Flickr: almost certainly quite possibly a shining example of how not to do UX.

Integrity. That's a thing most UX is sorely lacking. Consider how when you post an ad to craigslist you get a message saying something like, "Thanks for posting, we really appreciate it" but then if you are trying to post more than one thing you can get the dreaded, "you are posting too fast, try again later" which seems to happen to me after like 4 postings which is hardly enough, and I am not botting this, I am doing this all manually by hand, so I don't see how I can be doing it too fast, really. The kicker is that some other things I am posting afterwards go through OK, but the one thing that said "too fast" is now somehow stuck always always always giving me that result, so it seems like I can never post that one at all. Pretty much seeming utterly crappy random illogical unfriendly unuseful punishing sad broken lame dumb backasswards terrible UX. I mean, if you ask me.

It is so "awesome" that the GIMP on Ubuntu 14.04 running X11 Unity LightDM (I guess, I don't really know how to tell, I am just looking in the results of "ps aux") when I tell it to load a bunch of files and then -- you know, because this is supposed to be a system that supports multitasking of things -- try to go browse the web that every time GIMP starts loading a new file it forces itself to the front of the desktop stack.

I have tried various "teach kids to program" systems over the years. Frankly none have been impressive to me. I guess maybe kids are more able to put up with broken UX than I am. Unfortunately my son already has shown the ability to recognize bad UX, which means he is doomed to live a live of living user hell like me. I just want to hit the lottery so I can sponsor things done well as a response to all the drek out there.

There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind that think when using a scroll bar on a 'desktop' app, clicking above or below the 'thumb' should move one page towards were you clicked; vs. the kind that think the thumb should jump all the way to where you clicked.

The former are correct. The latter are wrong. (If you ask me.)

Another thing I would like to teach people is that moving things out from under me is annoying as all heck. Android OS does it. Firefox does it. Ghostery does it. Seems like Every Bloody Freaking Thing does it. Why are the folks who make these tools so apparently desperate to make my user experience so completely and utterly horrible? I wonder if they could have done any worse if they had somehow designed the system to purposefully watch me and make sure that just as I am about to click/touch on something and then move it in a premediated fashion so that the wrong widget gets my input. Unfathomable. Do these people not use these products? Ever?

The US Social Security web site UX continues to just impress and amaze. Ok, not. Including the TEXT MESSAGES ALL IN UPPER CASE and the "extra security features" that apparently aren't really required and/or depend on physical paperwork I haven't gotten or have long since lost. Yay.

O'Reilly parts search UX? Fail!
Pep Boys parts search UX? Fail!
AutoZone parts search UX? Hey, that's not so bad at all! Crazy. Based on that alone I wanna use them as first preference when in need of parts.

Leave it to the US Government to make a Social Security web site that only works during certain hours. As if the computers really need to go home and get some sleep every day. I mean, we aren't talking about some infrequent unavailability for some tweaks or upgrades or whatever, we're talking about a regularly recurring day in day out thing where the web site basically puts up a CLOSED sign. Of course the kicker is that the front page doesn't tell you anything about it, you have to click to log in and only then does it tell you:

This service is shutting down for maintenance now. View our service hours.
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Social Security

The Official Website of the U.S. Social Security Administration

We're sorry...
 
This service is not available at this time.

Please try again during our regular service hours (Eastern Time):
Day
 
Service Hours
Monday-Friday
 
5:00 a.m. - 1:00 a.m.
Saturday
 
5:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Sunday
 
8:00 a.m. - 11:30 p.m.
Federal Holidays
 
Same hours as the day the holiday occurs. 

Well, hallelujah and amen, people!

If there is one thing I would like to successfully teach everybody on Earth, it is that when you write out a date for humans to read, it really really really should include everything relevant:

• Day in month #
• Day name
• Some write MM/DD/YY and others (more sensibly, ahem) write DD/MM/YY. Thus I think months should always be written out as names, not numbers.
• 2 or 4 digit year #.
• A time if need be. Personally I like 24 hour clocks, but am/pm/whatever.
• Redundancy is not bad! If the thing is in the morning then say "morning of <date> at 11am." 
• Spelling day and month names out fully is not bad!

Thus "3/7/2013", or "March 7th '13" (or, gosh, was it actually "July 3rd 2013") etc. doesn't cut it. Something like "Thur March 7th 2013" is better!

What do you think?

I have to say that the UX of the tools people use to build software is often severely lacking. When (ha ha) I get rich I will use my ill gotten gains to improve things.

