austin usability, seriously?

Welcome to austin usability, the least usable usability site I've seen in a long time. If you go to the page, you're instantly greeted with a popup that blocks you from using the site.
Nice.

When you're shopping for a usability company, what do you care about the most? I hope you answered "journalists' opinions of the company":


Here's their "what we do" page:


I like my version better:

Goddammit Google Reader

This just started happening today but now I can't fucking use Google Reader. First this dialog comes up:Ok, I don't really care why it doesn't work, just give me a way to make it work.  Maybe the settings will be useful:

Awesome, you just sit there are 0% forever. Maybe if I click Account settings...
Fuck! The fucking "go online" button just hangs the whole app.

What the fuck, Google? Argh.

Google App Engine argh

I have written and hosted my latest site: PixPlz using Google App Engine. I don't really recommend GAE to anyone unless you really, really value using a free service.

Here's a list of minor limitations you might run into:

• no aggregate queries
• no image handling
• hard to port
• index building
• bizarre errors from simple commands
• must sort on inequality filter first
• random 1000 limits

no aggregate queries
This one is pretty frustrating if you ever like to gather statistics about a single damn thing your app is storing. I would like a total of the number of times all my images have been voted on, but if I try to loop through every image (which appears to be the only way to do it) I quickly run into Google's 5 second page timeout limit.

no image handling
I know that technically, there's an image library, but it doesn't do a damn thing if you actually want to handle images. Say someone uploads an image: want to know the filetype? Read the individual bytes to determine it. Want to know the dimensions? Yeah, read the bytes. You can do a few write-only changes like resizing, but you can't read any attributes about the image you're manipulating.

hard to port
Other people have written about this, but eventually I'll want to get away from GAE, and it gets harder and harder the more code I write.

index building
Want to query some data in a new way? Cool, just write the query, test it on your dev machine and push to production. Oh, wait, you have to sit and stare at a progress indicator for an indeterminate amount of time before you can actually use that query. This took over 5 minutes for 100 photos:
bizarre errors from simple commands
When I got up to about 150 photos, I started getting timeout errors from this GQL query:
photos = db.GqlQuery('SELECT * FROM Photo')
photos.count()
Yes, counting 150 photos is difficult for BigTable to accomplish, and results in an timeout error about 1% of the time.

must sort on inequality filter first
I wanted to make a page that showed the top rated girls, but not one that had maybe one or two "yes" votes, and were thus at 100% falsely. Simple, right? You just query for all the photos that have more than 5 votes and sort them by score. But wait, you have to sort by votes first, then score, giving you a useless top 10 board of mostly the oldest photos (because they have the most votes) thanks BigTable!

random 1000 limits
Can't return more than 1000 elements from a query, can't offset more than 1000 elements into a result set, can't handle uploads or any variables in memory bigger than 1MB. Google touts how well App Engine scales, but I can make any system scale if I just don't let you do anything with it.

ShoutNow

This sign up process is great way of indicating the steps you'll need to take, and that you'll need to pay at the end. (I really hate sites that never mention payment until you've filled out multiple pages of forms, only to be hit with a card card info screen)

from ShoutNow

Square Master

Look at this clever use of space:

Image from danbourque.com (the maker of Square Master)

Dreamhost Sucks

I had (have) an account with DreamHost.  I'm currently trying to cancel it, but they are doing their best to thwart my efforts.

I present exhibit A, the "cancel your account" page.

You Currently Owe: $190.80
However, if you close your account you will get a credit of $190.80 for unused services you've already been billed for.

So you're saying I owe money but I don't owe money? Ok, cool, I guess.

You will have to pay for your free domain registration if you cancel your hosting account now though, meaning there will be a charge of $9.95 added to your account.

Something about the phrase "pay for your free..." doesn't seem right.

You are not within our 97 day money back guarantee (it has been 732 days since 2006-12-23)!
To end your hosting now, you must submit an additional $9.95 to pay off your account.
We're sorry, but because you will owe $9.95 after closing your account, we must ask you to first go make a payment for that amount.

How about if you just end my hosting now and send me a bill for $9.95 instead of preventing me from cancelling?

I sent support an email and they said the terms of service clearly states blah blah blah I don't care.

I don't really care what DreamHost's excuse is for this crappy user experience, but I can give a recommendation to never use them to host anything. This is not the first annoyance I have had with them, but it should be the last.

Updating the iPhone

(pop) I'm updating my (pop) iPhone to firmware version 2.2 for the "improved Safari" features and some of the se(pop)curity fixes and iTunes decides that disabling my fucking phone for an hour isn't enough, it has to annoy (pop) the shit out of me by putting itself on top of all my other windows every few seconds. Thanks a fucking lot, it's not like I wanted to get (pop) any WORK done on MY computer (which is now temporarily Apple's).

Who the fuck coded this? S(pop)omewhere deep in the code, there must be a delay loop that says "hey, it's been 10 seconds, time to be (pop) FUCKING ANNOYING now."

Each of these (pop)s is seriously (pop) another time the window popped up just while I was typing this.

Fucking Apple.

Be a marketing ROCK STAR

Oh marketing-speak. I love how you can talk so much when you have so little to say.
From jQuery Site Redesign - The Community Speaks

As many of you have seen by now, the jQuery Project’s site has been redesigned. It had been a long overdue task and it was important to put a fresh new spin on the main hub, and the face, of jQuery.

