Tag Archives: User Experience

It shouldn’t be this hard

Leave a reply

I get really frustrated when things don’t work like they should. I’m putting in medical claims into my online insurance claim form and the form won’t let me upload the requested evidence of receipts. Is my file too big? No. How do I know? Because it’s my second time through and I’ve made the file smaller this time.

I’ve refreshed the page and restarted my claim from scratch. I’ve made the file into a different format… and I’m watching the little spin-wheel loading symbol go around and around and around. I’m now going to start again on a different browser.

It amazes me how in such a technologically advanced age we run into issues like this so often. I’ve had people tell me they wanted to leave me a comment on my blog but they couldn’t figure out a way to sign in. But if I don’t have a sign in either by email, Facebook, or WordPress then I’m inviting spam messages. It shouldn’t be a process that doesn’t work, people sign in to things all the time.

I’m now on a second web browser and the file still is t uploading. I’m going to give up and try again later. Maybe restart my computer first. Maybe reduce the file size some more. Basically I’m going to waste a whole bunch of time doing something that should already have been over 30 minutes ago.

It really shouldn’t be this hard. I feel for elderly people who run into issues like this, then spend 45 minutes on hold waiting to ask for help, then getting flustered even more trying to follow instructions over the phone. Maybe AI will help, eventually, but I see things getting more frustrating rather than better in the short term. It all boils down to bad user experience and ultimately bad customer service.

(And as a final thought, I was trying to cut/paste a few words in the last sentence on my blogging app and my highlight feature froze on the wrong words… I had to save the draft to be able to do anything else. A small inconvenience but still, one of those little things that should just work!)

Not so techie

Leave a reply

I’ve shared before about how I’m not as tech savvy as most people think. The reality is that I’m just willing to spend a lot of time getting to the bottom of an issue, and so my savviness has more to do with patience than with prowess. That said, I’m getting very frustrated with the technology challenges that seem to be coming my way that I can’t solve. A couple days ago the WordPress App stopped working. I could no longer save anything on it and so I couldn’t write posts on my phone. I deleted and re-installed the app, I tried logging in with my back-up access account, and then I gave up and finally moved to the Jetpack App that I have been begrudgingly avoiding. I didn’t want to make the switch because it forces block editing, which I think is clunky and works against me, rather than helping me with my writing. Now that app won’t work with my blog either. Maybe that’s a good thing because I wanted to write on my laptop rather than phone, so this might be the push that I needed.

Still, this wasn’t my only technology challenge this week or today. My wife is with her parents and her dad can’t access his Shaw mail. It’s an issue on his computer because my wife can access it on her phone and I can access it on my computer, so it has to be an issue with his machine. But the account uses web-based access and I suggested updating Chrome, and then we tried Firefox and while he can log into the account, he can’t click on any of the items in his inbox to read them on either web browser. The fact that I’m trying to give support over Facetime doesn’t make it an easier. I have Teamviewer (to take over a computer remotely) on my mother-in-law’s computer, but not on my father-in-laws, and while I’ll set that up soon, I didn’t feel like doing that for what I thought was a minor issue, and with my wife there, the support itself went fast, even if we couldn’t figure out the issue.

So here is my little rant, why does it seem that there are a lot more things breaking rather than working these days? I have to manually share my blog posts on social media because the tools I try to use (and have even paid for) don’t seem to work consistently. My wife gets a new phone and I spend a week updating issues that come up that were not a problem with the old phone. I upload a new plugin (after the issue with the WordPress login – yes I thought about that being an issue already), and it takes an hour to move from the free version to the paid one. I get stuck on a technical issue and google searchers seem less helpful than they used to. I buy a new toaster oven and the extra features make it harder to use and less convenient than the old one. I can’t decide if I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, or if things are being made less convenient and harder to repair?

In any event, I’m not feeling so techie right now. I seem to be coming across issues that are too hard for me to fix, and my patience is thinning. Cue the memes about old people not understanding technology… I hope that’s not me despite my little rant.

Sometime technology s(UX)

I used to have one remote for my TV, now I have 3. One of them is for my sound bar. When I turn the sound bar on, (on its own, it turns on automatically for the tv), in order to connect to my phone. Before I can click the input options, I need to wait 6 or 7 seconds while the sound bar scrolls ‘WELCOME’ across its small screen 3 or 4 times.

Just now I decided I want to have a song on repeat on my phone and it took me over a minute to figure out how to do this. Sure, I was given the choice to do many things with the song…

But the simple option to hit repeat was elusive on the main screen.

Yesterday I wanted to drag a song into GarageBand and it kept being added at 4 times the speed. I found out GarageBand needs the song to be a specific speed. I checked, same speed. Then I learned it had to be a specific format, so I had to duplicate the song in the new format. Now I’ve got two versions of the song in iTunes and need to delete one, but which one, they look identical in iTunes? 3 years ago this was a seamless activity that I never struggled with no matter what format I worked with.

Is it just me or is technology getting more confusing and less user-friendly. And no, my sound bar scrolling ‘WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME’ while being fully inoperative is NOT user friendly!

I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.

So for any tech designers out there, here is a little tip, we don’t need to be greeted by inanimate objects, and if we are, allow us to actually use the object while it’s welcoming us.

‪Incessant reminders are an annoyance, not a service.‬

I’m sure that I’m not the only Apple user fed up with the repeated ‘invitations’ to use iCloud for backup.

I know I’m not the only one that opens an app and gets the request to rate it, and the choices are to rate it or click ‘Not Now’ only to have to face this question again in the near future.

These ‘reminders’ and ‘invitations’ are annoying when they keep coming up. I understand an initial invitation for feedback. I’d be ok if I got another one 6 months later, after I’ve used the app for a while. But the window of time before the next time I’m asked is too short… Well here is a solution I just found after starting to write this little rant:

You can go into the iPhone settings under ‘iTunes and App Stores‘, scroll down and toggle the ‘In-App Rating and Reviews‘ radial button off.

This won’t stop the annoying iCloud reminders but it will go a long way in making my app user experience better!

If you are an app developer, or someone that is creating a service, remember that asking for feedback or selling a product are interruptions, so use these sparingly. Or, imbed these options in a way that isn’t a pop-up that forces a break in the flow of using the app. For example, 3 highlighted features/buttons to click to use features, and 2-3 more that are greyed out, but still work, taking you to a page to upgrade to use these features. (Take note Apple iCloud.)

Incessant reminders are an annoyance, not a service.‬