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blatherskiteSo I'm on the Via train to Toronto to visit some old friends (the bestest kinds), and lo and behold, the wi-fi isn't working. I can see the network, but I'm getting a weird-ass redirect loop that isn't letting me reach their "you agree to these terms" page. My fellow travelers clearly have a connection, and are happily surfing Facebook and Youtube. I can't look this up on the Web, for obvious reasons, so I go to the online help for suggestions on how to do what the error message suggested as troubleshooting, and guess what? The online help is online (that is, on the Web), rather than on my laptop (i.e., online rather than printed).
Pause to admire the inspired stupidity of the programmers who thought that was a good idea. The notion of putting the help text on how to troubleshoot connection problems on the Web would make George Orwell, Joseph Heller, and Douglas Adams bow humbly in your presence, acknowleding the presence of their master.(Credit where credit is due: Thanks to the Firefox programming team. If nothing else, you provided a great subject for a rant.)
Though I'm infamous among those who know me as an Apple evangelist, I have to give Apple an honorary mention for programming stupidity, since they've crafted a superficially lovely operating system that is often unusable if you don't already know how to use it. Online help? Good luck finding it? Tool tips? Fuhggedaboudit. If you want to use your lovely new smartphone, you either need to go online to find someone's Youtube tutorial, hope the software developer has an online manual somewhere (and that you can get online to find it), or show up at the Apple store and wait for a merciful Genius* to help. (Note to Apple: If someone needs a "genius" to solve their problems, this is a clue that you've created something unusable by the majority of the population. Maybe you should call them all Dummies, so people will feel better about publicly admitting their humiliating inability to use what is supposed to be a simple product.)
* In fairness -- which I know, doesn't belong in a rant -- I've found Apple's geniuses to generally merit their name. They haven't always been able to solve my (often obscure) problems, but they've been friendly, superhumanly patient, and generally very good at their job.
A simple hint, which I'd love to see become a manifesto for designers of mobile apps: Make every last interface object "pressable" so that if you hold your finger on it for (say) 3 seconds, it pops up ***locally stored*** online help that describes what the feature does. (For laptop apps, use hovertext based on the cursor position.) And ban apps from the App Store or Google Play if they don't include that feature for at least half of their interface objects. It's not rocket science -- this kind of usability aid has been part of all desktop computer software for well above a decade. It's simple courtesy to your audience, and it makes you look like less of an elitist twit.
Pause to admire the inspired stupidity of the programmers who thought that was a good idea. The notion of putting the help text on how to troubleshoot connection problems on the Web would make George Orwell, Joseph Heller, and Douglas Adams bow humbly in your presence, acknowleding the presence of their master.(Credit where credit is due: Thanks to the Firefox programming team. If nothing else, you provided a great subject for a rant.)
Though I'm infamous among those who know me as an Apple evangelist, I have to give Apple an honorary mention for programming stupidity, since they've crafted a superficially lovely operating system that is often unusable if you don't already know how to use it. Online help? Good luck finding it? Tool tips? Fuhggedaboudit. If you want to use your lovely new smartphone, you either need to go online to find someone's Youtube tutorial, hope the software developer has an online manual somewhere (and that you can get online to find it), or show up at the Apple store and wait for a merciful Genius* to help. (Note to Apple: If someone needs a "genius" to solve their problems, this is a clue that you've created something unusable by the majority of the population. Maybe you should call them all Dummies, so people will feel better about publicly admitting their humiliating inability to use what is supposed to be a simple product.)
* In fairness -- which I know, doesn't belong in a rant -- I've found Apple's geniuses to generally merit their name. They haven't always been able to solve my (often obscure) problems, but they've been friendly, superhumanly patient, and generally very good at their job.
A simple hint, which I'd love to see become a manifesto for designers of mobile apps: Make every last interface object "pressable" so that if you hold your finger on it for (say) 3 seconds, it pops up ***locally stored*** online help that describes what the feature does. (For laptop apps, use hovertext based on the cursor position.) And ban apps from the App Store or Google Play if they don't include that feature for at least half of their interface objects. It's not rocket science -- this kind of usability aid has been part of all desktop computer software for well above a decade. It's simple courtesy to your audience, and it makes you look like less of an elitist twit.