Why Does It Have To Be Like This?

I am surrounded by poor design. Take my digital radio, for example. It’s generally a fantastic piece of kit, and does lots of funky things like allowing you to pause and rewind live radio, and record stuff onto memory cards (oh, and it also manages to receive XFM, which is more than can be said for the old analog clock radio we used to have). Unfortunately, the device has a pretty fundamental design flaw: the designers forgot to include an “Off” button.

I’d have thought this was a fairly basic requirement for a radio, but no: the main control area of the device has four buttons and one of those multi-function jog wheel thingies, like you get on iPods. To turn it off, you have to hold down the centre of the jog wheel for a full 5 seconds (being careful to hold down only the centre, and not accidentally push it in one of the other directions, thus activating one of the other functions). This is an operation so unintuitive that I actually had to pull out the plug from the wall the first time I used the radio because I couldn’t work out how to turn the thing off. I wouldn’t mind so much, but one of the 4 single function buttons included on the device is “Auto-tune”, a feature I have never used (it does this automatically the first time you plug it in), and that I can’t imagine most users will need more than a handful of times during the lifetime of the product. So although I can easily retune all the stations with a simple single button press, the designers chose to make turning the thing off, something I do twice a day, every day, ridiculously complicated.

Another example is my old digital camera, where the designers decided to combine the on/off switch with the open lens function. Great if you’re switching the thing on to take a picture, but less good if you want to browse your stored shots (out pops the lens, and there it stays–right where your greasy fingers naturally fall as you hold the camera to look at the screen). Genius.

And don’t get me started on the hotel we stayed in in Lisbon where someone had chosen to place the toilet at right angles to the bath, and extremely close to it at that, making it almost impossible for anyone owning knees to sit on it.

Nowhere is bad design more prevalent, though, than the Internet. Just because anybody can learn a bit of HTML and write a website, it doesn’t mean that everybody should. I’m fed up with poorly designed websites that aren’t standards-compliant and don’t work on Firefox. I’m fed up with the gratuitous use of Flash, and I’m fed up with sites that haven’t bothered to test their sites properly, or try to validate data that I enter, and haven’t catered for any non-standard options.

For example, shortly before Christmas, Sal tried to order a couple of webcams from an Australian online store to be sent to her family back home. Nice and efficient, you might thing, but unfortunately we ended up tearing our hair out by the fact that whoever designed their online shopping system made the ridiculous/pointless assumption that all postcodes will consist of 4 digits, and no more. Fine if you’re shipping to an Australian address, but not so good if your billing address is in the UK and happens to include a postcode consisting of 5 or 6 characters, and your customers end up seeing a Microsoft ASP error message indicating that the script “could not convert string to varchar”, and then have to phone the company’s Sydney office to get them to process the order for them (which they can only ultimately do by using the company’s own postcode in place of the correct one).

Then, just the other day I tried to sign up with the Spanish website that will be handling ticketing for U2’s Barcelona gig: these jokers allow a strict limit of 5 characters in a postcode. Not so good if you have a 6 character UK postcode though, is it?

I expect much more of this sort of thing as I change my address in anticipation of our upcoming house move with all the various companies providing me services. Increasingly, companies don’t seem to trust me to type in my address correctly, but instead insist on using things like the Royal Mail postcode database to validate and standardise what their customers tell them. All well and good if (a) your address is in the database, and (b) you have a simple house number/post code address–not so good if you have a specific flat number or an unusual address. As far as the Royal Mail are concerned, for example, the flat I have lived at for the past year doesn’t exist.

Some companies take this “don’t trust your customers” logic to extremes–try registering on BA’s website, for example, and have a look at those options for “Title” (oh no, they appear to have omitted “Pope”…). Seriously, would it have been that hard to just let people type in their title? Or how about “Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Other…”? I’m surprised they don’t have a drop-down list of first names and surnames to choose from, although surely that can’t be far away.

And what benefit do these companies possibly get out of this? The Australian webcam company and the Spanish ticket agency might have fractionally reduced the size of their customer database by limiting the length of acceptable postcodes, but they both nearly lost at least one customer in the process. Is it really worth it?

Yeah, so poor, sloppy design really annoys me. Seriously. It doesn’t have to be this way…