Techno Tantrum

Technology Hardware/Software Pet Peeves:

• The ‘On/Off’ conspiracy. Everyone knows what ‘on’ and ‘off’ mean. Who the heck can remember what the silly little circle and line mean? What’s wrong with ‘on/off?’

• Buttons with meaningless symbols on them. Triangles and exclamation marks, etc. Just write on the button what the heck it actually does!

• Software applications with goofy names that have no meaning relative to what the application actually does. Can’t we just call things email and calendar and search instead of Lotus Notes and Outlook and Entourage and Google?

• Error messages that don’t tell you what the error is, whether it’s even important or not and how you can fix it; or even if you need to or can. If it’s ‘Done, with errors’ what the heck am I supposed to think or do about it?

• Help files that don’t have entries for the most common problems that keep popping up.

• Trouble-shooting routines that never diagnose or fix the problem.

• ‘Productivity-enhancing’ applications that are not intuitive. It’s not obvious when you open them how they work or how they’re going to help you accomplish what it is that you want to do. It takes longer to read the instructions and figure out how to make them do what you need done than just doing it the way you always have. You wind up having to adapt your work routine to the application to make it work, rather than the application adapting to your routine. Ultimately it doesn’t really do anything to ‘enhance’ your productivity. All of these types of applications should start with a welcome page that asks, ‘What can I help you do today?’

• Applications should communicate in plain logical English sentences and phrases. Just like we all speak and write. The end-user should not have to learn computer geek-speak.

• Cryptic key-stroke combinations and hotkeys on the keyboard to make things happen that are totally arbitrary and meaningless.

• Applications that try to figure out what you’re trying to do and start doing things and making changes and decisions without your knowledge and permission. It may not even be what you want to do. Then you can’t figure out how to turn it all off and undo what the application has done.

• Applications that keep changing my formatting on the fly. Sometimes I want things to stay exactly the way that I created them, even if it doesn’t look right to the application.

• Things that don’t print the way that they look on the screen.

• Corporate networks that are so secure you can’t get any work done.

• So much corporate stuff loading at start-up that it takes 10 minutes to turn on your machine in the morning.

• A 100 megabyte QuickTime/iTunes update every week.

• Corporate software updates loading every morning when you start your computer.

• Default settings that no one would have ever selected and it’s impossible to find how to change them or turn them off. And they keep coming back, even after you change them but then you shut down the application and they go back to the old default when you re-start.

• Turning off a machine by pressing the ‘Start’ button!

• Numbers, letters and characters on microscopic buttons on cell phones/blackberries that no baby boomer can read!

• An office telephone that I have to go to a training class on just to know how to use the darn thing!

• Corporate web-based applications that are slower to load each page than the old client-server application.

• New and improved, that isn’t. Do designers/developers ever talk to end-users first?

• Those canned automated voicemail greetings/menus that go on for 10 minutes before you can leave a message.