The previous site was getting old.

One of the things about the jQuery Project is that we’ve never run with the crowd or accepted the norm. By pushing boundaries and sometimes being “in your face” we’ve not only grown tremendously in popularity but we’ve pushed most of the other JS library projects to rethink their own principles and make changes to improve their products. That’s a good thing for everyone as competition is always good.

This is our excuse for a really weird site redesign.

So, it should come as no surprise by the drastic change in the jQuery website. So far, the single biggest complaint has been associated with the new banner (ie: rockstar caricature & slogan). Again, we wanted to push the boundaries and come up with something that would generate a lot of buzz.

It should come as no surprise that we're making a surprising change to the site.

Overall, we’ve succeeded in that goal with plenty of positive feedback but unfortunately, with some very negative comments as well. We actually value both types of feedback and want more as it’s the only way to determine if we’re on the right track. As with any site redesign, you can’t please everyone and we understand that. But we also want everyone to realize that this is a first cut and it doesn’t mean that it can’t be tweaked.

While we value your comments, we value ignoring them even more.

We’re actively reviewing all of the feedback and will certainly be looking at how to best handle some of the concerns of the community. After all, the community is what makes the jQuery Project so special and so different from other projects. In addition, the jQuery team has always listened to the needs of the community and this time is no exception. Again, I think the team is unique in that we *DO LISTEN* to the community and we’re going to work on making the site an invaluable tool for everyone. So just give us some time to go through the messages and keep an eye on this blog for updates.

We still don't want to change it.

Thanks for your patience and we truly appreciate your feedback.

Leave a comment, we'll ignore it.

You know what? Fuck your login!

I was holding off writing this post until I was calmed down about it, but you know what? This is angryinterface.

I submit Exhibit F:


Yet Another Fucking Login Prompt. I saw Shapeways on Mashable and thought "hey, I would love to fabricate some gears, and maybe some other stuff", so I go to look at their site.

But nooooooo, you have log in. Does no one understand that I (and everyone else) have a thousand fucking logins to every site in existence? Do I really need to login to BROWSE your site? That's ridiculous.

I hate your site, I hate your stupid login prompts.

I'm going back to cuneiform tablets

I must have unzipped thousands of files since I started using computers. I bet billions of files are unzipped every year by computer users.

And yet...

Not a single fucking software vendor has noticed that a lot of zip files contain just a folder with the actual files inside it.

In fact, I think that's probably the most common use case for zip files.


Instead every vendor says "oh, we'll just be flexible and give the users a choice"

"Do you want to unzip all the files in this zip file you haven't looked inside to a folder or not?"
a) Sure, I love having folder structures like \Desktop\downloaded_file\downloaded_file\setup.exe
b) Nah, randomly dump files all over my desktop


Why give users a choice when you know what they'll want and you could pick for them? This goes double for a choice where the user would have to research which option to pick (like looking inside every zip before choosing)

OH GOD WE ARE SO SORRY

There is a team of guys at Microsoft whose sole job is to be personally sorry for the inconvenience every time an application encounters a problem and needs to close. They just wail for 40 hours a week each.

Enso, why you gotta make me sad?

The guys over at Humanized just released the 2.0 prototype of their quick-launching product Enso. I'm sure they're still ironing out some bugs, (like how I crashed it by typing "1+1" in the google search field). But their help documentation made one UI mistake I really hate.



Guess what area on those previous and next links is clickable? If you guessed "just the links", sadly, you're correct.

always make your buttons as large as is reasonably possible

Aptana Studio disables internet, "known issue"

This may be one of the most ridiculous problems I've ever had with a piece of software. I tried to use Aptana Studio to some Rails development, but when I tried to install the Rails plugin, it would block my network adapter from doing anything. Here's the mail I sent:

If I attempt to install the Radrails plugin from within Aptana Studio, I lose all internet connectivity instantly, including the ability to ping or resolve a DNS entry. Naturally, this interrupts the download also, and prevents me from doing anything until I forcibly close Aptana, at which point, I regain full connectivity.

So Aptana replied:

Hi Blake,

This is a known issue with the Aptana update site for some users. Try the workarounds for manual installation described on this page:

http://update.aptana.com/install/rails/3.2/

Hope this helps,
Michelle Petersen
Aptana, Inc.

So not only is it ridiculous, but it's a known issue. Aptana currently does not have a product, but they shipped something anyways. If you have software that breaks other functional parts of a user's machine, that's unacceptable.

I will never use any of their other products and I can't recommend any of them to anyone.

never break other parts of a user's machine without warning (some exceptions to this would be a BitTorrent client that may peg your network traffic, or a defragger that blocks hard disk access)

When all you have is a pie hammer, the whole world looks like a pie nail

Just look at that! What is a pie menu doing there? ARGH. This is a problem when you spend all your time reading about and creating interfaces. Any sexy technology can catch your eye and overwhelm your reasoning.

Why not just have a play button off to the right of every song? It would be easy enough to either 1) show a ton of play buttons, or 2) show the play buttons on mouseover. You could probably even think of a 3) something better. That's just off the top of my head.

The pie menu gives no affordance as to how to play a song (the point of the site!) until a user explores and clicks something. Then it requires a click and a drag of minimal precision to play a song. I shouldn't have to do more than click to play a song on a music site.

always minimize the cost to perform your most common tasks
don't use interface elements just to use them, make sure they're suited for the task