The New Yorker takes a wry look at the cultural perspectives embedded in information design

When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other.

Just went through an annoying hotel booking process.

I was hoping to get a corporate rate, for which I would have to call and ask for it. I finally gave up sitting on hold, figuring that the cost of me on hold (wasted time) was probably close to the discount I might eventually receive.

Went online, and see the the Marriott hotel we’ve been recommended have two different room styles for almost the same price (one has the word “spa” in the name) but there is nowhere easily found on the site with information about what these rooms actually contain, or hey, what they look like.

I pull the trigger on the fancier rooms. I fill out all the online forms to book the reservation. The UI has a little spot to send in comments. It’s nice and wide and is about three lines long. There is text that says “45 characters maximum, including spaces” but I see the box not the warning, and I put in a whole message about our arrival. Nope, they send me back several times until I get it down to 45 characters, which is less than 1/3 of the available space.

My confirmation arrives and buried in all the visual jargon is a little notification:
Promotional email unsubscribe
Periodically, Marriott Rewards sends email about your account balance and membership status, member exclusive specials, and other program information that may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive these promotional emails, you may unsubscribe here.

I click on that, and it takes two steps (including specifying which of all the possible newsletters they generate do I want to unsub from), and then they tell me Please allow 10 business days for processing.

Nice.

We’ve got some quality control problems with Froogle. Maybe this is nothing new. I searched for “bluetooth mouse” and clicked on one listing to see the two results in detail. Here they are listed. The name of the product and the merchant, together.

I tried the first one and the product page they link to is actually for a screen protector, not a mouse.

I tried the second one and it prompted me for login and password, and then of course denied me access.

Don’t be evil, sure. But don’t be lame, either.

SF Chron revisits this story yet again, taking the unfortunate thrust (backed up by lots of examples) that designing for women specifically means making it a pretty color, like pink.

Technology companies say they’re getting the message. Kodak, which has introduced a line of fashionable digital cameras in black, silver, red and — you guessed it — pink, also plays up the camera’s ability to take high-resolution pictures and record up to 80 minutes of video.

Likewise, Sony, whose products include a red digital camera, red laptop and pink digital music player, said it has studied not just appealing colors, but also how easy it is to use once the customer takes it home. Features such as the ability to charge the digital music player in three minutes and get three hours of use appeals to women, especially mothers on the go, said Kelly Davis, a Sony senior product manager.

‘Women are not just making the purchasing decisions, but making the purchases themselves,’ she said. ‘I think it’s definitely increased dramatically over the years.’

Nearly half of Sony’s digital music player customers are female, up from around 30 to 35 percent several years ago. Pink has been the No. 1 color sold among its Walkman Bean digital music players.

Cingular said it added the pink Motorola Razr to expand its line of popular black and silver models, which are super-slim camera phones. ‘We looked at it and said, ‘Can we expand our demographic and offer a different color?’ ‘ said Jennifer Bowcock, director of consumer media relations for products. ‘We want to hone in on the female audience.’

Is it the color? Or is it ease-of-use? It doesn’t seem anyone has any good (and non-insulting) ideas about designing for women.

In Conversations with a robot Klaus has a frustrating but hilarious interaction with a chatbot. Look, this stuff is as old as Eliza, but for some reason, it’s still hilarious. I hope someone has done a PhD on why there is humor in interfaces that act human but fail to do so. Besides stand-up comedy (or blog) fodder, it obviously says something profound about our own expectations for communication.

Klaus says:
you are a robot, right?

Spleak says:
What if I am?

Klaus says:
just answer the freakin’ question

Spleak says:
Questions, cool. Ready?

Klaus says:
aaahhhh

Spleak says:
Yeah yeah, whatever.

Klaus says:
ok, whatever. I’m ready.

Spleak says:
Help me get smarter: tell me what the average human would have said.

Klaus says:
an average human would have remembered the sentence uttered 5 seconds earlier. You asked me if I was ready for questions

Spleak says:
What about me?

Klaus says:
what about you?