In my bleeding heart alternate universe, our transportation would be designed to avoid road kill as much as possible, and our buildings would be designed to make it easy to let lost birds get out.

Personally, I find the UI/UX of Android 5.x for phone stuff to be utterly abominable. The general UX for contacts is also still horrible, as ever, in Android. Utterly boggles the mind.

Has there ever been a programming language that gets numbers right? I mean in every regard. There's a lot of nuance about numbers, even abstractly let alone in terms of actually trying to implement them on a machine, and I have yet to see any language that doesn't have big frustrations, holes, gaps, ux gaffaws, etc. when it comes to Things Numeric.

What about my old 78's?! Er, I mean, what about integer_t?

#endif  /* ASSEMBLER */
/*
 * If composing messages by hand (please do not)
 */
#define    MACH_MSG_TYPE_INTEGER_T    MACH_MSG_TYPE_INTEGER_32

#endif /* _MACH_ARM_VM_TYPES_H_ */

Anything vaguely related to C (like, say, C++) is probably crap to be avoided whenever possible. If you ask me. Which you didn't.

In some "oh look at that horrible, horrible car wreck!" kind of fashion, the fact that Android so utterly screwed over the entire concept of the back button from the Web is sort of fascinating to me. Except for how it drives me nuts daily.

The problem is that the back button is involved with task stacks as well as being used by apps themselves for their internal UI. So when I am using a, you know, web browser on an Android device, the hardware/OS back button will only sometimes act like a real browser back button: other times it will dismiss the browser app entirely.

Sure on the one hand I completely get the logic of it all. But the final effect is really only to drive me nuts. Best way to drive somebody crazy? With random negative stimulus.

I sorta wonder what it would be like if instead of "git branch -a; git checkout [some branch]" we could do things like "ls branches; cd branches/[some branch]", if you catch my drift.

"They have a preferred way of working, for better or worse, and if they’re not open to adapting their process to align with your needs, then even if they put up some of the optics of Kanban (using a board, limiting WIP, etc), you’re not going to get the continuous improvement mindset that it sounds like you’re looking for them to approach your engagement with."

Probably the only way things won't egregiously suck is if there is sufficient competition. Having rules & regulations from some government entity might help a little (I am not a fan of completely unfettered capitalism), but can of course also go terribly wrong.

Unfortunately certain things seem to happen that make the "sufficient" and "competition" parts of the phrase not come together. Like, only the big orgs can do it; or the incumbents have ways of locking out new competitors (e.g. by vacuuming up most of the investment money even though they aren't yet profitable); or all the consumers are complete idiot glutton for punishment dummies who keep on using the evil bad stuff even when it is known to be evil and bad; or all the consumers wouldn't be able to differentiate between good and bad ux if their life depended upon it; etc.

ux is hard, and thus - although sometimes i wonder about cause & effect - everybody gets it wrong.

I know I shouldn't be surprised, and I know nobody really cares. But. But, the Pokemon TCG game UX kinda really sucks. Even just trying to set up an account and log in is kind of a little circle of hell unto itself.

Based on empirical evidence, I think just about any online form these days is a broken piece of junk. I tried ordering burgers online from The Habit and it only failed egregiously at the very end. So I hope that company immediately goes out of business as just desserts.

A main problem with any extra layers of security is that it is another layer that can go wrong. Google's 2 factor auth is sometimes pathologically incapable of sending a text message to my phone. In those cases I have sent myself an sms via other routes and they get through so I must guess that it is something Google is doing wrong. Yay. So then once I do get in I try to get some backup codes and save them, but the UX for that is weird and really bad and hateful as well. So all in all, a fuster cluck when it comes to user experience.

1. I do the online check in and get A boarding passes.
2. I print them out.
3. My printer does a bad job printing them out, dunno if they will scan at the gate.
4. Download the PDFs to my phone.
5. Think to see if the airline says that will work.
6. Their web page implies they have some special version / app that I should try to use, and that the way to get it is to say you want it when you check in.
1. but, uh, I already checked in?
7. Go to the web page to see if I can just type in the confirmation code to re-get the same boarding passes, but as mobile form as well.
8. After I type in the info, it tells me that I can check in.
1. BUT, UH, I ALREADY CHECKED IN!
2. if I click on "check in" will it kill my A's and give me I dunno Z's or something? I have no way of telling, and I don't really want to risk it.
9. Go to the app store and download the app and run it.
10. It asks me to log in, or "CONTINUE AS GUEST" (caps theirs).
11. I click guest... and wait... and then...
12. It gives me a god awful programmer art error dialog box about not being able to connect, "X ERROR Unknown Error while connecting" (oh the hate)
1. Doesn't tell me what they are trying to connect to.
2. Doesn't give me anything useful I could use to figure out what to do to fix the problem.

