Jeff Chausse
Digital Strategy + Design
Bad Usability in my Car
One of the most notorious bad-usability culprits is the process for setting the clock on anything that isn’t a dedicated clock. The logic seems to be that people only set the clock once every six months or so (Daylight Savings Time, you know) so you really don’t want dedicated clock-setting features cluttering up your interface. Makes sense, so what do you do? On some devices, this means you put the clock-setting buttons on the bottom or rear of the device, where you never have to see them until you really need to use them.
The device in question here, however, is my factory-standard Mazda car stereo. Clearly, putting the clock setting buttons on the rear or bottom of the device is not an option (well, it is, but that would truly take the cake for bad usability).
So, we don’t want to add controls to the face of the device, and we can’t hide dedicated controls elsewhere. What do we do? Well, we do what most device makers do in this case – we repurpose (or, in programming lingo, “overload”) some existing buttons. We simply take buttons which are normally used for something else, and, when we’re in “clock setting mode”, use them to change the hour and minute instead.
I’m willing to grudgingly accept this “workaround”, with one request – choose sensible buttons to “overload”.
Here’s a picture of the stereo:
Now, the first thing you do to go into clock setting mode is hold down the “Clock” button. OK, that’s pretty standard, now the clock is blinking. Next, we must deduce which controls are used to change the hour and minute.
Looking at the clock, several sensible options present themselves:
- The “Seek” button has up and down arrows. Those seem like a good option – up moves the time up, down moves the time down. Or, maybe up changes the hour and down changes the minute. Not 100% logical, but at least arrows represent change, and I know I’m looking to change something, so it’ll do.
- The “5″ and “6″ buttons also have arrows on them. Same deal, they seem pretty logical to me.
- If, for whatever reason, neither of those options work, perhaps the “1″ and “2″ buttons are the magic keys. Those have arrows as well, albeit less noticeable, and the least logical of all the arrow options.
- Maybe the designers thought it would be cool to use the knobs, instead of arrow buttons. That way, you could control the speed at which the clock changed. Sounds pretty reasonable, although I’m not a big fan of “overloading” the volume control on an audio device (*cough* iPod *cough*).
Now, this list is the list that actually went through my head this morning as I tried to change the clock. I tried each option in turn, and none of them did the trick. Finally, having exhausted all these options, I tried the “well, it couldn’t possibly be…” option. And, sure enough:
- To change the hour: You press “Scan”
- To change the minute: You press “Auto-M”
How depressing. I don’t even know what the “Auto-M” button is supposed to do normally. But, now that I think about it, M could stand for minute, and I am setting the “Minute” in my “Auto”. Maybe there’s some perverse logic to this that’s just going over my head right now.
Moral: When forced to compromise on usability for whatever reason, at least do the best with what you’ve got to work with, instead of throwing your hands up and deciding “if I can’t have optimal usability, I might as well just choose my interface randomly.”
Dilbert Wisdom
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I use the Wally Reflector on a fairly regular basis – as does nearly everyone I know. It’s usually quite justified.
Blade Desktops? Nope, I Don’t Get It
It seems every couple years or so some company or another decides that “thin clients” are the way of the future. Today, our inevitable future apparently involves “blade desktops“.
The “Blade Desktop” is like the old network PC proposed by Sun, except instead of a bunch of of “thin clients” connecting to a single powerful server, each “thin client” has its own dedicated “blade” computer sitting in the server room. So… it’s kind of like, you take the kind of dumb computer parts and put them in one box, then you take the smarter parts and put them in another box, then you run a really long cable to connect the two parts. This is called progress.
OK… Hm… Are desktop PC’s too expensive? No. Are they too big? No. Are they too hard to maintain remotely? No.
So, this makes everyone’s life more convenient how?