Re: Lilfe in the slow (repair) lane.

... snip

My favorite 'how not to' example is a dustpan, made with strengthening ridges on the bottom sides of the pan, in such a way that its impossible to put the front edge of the pan flat on the floor to pick up the sweepings - they go underneath the raised edge on the front lip created by the ridges. Obviously the designer ( and any subsequent reviewers ) never used a pan.

About a decade ago, we did this, but it was a dismal failure.

I worked with the installation group of a fairly popular circuit simulation program, and someone had the bright idea to have the CEO test out the installation...

A few hours later... ;-)

Charlie

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:56:15 -0700, DaveC wrote:

Most of my frustrations were unloaded in the original thread:

In a past life, I helped design several marine radios. The user interface was designed by a genuine industrial designer, with input from literally everyone that could possibly render an opinion. That included the janitor and random visitors. Part of my responsibility was to document all these great ideas for the industrial designer so that he could concentrate on the aesthetics and ergonomics. As a result, usability took third place behind feature bloat and artistic packaging. By the time the front panel was presented to engineering, it was obvious that we were in trouble. There weren't a sufficient number of buttons to handle all the features. So, each button had multiple functions, depending on whether it was tapped, held for 1 second, or held for more than 3 seconds. Considerable effort and wine went into crafting said interface, but the inevitable result was a miserable compromise. Marketing insisted that the radio with the most features would sell best, so there was no way to remove features or add buttons. We built a mockup and tried my usability test on various non-technical employees including the marketing manager. Nobody could operate it. There was even some difficulty in turning it on and off. Someone suggested that we have 3 modes (crude, basic and advanced) where some of the obscure functions were simply disabled. Everyone could operate it in crude mode, but the others required both RTFM and practice. We shipped a data logger with several radios, and found that 99% of the wiz-bang functions were never used.

Lesson learned: Features, functions and complexity sell products, but drive the users nuts.

Any product that is worthwhile should be intuitive and not require a manual. These daze, manuals are shipped on CD's and never read until something goes wrong. If the product needs a manual to use, there's something wrong. Besides, today's manuals are mostly legal disclaimers, court ordered warnings, and patent notices.

Lesson learned: Assume that users are NOT going to RTFM.

You're optimizing whale oil and sealing wax. Manuals and static user interfaces are dead, or at least should be dead. A proper user interface adjusts itself to what the user is doing, offering only those choices which are involved in whatever the user is trying to accomplish. A banking machine is a good example. You are presented with a minimum number of selections, all of which are appropriate to the current operation or mode. This results in more menus, but fewer choices.

I had the displeasure of proving the point when my father, the original permanent computer beginner, was trying to learn how to use his shiny new 1981(?) Altos AOS business computer system. I translated the menus from English to Polish, which was a big help, but he was still lost when presented with 20 menu choices per page. When I reduced it down to 5 choices, he was elated.

You can demonstrate how it works by asking someone to add a column of numbers, first with a 4 function calculator, and then with a scientific calculator. The 4 function is easy, but the scientific will usually cause a beginner to panic. Yet, they have the same numeric keypad and arithmetic buttons, usually in similar locations. The difference is the scientific calculator has far too much static clutter in the form of unused buttons, which add confusion.

Lesson learned: The purpose of a user interface is to REDUCE the number of choices, not bury the user in irrelevant over choice and complexity.

About 10 years ago, I designed a user interface for a radio. It was sufficiently unique that the company engineers and marketing people were afraid that users would not intuitively understand how to operate the radio. A few tests confirmed their suspicions. So, I now have to wait until some clueless competitor produces something similar, so my client company doesn't need to take any risks being innovative. If you're wondering why you're seeing the same broken user interfaces repeated ad infinitum, this is why.

Lesson learned: Innovative user interfaces are risky.

OK. End of yet another rant...

The best measure of the quality of a product is employee theft. It's not worth stealing something that they know doesn't work or will break.

You may wish to browse the "Made by Monkeys" column found in Design News magazine: Every month, they feature one or two poorly designed or poorly built products. I don't recall reading about your dust pan problem, but there are some that are similar.

Speaking of radios and user interfaces...I had a Kenwood receiver in one of my cars. Great radio, great sound. The one problem was that they used the volume "knob" as a joystick to get multiple functions out of it. When you pressed it in, it switched to the sub-woofer menu. There was no easy way to exit the menu. If you were sitting still, this would seldom be a problem, but in a moving, bouncing, vibrating car, it's quite likely that you will push the knob in while trying to adjust the volume. Then you have to try to manipulate your way through the menus without taking your eyes off of the road for more than a split second. I finally started popping the faceplate off and back on, whenever I got into the menu system accidentally. This turned the receiver off, and let me resume normal operation. Kenwood stopped using this interface with this model.

