Strike Two: I could not figure out how to set the alarm. It’s as if they worked to make the button labels as unhelpful as possible...not only that, but it’s easier to set the time than the alarm. The rocker switch on the front is labeled both tune up/down and hours/minutes, so obviously it has something to do with it. But none of the other button labels said ‘set’ or ‘alarm’. Now, hitting ‘MODE’ seemed promising, because on the front panel it started flashing ‘SET ON’. Hitting the hour/minutes button did nothing though. This is when I had to download a PDF copy of the manual. It turns out to set the alarm you have to also hold MEMORY/TIME down. Now, since that button on the front does double duty for tuning and time setting, it makes sense that you have to hold down another button or the clock has to be in ‘set mode’. But both? Why is that? A little experimenting reveals the answer—if you hold MEMORY/TIME down and press the front button when not in 'set mode', you change the time. Not the alarm, the time. That means it’s about twice as easy to change the time than to change the alarm. Now, which one do you think people do more often?

My college roomie Brian used to add or subtract hours to the time setting of his alarm clock rather than change the alarm time itself. For years I assumed he did it because of a sense of surreal-ness it added to everything. Now I’m wondering if he had a clock as user hostile as mine.

Strike Three: If there’s one thing an alarm clock should do, it’s wake you up on time. This clock has a little icon on the front panel. When you hit the [ALARM] ON/OFF button, this icon goes on and off. One might assume that this means the alarm is on, or that the alarm is off, accordingly. No. Because, see, if that switch on the left is on [RADIO] OFF, your alarm clock will not wake you up for love nor money. It might display its little alarm icon, lulling you into a false sense of security, but next morning that radio will not play. The stupidity of this design overwhelms me. I can see the half-assed logic (wanting to separate turning the alarm off in the morning from just hitting snooze) but… jeez. Your clock shouldn’t lie to you.

For the exact same manufacturing costs, I could’ve designed a better UI than this. Just making labels less misleading would be a start. (I still don't know what '+5' does.) Changing a few behaviors (making it easier to change the alarm than the time setting, not showing the alarm icon if the alarm is turned off because of the switch) would be even better. Changing a few more electronic readouts could actually make it intuitive!

Anyway.
I hate to sound like a curmudgeon about this thing, but it really is bad. I'll try to justify my rant with this next quote:

Quote of the Moment
"If people were going to use computers all day, everyday, the design of such machines was not solely a technical problem-- it was also an aesthetic one. A lousy interface would mean a lousy life."
--Myron Krueger

News of the Moment
Salon article: Judge rules no webcast of McVeigh's execution. Now I'm against the death penalty. But if you're going to go for it, you should really go for it. Don't try to pretend there's some kind of dignity here. Go full tilt for the bread and circuses. If the people demand revenge in cold blood, give it to them! In full color! And Dolby Stereo! On national tv! Really get that "deterence" message out there!

Front		Inside

K.I.S.S.: Don't over-engineer.

I have seen so much over-designed stuff, with layer after layer after layer. Following the programming execution over a single call becomes an enormously difficult task. If any given interaction goes much deeper than 3 or 4 levels, something might well be wrong.

Keep a clean modular approach to your systems.

Have a core engine that drives everything and uses the rest of the system as an API. Think Unix's philosophy of "do one task and do it well"...this guideline comes from stuff I'm dealing with at work. They've developed these APIs, but the APIs are so tightly integrated with the logging and configuration, it's sick. For example, they made a wrapper to a Castor routine that converts an object into an XML representation. You would think that if your central program says "make me an XML representation of this object and put it in such and such a file" it would do just that, right? But no. See, it goes ahead and checks the configuration on its own accord, and then might or might not do the conversion. And whether it tries or not, or if it succeeds or fails with some error, it will do so SILENTLY, catching any exception that occurs, because heaven forfend that the main program has to worry its sweet little head about everything collapsing underneath it... Hideously redundant, impossible to follow.

Keep a devnotes.txt file

I find it useful to have a single text file where I jot things down as I figure them out...usernames, passwords, techniques, etc. It saves me a lot of time.

Consider disabling web access during the workday.

