A screenshot from the My Itineraries page at United. I’m trying to cancel a flight. Their FAQ suggests you can do it from their site, but I had all sorts of trouble on Friday and ended up sending them an email (nicely enabled from that part of the site, with automatic form filling with my ticket number and all that good stuff). It’s 5 days later and they haven’t canceled it or otherwise responded. So now I’m in limbo. Today I went back to check what itineraries they were showing for me. And here’s what I find – button and other interface text is replaced by labels in the code, probably variable names instead of their values.

Neither the bad service nor the poor attention to detail gives me a great feeling about United.

I had a fun time at a Microsoft event in SF yesterday, essentially a product demo day, with 300 people watching presenters tweak HTML (and other arcane variants of such code), and then some more intimate discussions on design, user experience and so on by Chris Bernard. Given the emphasis on User Experience, I thought these demo kiosks were lovely but discouraging to use.

Things look nice.

I’m not sure about the term demo assets exactly, and why I need to get them ready, but the mess of a screen at least has a “do this first” zone.

Except it’s a non-stable trick. They put a Windows shortcut on top of that white triangle, but I accidentally dragged it when I went to click it. It’s not really a button, it’s a fake button, and one that easily breaks when someone tries to use it. Oops.

Okay, so now you do the double clicking they want you to do. And up comes a DOS window that lasts more than 1 second. Maybe I’m just un-tech enough to have that bother me, but it really seemed like the backstage was being revealed in a way that it shouldn’t. Why do I see DOS stuff when I’m running a new Windows app?

Anyway, it wasn’t clear what that was doing (perhaps restoring things to a pristine state) and it was even less clear what to do next. Some things to click were just Word documents that you couldn’t interact with (that’s a demo?), and others were apps that gave dire warnings about expiring betas. Again, maybe I’m not the right person to be trying this stuff anyway, but you can see that the commitment to design and user experience has a long way to go.

My hosts were exceedingly kind with their time and made me feel very welcome, so I apologize for having the poor grace to only post something negative. I suspect they are only too aware of the many instances of this sort of thing going on, and are marching uphill. But at least they are marching!

Yet another article

that mocks the introduction of an automated technology. In this case, it’s a self-serve postal kiosk in San Francisco. Several silly examples in the story where people struggle to figure out how to use it, taking longer than the line for a real person, where the machine asks for lots and lots of extra info (since it has no a priori context like a human might), and so on.

Some themes that we now know

1. Lots and lots of stuff is badly designed
2. Many people can’t easily become quick at interacting with a new computer system
3. Some tasks are more appropriate for a kiosk than others.
4. Lack of context in an automated system and the resultant work the system (and thus the user) must do in order to establish that context reads as silly, funny, frustrating, and unacceptable

It’s impossible from these stories to tell, of course, what’s really going on. Me, I love self-check even if I have to fight it, even if I have to bend my natural tendencies to work the way it wants me to work. Maybe it’s being an introvert, or a bit of a technology geek, or curious, or just the idea that there’s a scam to be had by being savvy and checking out automatically rather than the usual way.

Our CCA class just finished a “user experience audit” of BART and found dozens of aspects of the whole experience that are sub-optimal. I’ll add this one (although maybe one of them saw this as well).

Step 1 – remember your stall number.

Too bad this sign is posted in the ticket-buying area of the station, far far away from your car off in the parking lot. It should read Go back to your car, dumbass, and write down the four digit number and then come back here and look at step 2. Their guidance is not presented at a useful point in the process, at all.

Last week I dialed my cell phone with my 4-digit parking code so that I could “remember” it. There’s one machine for buying tickets, and then through the turnstiles is the next machine for paying for parking (“the paid area”). So even if you walk from your car muttering 3214 over and over again, you still have to use a number-heavy interface to select the value of your ticket, enter your ATM password and so on, and that’s likely to wipe out your short-term memory.

But I only learned this from failure. All of which makes this sign so unhelpful.