My former 1983 Dodge D50 pickup had a chain hoist spare tire under the bed. Great idea until I blew a rear tire and high centered the rear axle while driving on a dirt road on the way to a mountain top radio site. In order to lower the tire, a long hand crank was provided. The problem was that I was backed up against a hillside, and could not get the long crank into the hole. I had to dig out part of the hillside for it to fit. In order to remove the spare tire, I had to jack up the pickup bed about 3 ft off the ground, and crawl under the raised bed to release the toggle link holding the tire to the chain. Of course, with the tire lowered, the toggle link is UNDER the tire on the ground. I raised it with a bottle jack and a rather unstable pile of rocks. While replacing the blown tire, the pile of rocks and jack did partially collapse. Perhaps in your parents tire store, it might work, but on a dirt road, it's not easy.

I carried some scarp pieces of 2x12 in my '79 Dodge pickup. If I had a flat, I would stack them against the flat tire and pull the truck up on top of them to be able to get the factory jack under the tire. Without the extra height, you couldn't get the jack to the jacking points on the frame.

If

Rant noted and seconded. I've seen aftermarket auto radios that required you to hold-two-buttons to turn the power off. Now what the hell were they thinking? And this wasn't some cheap unknown brand, it was made by Pioneer. Don't the designers know that complexity in a vehicle environment can lead to dangerously distracted driving? Or do they give a damn? Tom

How many people pull their after market radio after a wreck? If you live, you'll just by another radio.

Yes, my Toyota has the chain lift spare system too. But its marginally better than having to unload the whole back of the tray to get to the spare, like some other pickups.

My Jeep has the crank hole for the spare tire cable winch right under the center of the load space...

"The barrel of bricks was heavier than I was..."

A respected engineering colleague of mine refuses to carry a spare tire in the trunk. His reasoning is that in the long run he will save money. He c laims to have only had a couple flats in his driving career and each time w as inconvenienced only briefly while AAA fixed the flat. The missing full- size spare also frees up room for his bike(s) when he and a friend might go out on the trail.

Should be noted, he drives a couple boat anchors: both early 70's Eldorado 's. Mileage even without the spare is probably not worth bragging about....

And right behind this is test equipment that features a "LOCK CONTROLS" button. Turns out, those hold features rarely include the ON/OFF button!

If you think about it, that the ONE BUTTON you probably don't want to accidentally hit! :)

I guess they do it to tamp down warranty repair issues, when users unknowingly lock and device and then realize they can't turn it off.

eer

are

ow

ne

t,

ould

Personally, I think the most horrific example of a User Interface is the en tire Microsoft Office product line after the 1997 release. Who's idea was that "ribbon" interface anyway? It's stupid and unusable - particularly wh en you are in a hurry to get something done! Plus, there was nothing wrong with the "old" way of doing it. Ditto for PhotoShop, Skype and hundreds o f others "upgrades".

re

had

The

ile

ck

ht

f I had

n the trunk.  His reasoning is that in the long run he will save money.  He claims to have only had a couple flats in his driving career and each time was inconvenienced only briefly while AAA fixed the flat.  The miss ing full-size spare also frees up room for his bike(s) when he and a friend might go out on the trail.

rado's.

afair a Citroen C4 come with no spare, just a can of tire fixer and I think you can for some models buy one of those small emergency spares

several of AAA type services here garantee something like max one hour to come change a flat tire

-Lasse

That's NOT what happened. All the rocks in the area were sandstone. When I lowered the jack after replacing the tire, because my pickup was at a slight angle, the crumbly rocks didn't like the side load and crumbled. That caused the jack to fall over, and the car to slide sideways (fortunately away from me). Not fun.

The idea of a spare tire should have gone the way of the buggy whip socket. The spare is an indication that the other 4 tires are not to be trusted. Perhaps it might make sense to improve the tire design so that it can be trusted?

There are plenty of good (and bad) ideas on how to build a flat proof tire. In it's simplest form, molding multiple cellular air chambers into the tire, should work. If one section to loses pressure, the other air chambers will provide adequate suspension. There are also inserts of various types: Also, self-sealing tires: and wheels with built in suspension: Any of these would be safer than the current pneumatic tire, which tends to fail catastrophically after a blowout, usually causing a loss of control.

Depends where you are.I can think of places that are more than an hour from any habitation.

And where you'd be lucky to get any cell coverage.