{"id":343,"date":"2007-01-21T09:00:27","date_gmt":"2007-01-20T22:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/01\/21\/candidates-for-the-ui-disaster-museum\/"},"modified":"2008-02-05T23:03:26","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T13:03:26","slug":"candidates-for-the-ui-disaster-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/01\/21\/candidates-for-the-ui-disaster-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Candidates for the UI Disaster Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two user interfaces&#8230;<br \/>\nTwo single-purpose embedded devices&#8230;<br \/>\nTwo simple tasks intended to be achievable by naive users&#8230;<br \/>\nTwo devices that have been built for many years, with little feature innovation, so there&#8217;s plenty of engineering experience&#8230;<br \/>\nTwo usability disasters that shouldn&#8217;t be seen outside a museum in 2007&#8230;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>The scene of the first: a local <a href=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2007\/01\/03\/is-necessary-redundancy-a-tautology\/\">ATM machine<\/a> outside a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/02\/17\/an-ongoing-review-of-bendigo-bank\/\">Bendigo Bank<\/a>. I tried to withdraw $150, but I failed to remember that the machine, which only dispenses $20 and $50 notes, requires to me enter the amount to be withdrawn in cents. I accidentally entered $1.50, it displayed this dialog box.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"imagelink\" title=\"Amount was not whole dollars\" href=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/atmmachine-ui.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image341\" alt=\"Amount was not whole dollars\" width=\"400\" src=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/atmmachine-ui.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>No, I don&#8217;t want to continue with the current transaction to withdraw $1.50. But, wait, yes I want to continue with the current transaction, I just want to correct the amount. No, wait, that&#8217;s a different transaction. Errr&#8230;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>The scene of the second: A no-frills front-loading washing machine that I have owned for a several years now, but have never blogged about.<\/p>\n<p>What steps would you take to initiate a standard wash cycle?<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"imagelink\" title=\"Washing Machine UI\" href=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/washingmachine-ui-002.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image342\" alt=\"Washing Machine UI\" width=\"400\" src=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/washingmachine-ui-002.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here are some hints that you might not get from the photo. <\/p>\n<p>The serrated circle near the middle, and the ellipse near the right, pop out when you push them. They are retractable knobs. (I sometimes wonder who finds retractable knobs useful on a washing machine. Is there a button somewhere that makes the whole machine fold up flat, so it can be neatly put away in a kitchen drawer, or taken with you on vacation?)<\/p>\n<p>The serrated-circle knob controls the temperature of the water, which is made clearer by the markings on the edge of the knob (not visible in this photo.)<\/p>\n<p>Now, try to imagine how long it took me to work out that the machine had been delivered with the right-most knob fitted incorrectly. It was put on upside-down, making all the markings wrong by 180&deg;. My clothes were often put through the &#8220;curtain&#8221; cycle until I figured it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In which Julian whinges about two embedded user-interfaces, mainly because he has photos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[69,103,50,237],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","tag-software","tag-user-interface","tag-whinge","tag-whitegoods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}