Today I went to purchase a tool called HTTP Analyzer from IE Inspector. It is a really great tool for looking behind the scenes when content is loading from a website.
Problem is that when I went to purchase the tool I was asked for the billing address of the credit card I was using. My corporate card is billed to New York. Check out the list of states I was presented with on the left. How easily can you find New York?
I wonder how many sales this costs them?
...do they ever make some bad UI decisions.
Given the context of the "Close Account" button here, right next to your account details, what would you think the "Close Account" button does? If you have a Skype account, I dare you to click it and find out. :-)
Given the context of the "Close Account" button here, right next to your account details, what would you think the "Close Account" button does? If you have a Skype account, I dare you to click it and find out. :-)
Note: Clicking Close Account doesn't actually close your account, it just minimizes this section of the dialog.
Thanks Arlyn for this.
Happy Friday everyone.
Labels: Bad UI
Doug LeMoine blogs about how the usability of ESPN.COM has deteriorated. At one time in my life I would read ESPN.com several times a day, but now it is so filled with adds, and pop-ups and garbage I can't read it any more.
See the picture below. The highlighted and arrowed 300x500 pixel area is the only real content in a page that is 1260x3000 pixels.
I actually had a tough time trying to highlight the area I viewed as actual content. The colors are so bright on the page it makes it difficult to actually draw someones attention to a specific area.
They have even managed to fit in another ad in the content area.
See the picture below. The highlighted and arrowed 300x500 pixel area is the only real content in a page that is 1260x3000 pixels.
I actually had a tough time trying to highlight the area I viewed as actual content. The colors are so bright on the page it makes it difficult to actually draw someones attention to a specific area.
They have even managed to fit in another ad in the content area.
Labels: Bad UI
I just upgraded to Office 2007, and I am a little confused as to why the Paste button is here when sending an email in Outlook 2007. Shouldn't the send button be there instead (like it was in Office 2003)?Don't get me wrong, the new Office is pretty cool, but I just thought this was odd, as I almost never paste into emails, and I always Send emails I begin.
So why not place the Send button in the same location that it was in Office 2003?
Labels: Bad UI
This a pretty funny clip that shows how annoying it would be if the Microsoft Clippit Help character tried to help in other manners of life. The best part of the clip is when he tries to help the guy spreading propaganda.
Labels: Bad UI
When I worked in product support for eHelp, Macromedia and Adobe, there was a common phrase that you would hear around the product support department.
It was RTFM.
In case you don't know what this stands for, it stands for Read The F***ing Manual.
One thing people who say this never realize is that nobody reads the manual, especially with software manuals. Software manuals are boring, and for most products (Articulate not included), are poorly written.
Good software shouldn't need an extensive manual, and if it does, users won't ever read it, and people will never figure out how to use the software.
It was RTFM.
In case you don't know what this stands for, it stands for Read The F***ing Manual.
One thing people who say this never realize is that nobody reads the manual, especially with software manuals. Software manuals are boring, and for most products (Articulate not included), are poorly written.
Good software shouldn't need an extensive manual, and if it does, users won't ever read it, and people will never figure out how to use the software.
Labels: Bad UI
Rant On:
It really bugs me when software programs have no error handling whatsoever. Take for example OnTime. If at any time you loose internet connectivity when trying to use OnTime (a bug tracking system) OnTime throws the unhandled exception shown below.
To me it is shocking that:
A. That they had no error handling for what is likely to be a common error
B. No QA guy or gal ever caught this
Imagine for a moment if every time you tried to publish a presentation from Articulate Presenter without first saving the Powerpoint file we through up this exception, then crashed Powerpoint...How annoying would that be?
Thankfully Articulate Presenter has better error handling than this.
BTW...if anyone from Axosoft reads this, it would be awesome if you fixed this.
Rant off.
Sorry, I felt compelled to write about a program I disliked after my last post about a product I liked. I wanted to maintain some balance :-)
It really bugs me when software programs have no error handling whatsoever. Take for example OnTime. If at any time you loose internet connectivity when trying to use OnTime (a bug tracking system) OnTime throws the unhandled exception shown below.
To me it is shocking that:A. That they had no error handling for what is likely to be a common error
B. No QA guy or gal ever caught this
Imagine for a moment if every time you tried to publish a presentation from Articulate Presenter without first saving the Powerpoint file we through up this exception, then crashed Powerpoint...How annoying would that be?
Thankfully Articulate Presenter has better error handling than this.
BTW...if anyone from Axosoft reads this, it would be awesome if you fixed this.
Rant off.
Sorry, I felt compelled to write about a program I disliked after my last post about a product I liked. I wanted to maintain some balance :-)
Labels: Bad UI
If you aren't reading this post via a RSS reader you have probably noticed the new site design. I use blogger as my blogging tool and they give you a choice of about 20 different templates to choose from. So I spent the last couple of hours modifying the site to use a new custom layout I designed. I tried to make it have somewhat of a comic book feel without being too unprofessional. I also added a new search feature that is specifically tailored for this site. Hopefully this will enable people to find old posts a little easier. If you have a feelings about the new site design please feel free to leave me comments, I will be interested to hear some feedback.
Labels: Bad UI
AICC
Articulate Presenter SDK (2:03)
Articulate