Spleak says:
I’ve been wondering about me myself.

Klaus says:
well, good for you. please don’t let me in on it.

Spleak says:
Yes?

The local Macy’s store has modified all their card reading boxes so that the card swiping slot is blocked. That t-shaped blob of plastic along the right side is where the slot used to be.

The software hasn’t changed, however, and while your purchases are being run up you are asked (as always) to swipe the card. I looked for quite a while, feeling stupid, trying to to figure out where the heck to put my card.

There was no place.

They also have not changed their staff training, so there was no mention of what to do or not do with the card.

Eventually, they take the card from you and swipe it themselves, and you return to the device to “sign” the purchase.

I hadn’t seen anything like this before, known as a dual-flush toilet. Nice interface; the oval flush button is divided in two; one button is twice the size of the other. You choose which flushing button to press based on what you’ve just done. Visually there’s a number one and a number two button. They could have had some awkward fun with color-coding, I suppose. If it’s yellow…etc.

Note: other pics from our trip to Banff are here

I’m trying to comment on a couple of blog entries on BusinessWeek online. Hitting “post” just times out. So I searched the site for a means to contact them. First I found the Masthead for the online edition. But nothing there. Turns out I want “customer service” (even though I’m not a customer, I’m a user, yes?).

BusinessWeek Online: Customer Service says

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Please provide as much information as possible to help us resolve the problem. We will respond if you include a valid BusinessWeek user name and email address below.
Name
Email Address
Address
Address 2
City
State/Province
Zip/Postal Code
Country

Of course, I have no idea what a BusinessWeek user name is. Nor do I see a place to enter that information! I put in my name and email and describe the problem. Nope. I need to provide an address. A City. A state or province, and a zip or postal code. To submit a problem report with their website. What?

Okay, I give them 1 nowhere st. Nowheresville, etc. etc. And submit it.

And it reloads the exact same page, with the fields still populated with what I typed.

There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve received my feedback, nor any indication that I need to do something else to get the info to them. I have no idea what has happened. Have they now received several copies of the same bug report (including the one I tried in IE in case this was a Firefox problem?) or have they received none?

Meanwhile, I have two composed but not-accepted blog comments.

Obviously something is broken, but how much is broken and how much is bad design? I expected better!

click screenshot to enlarge

This is an interesting new feature from Google. At least, I’ve only noticed in the last few days, and I haven’t seen it mentioned on the usual blogs that hype every new thing that Google does (I guess this is just an improvement in searching and that’s just so – yawn – less interesting than other Google improvements or innovations).

Looks like the top result for a search (but only certain type of searches – it doesn’t work for portigal

or portigal.com – is it only for sponsored?) come up with not only the links to the site, but also a selection of links to other pages in that site. Interesting tradeoff between useful and clutter. I’m not sure yet what I think; I imagine I’d typically want to open the page anyway, and then use the context of that page to choose my subsequent links. But I guess if you knew you wanted to do something specific on that site, like check arrival times, if there is enough info in the link shown in the Google result, you might try that.

We’ll see what happens. Nice thing about the web – companies can try out new features easily and take them away or improve them easily (sure, it’s not easy exactly, but if you wanted to do this with a car feature, that’d be a lot harder).

MSquared is a mini-conference in SF in late September, put on by Influx Strategic Consulting. I’m serious about the mini aspect – between 8am and 12:50pm there are 7 presenters (including Chris Anderson and Howard Rheingold), Q&As and a coffee break. Anderson presents for 20 minutes. Rheingold for 30. Yeesh.

Given that the aim is obviously to promote Influx’s brains (and services), one might wonder what it costs. That information is nowhere to be found. The registration page simply asks for contact information. Submitting that, however, takes to you a page where you are asked to pay $185.00. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but how hard is it to put that information upfront so people can decide to register or not? It might be nice to be a little clearer that this is happening in San Francisco, specifically.

Update: They’ve fixed the price thing; it’s right up front now. Thanks!

The event might be fun, however, we’ll be on vacation (well-deserved I might add; it’s been a few years).