Andreas' UI and design blog

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Spell something with Flickr

Here is a reeeeeally cool (and useless?) Flickr mashup (hmmm - does this actually qualify as a mashup?) I found this when I surfed to Julie's Jumble which I found because Julie left a comment on by blog (thanks Julie :) )

It is Words from FlickR Just enter some expression and you get it spelled out using images from Flickr. Here are a few examples:





Now, how cool is that?

Cool: Speculative ligatures for internet expressions

Here is a neat little page for people who care about typography. Imagine abbreviations like lol, wtf etc would have evolved before there were computers? How would they change over the years, centuries... what would they look like?

http://typophile.com/node/16343

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Driving into a parking garage

Oh my, just created the blog and I have something to bitch about already? Geez...!

Yesterday I drove into a parking garage as I have done hundreds (thousands?) of times before. I stop at the gate, open my window to get the parking ticket and hear the voide "push the button for the ticket" or something along those lines. And suddenly a thought struck me: why in the world do I have to push a button to get this ticket? Obviously the machine knows I am here, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten that voice prompt, right? And the button was even blinking, if I remember correctly.

Now this IS interesting. Why indeed do I have to push this button? Couldn't the machine simply push out the ticket and give me the voice prompt to please take the ticket? I am pretty sure I have once been at a garage where things indeed worked like that: you drive to the gate, the ticket gets stuck out at you and you get a voice prompt. So why not here?

Let's step back for a moment and assess the more complete situation. That particular garage entrance was right off a street. You turn off the street and there you are at the gate and get the voice prompt. This is different from some garages where you might have gone through some driving to get to the gate. I'm thinking of garages where you drive down a dark alley to get to the gate or where you drive down/up a ramp. Could this make a difference?

Well, I think it could indeed. Because if you turn off the street and there you are, especially in a place where there is maybe not much space to stop for a moment, it could happen that somebody stops at that entrance for a moment to take a phone call or whatever. And as the gate is right off the street, this would trigger spitting out a ticket.

Big deal? Well, maybe! Let's assume somebody stopped for a moment just to take a cell phone call. Voice prompt happens, ticket gets pushed out, nobody takes the ticket, gate stays closed (we have to assume the gate opens only when the ticket is taken, because you want to ensure that whoever went into the garage got their ticket) car drives away again. Gate still closed, ticket still sticking out of the machine. What now?

Does the machine pull the ticket back in? Probably not. Does the machine just spit out the ticket so it drops to the floor? That could be risky because somebody arriving later might drop their ticket and then they could pick up the wrong one (very bad). Just leave the ticket in the machine? Not good either because the next poor fellow that comes to the garage now has a ticket with - say - 10 minutes of parking time on the ticket already (unless the system is smart to actually record the time the gate really openend to let the holder of that particular ticket into the garage. Or somebody would have to talk to the machine to collect the bad ticket (which is expensive with today's cost of personnel)

So maybe in this particular situation it isn't quite so stupid after all, to give the voice prompt and ask the driver to push the button. But, only in a situation like this one. I don't think it makes any sense to ask people to push that button if we can be certain that whatever car drives up to that gate indeed wants to get through the gate.

Welcome to my design and UI blog

Greetings. For quite a while now I wanted to create a blog like this because almost every day I see something that is just sooo stupidly designed, or baffles me so much, or annoys me so much that I just want to scream. Or at least tell somebody to get it off my chest. So this blog will contain a lot of ranting and bitching about things that apparently are just badly designed.

But wait, I don't want to only rant, because as an HCI person I am very much aware of the most important law of UI design (IMHO): there is no perfect design! YOu can, at best, design something really well to support a specific task in a specific situation. But a universally perfect design...? Nope, not possible. And everybody who thinks they got it, has overlooked something. So I want to think a bit about why something might have been done a certain way, and maybe I even can come up with suggestions for improvement. I see this as much as opportunity for ranting as for exercising my own design thinking.

Let the games begin!