An amusing hearse, seen on a neighborhood street:
Here’s a close-up of the license plate:
Made my morning.
Archive for the ‘Friday Thoughts’ Category
Dress Re-Hearsal?
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2009-05-22 | 5 Comments »
You Know When Your UI Needs Help When…
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2009-05-01 | 15 Comments »
Seen at a gas station:
You know your UI has usability issues when people tape multiple signs on your gas pump to help people get through the intricate and error-prone process of purchasing fuel.
Why does the upper note exist? The trouble is that there’s a Debit button but not a Credit button, and so since Credit is the default, users need to remember to override the default before swiping the card. People will sometimes naturally forget the special step because there was originally no reminder that this needed to be done, and because most other pumps don’t work that way. One solution would be to print the information prominently near the card reader, thus standardizing the note and making it more visible. A better and simpler solution would be to do what most pumps do: Avoid the opportunity for forgetting to specify the right thing by having both buttons, Debit and Credit, and simply prompting the user to press one or the other after they swipe their card.
But the trouble behind the lower note is even more blatant and, frankly, inexcusable: Is there any good reason not to conditionally print “ENTER PIN” or “ENTER ZIP,” instead of just always printing “ENTER DATA” which is not only unclear but also one of the classic geeky words to avoid in a consumer-oriented UI?
Then again, I’m amazed that in this day and age I still see output like “1 item(s) purchased.” Apparently it’s still more important to write the programmer-friendly printf( “%d item(s)”, count ) than the user-friendly printf( “%d item%s”, count, (count==1 ? “” : “s”) ).
A Wryly Repurposed Quotation
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2009-04-17 |
In my travels, I recently came across this empty store with an almost-empty box beside the front door. As seen in Monterey, CA:
Evidently some character had also noticed the empty store with its empty box, and decided to do a little walk-by wry economic commentary via repurposed quotation. Zooming on the once-empty box:
Income in Perspective: 2 Bppl @ $3/day
Posted in Friday Thoughts, Opinion & Editorial on 2009-02-06 | 4 Comments »
I just saw a CNN headline that read: “Young workers scrimp to live on $15/wk.” Before reading further, what do you think: Is that stunning and shocking? Or shockingly typical?
The story turned out to be a piece about white-collar workers in China trying to live frugally, spending only 100 Yuan on travel and food during the workweek to conserve funds. Of course, the workers’ actual total expenses and income are higher, because that $15/week figure doesn’t include weekend expenses and other major costs like rent. Even so, the story is considered newsworthy here, and is probably a shock to a number of readers in the western world.
But the headline wouldn’t surprise readers who are familiar with the approximate distribution of income/GDP/wealth in the world.
To illustrate, here are two personal data points from 2006, when my wife and I traveled to Kenya and Zambia to visit friends:
- Income: In Kenya, we were told that being a staff worker at a safari lodge is considered a good job. What does it pay? About $2 per day, for long hours and six-day weeks. This isn’t unusual; in about 30 countries, including Kenya, more than half of the population earns under $2 per day. An estimated two billion people – 30% of the world’s population – live on an income of less than $3 per day. And $3 per day is about what the attention-grabbing CNN headline implies, though the actual story behind that headline is much less bad.
- Cost of living: But what happens when we consider, not just dollar-for-dollar comparisons, but purchasing power? Isn’t it less expensive to live in less-developed countries? Yes, it usually is, especially for shelter and services – there’s been some talk lately on the U.S. news about retiring in Mexico as a way for older people to save money in this economy – but the difference for the same quality goods is often less than one might think. In Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, we found there were only three grocery stores [*] having similar goods to what we would expect to find in a U.S.-style Safeway, although of course the Zambian stores were much smaller than U.S. stores (more the size of a medium Trader Joe’s) and offered far less selection diversity (something like a factor of 20 fewer varieties or brands). When we visited one of the stores, I picked up a few Western-style items, totaled the price and converted to U.S. dollars in my head, and found that those comparable products in Lusaka cost nearly the same as we would have paid for the same items in Seattle. Our local friend replied: “Right, nobody who lives here would ever think of buying a can of soda pop.” Certainly not when a can of Coke costs a day’s wage for many people, and doesn’t confer any significant nutritional benefit.
The gulf between the western- and world-median standards of living is, simply put, vast – and growing. The standard of living that’s normal for most of the planet’s population is well nigh unimaginable to many of us in the western world, and even for those of us who’ve been there, it’s one thing to see it and quite another to really understand what such a life would be like. I don’t claim to.
[*] They might well be the only such stores in the country, not just the capital.
From the "we know what they meant, but it’s not what they said" department
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2009-01-16 | 8 Comments »
While walking our dogs recently, we came across several of these signs — ironically, in front of our neighborhood school.
Anon on Data
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2008-08-08 |
The adage, quoted again this week by Bruce Schneier:
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”
But lest we enshrine raw data as holy in itself, another perspective:
And the plural of “datum” is not “proof.”
Seneca and Shakespeare on Goals and Opportunities
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2008-06-27 |
From the ancient dramatist Seneca the Younger:
“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”
And from the Bard, not to be outdone in metaphors of ships and seas:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and miseries.
We must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Talking Lambdas with Bill Gates on BBC
Posted in C++, Friday Thoughts, Software Development on 2008-06-20 | 8 Comments »
[6/25: Added YouTube availability and notes.]
A few weeks ago, the BBC was in town to tape a special interview/documentary on Bill Gates. As part of the footage they got, there’s a Bill-in-a-technical-review-meeting shot that includes yours truly at a whiteboard presenting an overview-plus-drilldown on C++0x lambda functions. It was a good review; Bill’s a sharp guy with a broad and deep background and incisive questions.
Here’s the trailer and the program [YouTube]. Some bits of our VC++ team review start around 4:30 of part one and 8:05 of part two, with a few other shots later on. If you watch really closely, you can see a brief flash of a guy in a blue shirt at a whiteboard with code on it in HerbWhiteboardScrawl Sans 60pt, and then Bill gesturing and making comments about simulating lambdas using macros instead of baking them into the language, and variable capture consequences.
The BBC documentary “How a Geek Changed the World” first aired today in the UK on BBC2; I’m guessing it will repeat. I don’t know when it will air in the U.S, but as of this writing it’s on YouTube.
Usability: Watch out for those non-errors that start with “ER”
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2008-04-11 |
Today I had a nice lesson in transaction codes. I did a happy little online transaction, and then the confirmation screen came up with what at first glance looked like an error. It startled me, until I read more closely:
Thank you. Your transaction has been placed and received by SuperMondoCorp.
Transaction Confirmation Number: ER6661234567
“Yikes!” thought I to myself, thought I. Then, “oh, the bolded confirmation number just starts with ER which only looks like ERR.” (And yes, the rest of the number did start with 666. I only altered the other numbers.)
I realize you can’t anticipate everything, but it is a reminder about usability. If the thing you draw the customer’s eye to on a confirmation screen can start with what looks like a negative confirmation, it’s not the greatest thing.
Many Books
Posted in Friday Thoughts on 2008-01-25 | 2 Comments »
When I walk into a Chapters or a Borders, seeing the many shelves of books often recalls the ancient writer’s words about quality vs. quantity, circa 1000 BC:
"To the making of many books there is no end."
So true. Yet that observation predates the printing press… and netnews… and now RSS.
(Yes, I’ve been thinking of managing-down my Google Reader subscriptions again…)