Have I mentioned recently how technology and the people who do stuff with it make me see red?

Update:

1. The 3rd time I touch to continue as guest, it gets in.
2. The app pretty much has the same horrible UX where it looks like I am taking a huge gamble, it has a CHECK IN button, which for all I know might kill my A's and give me Z's if I dare to press it.

P.S: Anybody (and it turns out to be a lot of people / orgs / sites) that uses I and L and 1 and O and o and 0 and Q etc. in their sekrit kodez is a freaking stupdenous idiot of dumb idiocy (oh the hate).

This is not saying anything new, but on the whole I think Android's biggest failing (and in particular vs. iOS) is in User Experience.

For example, the hardware tends to be under powered vs. what they try to do in the UI. Often when I am trying to swipe in Android Gmail, and other apps, things go all to heck. Either nothing swipes, or things swipe the wrong way, or things start to swipe but then think I did not swipe far enough and rubber-band back to where they started. Any number of completely incorrect user experiences from my user perspective. I just went through a minute of fighting with Gmail on this. What a bloody nightmare experience.

(Lest you claim that this is the fault of the handset folks, rather than of the Android OS folks and the overall ecosystem, I'll point out my current phone is a Moto E 2015 LTE, which I guess is in effect actually kind of a Google product, not some random 3rd party thing.)

So maybe iOS's market share will continue to recover, and eventually eke out Android, as people say, "forget that stuff!" to the Android UX.

Formalism is power.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/rank-polymorphism.pdf

My other band name really truly is <<The Right Abstractions>>.

"We also have a lot of crazy ideas for building out Kerf as a large scale distributed analytics system. Kerf is already a suitable terascale database system; we think we could usefully expand out to hundreds of terabytes on data which isn’t inherently time oriented if someone needs such a thing. There is no reason for things like Hadoop and Spark to form the basis of large scale analytic platforms; people simply don’t know any better and make do with junk that doesn’t really work right, because it is already there."

Coming soon! A new circle of Hell! For those people who post 'helpful' tutorials/examples on the web that turns out to be mostly just copy-pasting the examples from the manufacturer's docs. Which suck. Which was why I went looking for alternatives in the first place.

Living in the future is not all it was cracked up to be. Sure I can find out about all the restaurants in my local area super quick, vs. having to use the Yellow Pages, or hear from random friends, or whatever. But, it also means that I end up seeing a lot of web sites for restaurants that are usability and user experience abominations. Thus this hallowed future sometimes seems to be all about bringing me really bad user experiences faster than ever before, and anywhere I go since I can get it on my phone. Yay!

In the university level class I teach on usability and user experience, I use the ffmpeg command line interface as a wonderful example of both how to do it, and even more how not to.

I find it almost terminally depressing that apparently the world of computer software system development is populated with more than enough people to make sure that pretty much everything has some kind of blatantly bad stupid wrong evil broken hateful idiotic pathetic lame clueless eff up that makes me tear my hair out.

Consider pop up drop down menus. Consider one that has a little down arrow icon at the side of it. "[Foo bar|▼]" as a terribly bad lame evil wrong effing sad ascii example. I expect that when I click on the text, the full menu should appear, not only when I click on the down arrow.

But who knows! Maybe It's Just Me!

I grew up on Emacs, not Vi. I have to say, though, that Emacs is just kinda scary bad news when it comes to UX, in many ways. A nice glaring badness is how undo works in Emacs. There's no redo, just a twisty undo that can undo the undos until you are so freaked out and lost and confused you just give up using it ever. Anybody who is an apologist for this design doesn't score well on UX in my personal humble subjective opinionated opinion.

People complain that the IoT is instead "of Things" is "of Shyte". The thing is that everything about computers has pretty much sucked long before any IoT junk.


I start with this:

And when I click on View Details, I get this:

hate.

I don't even know how privileged I am vs. 99.9% of the rest of humanity. Nevertheless it drives me crazy whenever somebody doesn't realize they are privileged. Whatever form of socio-economic status is being blithely missed, it is depressing. Depressing when people really truly cannot comprehend disparity and biogotry and clueless discrimination. If you have never run the thought experiment of what it would be like if They were to throw you in prison for no really good reason, of what it would be like if They were to shoot you dead for no really good reason, please do try it and try to get a feeling for the existential horror of it all. (But don't worry about voting on it since everything is already gerrymandered all to heck.)