almost the same thing (I guess some of the more electronic types have additional smarty-pants features) so why have they not settled into one closely-related set of behaviors and interfaces.
Here's my favorite example of how divergent they can be. In the spin cycle mode, one machine locks the lid. Like a stove on the cleaning cycle, you cannot open the lid at all. There is in fact no way to cancel the spin cycle. On a power outage once, their clothes were stuck in the machine until the power came back on. How does this make sense, and why would you expect this behavior based on use of other washing machines?