Ms. Dewey (no longer online) is a new search engine making the blogosphere rounds today. You can search, and this character offers you comments, some based on what you search for and others perhaps random. It doesn’t make me think about neat new visions of software interactivity, it seems more like a gimmick. It meminded me of Subservient Chicken, I immediately wanted to start talking to her about her, not about my search task. And of course she’s loaded with responses. Folks on digg are documenting what they are finding (just like what happened with aforementioned poultry) that they can get her to do.

Haw haw, or yawwwwn?

Thanks to some great technical sleuthing and hacking, we’ve got some good improvements here on the blog
– an “email this post” link with every post
– an improved “tag cloud” off the right that links to other postings, rather than back to Technorati (who seem to have stopped indexing this blog 55 days ago)
– The blog title is now All This ChittahChattah rather than Portigal Consulting both on the page and in feeds
– I got rid of CoComment because it was (as others had suggested when I started using it) causing some problems. It was slow and was messing up pingbacks (i.e., posts here that refer to other posts here)

Please let me know if you see any weirdness or broken stuff that needs to be fixed!

This article in Wired considers the vulnerabilities of supposedly theft-proof electronic systems. Turns out there are “back-doors” in some of these technologies.

He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.

I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.

Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.

The story is interesting on many levels, but I was really taken by the interface to this back door. Our user model for automobile controls sees the different systems as entirely separate. Who knew the emergency brake could talk to the ignition?

I have always loved the idea of neat little tricks; unexpected ways of interacting with something, outside of the fixed rules of how you’re supposed to use it. It’s not so much the idea of unauthorized access, but simply the secret Toontown world that lurks beyond the mundane and familiar. I remember during the dial telephone era there was a way to get your own phone to ring back (it may have worked with tone, but I remember it as a dial hack); Dial 57 and the last 5 digits (or something) and then hang up, or hang up twice in succession. And the phone would ring. Great for messing with family members or when visiting someone else’s house.

The outcome was fun, but I’ll emphasize that much of the pleasure came from this possibility of navigating cleverly outside the interaction flow of receiver/dial tone/dialing/ringing/other party answering.

Sure, we’ve got Google hacks nowadays where there oodles of hidden functions, but it’s basically a command-line interface that reads more codes that you know about. So what? Isn’t that what Unix was? The delight (and I’m not talking about usefulness, just the fun and discovery) comes from the rupturing of the interaction model and the seemingly irrelevant actions leading to some new effect.

I don’t need anyone to reveal security vulnerabilities, but I’d be curious to hear about any favorite back doors!

David Pogue reviews some new phone in Lovely Phone; Ugly Software. I’m mostly interested in the headline, though.

I’m so sick of this as the status quo. Aren’t you?

Award-winning, or attractive industrial design is achievable. Usable, joyous, lovely software is achievable. Why is the combination so damn hard? When will companies figure out how to do better? As advanced as we think we are in these fields, it seems big companies are still launching stuff that wrecks your life while making you look hip. We can blame it on organizational silos, or increasingly complex design problems as screen sizes gets smaller and usage gets more advanced, but I think there’s a cultural problem (of course) in organizations, as they still don’t get it. They aren’t figuring out how to work together and they aren’t setting high enough standards for what’s good enough to launch.

Sure, this is Motorola in this article, but the story seems so familiar, this could be anyone. I don’t propose simple solutions here, but I do feel so very tired of the problem.

(This one is for Gene!)

It looks like a freakin’ teapot. You pull up to flush. And there’s no range of flush intensity available (say, based on how high you pull up or how long you hold it) that I could determine.

flickr just launched a new interface. Here’s some screenshots. I don’t think I can be objective about it; of course, I’ve got habits to break and new ones to learn, and that will take a while. I will say I trust them and so am hopeful for good things.

Update: I just noticed this: There are sneaky advertising links buried in flickr!

Taken with a Nikon D50.

is now
Taken with a D50.

and that logo is a hotlink to a Nikon advertising site.