Sometimes it's easier for a programmer to get distracted, especially when things aren't going well. The worse things are going, the more slashdot and various techie websites beckon. ("This task at hand isn't working out but maybe I can learn something else new!"). If your main browser is IE, the easiest option might be to go into Tools|Internet Options|Coonections|LAN Settings and setup a bogus proxy server. Sometimes just putting in that little gatekeeper is enough to make me reconsider a wayword path.

Keep your unit tests close and your smoketests closer

If your environment is at all complex and N-tiered, avoid the trap of your system breaking down and you don't know when and you don't know why by setting up good smoke and unit tests and running them extremely frequently.

1. You lose your place. Often, I'm still interested in keeping the current explorer view open when I hit Ctrl-F to conduct a search, but now my whole window becomes dedicated to this one search task.
2. Often in NT2K it takes a few seconds for the "Look in" field to be automatically field in with the location of the current Folder. Type in a quick search term, hit return, you get a message "A valid folder name must be entered"
3. The only way to know if you're looking at a "real folder" or search results is to look at the window caption. And even when the caption indicates "Search Results", it gives you no hint of what you were searching for. (Admittedly, a detailed description could get wordy, but still, having 3 windows that say "Search Results" in the task bar isn't that useful in refinding a specific window.)
4. To get your normal explorer view again you have to hit an IE like "back" button. This seems like a broken paradigm to me, that viewing a folder is one "task location", viewing search results is another "task location". To my mental model, an explorer view represents a "noun", and a search is more of a "verb", results and all. It's not like search results are really making up a "virtual folder".
5. When you hit "back" to return to your folder view, the sidebar stays up. But the "Look in" field doesn't get filled in with the new folder location unless you close the sidebar and reopen it. Conversely, if you close the sidebar, your search results remain...it looks just like a regular folder though! Also, the "Look in " field changes, but the main search fields remain filled with the old data, which is useful but inconsistent.
6. To start a search you either have to know the Ctrl-F mnemonic or use a graphical icon, there doesn't seem to be a regular menu option for it.
7. If you accidentally hit "Up Folder" instead of "Back", you get taken to a folder view of the Desktop. Why isn't the "Folder Up" option greyed out while conducting a search? It's not like it's an easy way of backing up to the parent folder to redo the current search...that requires all the steps I outline in complaint 5...
8. Don't get me started on XP's default "File Searching For Dummies" mode. Maybe it's good for novice users, and it can be turned off, but for exerienced users it's just a pain in the butt, and we become amazed that other people who seem otherwise to be pretty bright always use it...or even worse, with the goofy animated assistant.

• One grey lining to the silver cloud of the Wii's innovative controller schemes is that they've ditched the traditional "start" button, and while every game seems to respect the "home" button that takes you to a system menu and offers to totally reset the game (almost like power-cycling), there doesn't seem to be a single convention for an "in game pause menu" that might offer to, say, end the current match and return to the previous menu. The Plus button seems to be a non-universal standard for it, but games like "Super Monkey Ball" ignored it. Or seemed to... through trial and much error I finally figured out it's press and hold of the Plus button. That's irritating! The button serves no other use during the game, and it's not in place where it's likely to be pressed accidentally. So why do that? What possible benefit is there in making people think "this button does nothing"? Is the needed prolonged hold a way of expressing the sincerity of our desire to stop the game?
• My car radio's tuning feature. By default, pressing up or down adjusts the tuning .2 degrees on FM or whatever. Like most modern cars, it has a "seek" function, which kicks in after a second or two after pressing and holding the button. Now, given what a huge percentage of the time is spent driving near home, and at any given moment people likely have a big selection of strong radio signals to choose from (rather than having to fiddle and tuning in a station that's almost out of range), how smart is it to have the default be "tweak this tuning" rather than "find me another damn station"? And when you're trying to "channel surf" radio stations, the extra second of delay is infuriating. You listen, judge the content in like a quarter to half a second, go to move on, and listen to whatever crap you just rejected for another second or so, 'til the thing beeps and moves on to the next station...
• Ksenia's grandfather's radio... he asked me to set the clock for it. Now, clock-setting is a whole 'nother ball of bad-UI wax, but having to press. And hold. And hold the button labeled "Clock/Sleep/Timer" was just not something Ksenia's grandfather was going to stumble on by himself.