Tag Archives: user interface

It should be getting easier, but it isn’t

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Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we live in the 21st-century. It should be getting easier, but it isn’t. All of our schools just got new photocopy machines, and there is a one hour video tutorial to learn how to use them. More videos and instructions are required, if you are the one who is doing any kind of basic maintenance like replacing the toner.

Related to this, when was the last time you bought a new TV and you instantly knew how to use the remote? I find incredible irony that there is nothing universal about a universal remote control. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I would think that in this day and age the tools we use would get simpler to use, not more complicated.

Borrow a friend’s car and try to fill the gas tank and you’re left puzzled as to where the release is for the gas tank’s door. Go to the gas station and there’s a process to get your rewards card punched in, because you don’t have room in your wallet for 17 rewards program cards. Try to connect your phone to that same borrowed car, and you’re worried that you’re going to have to cancel another users profile. Or you are faced with a touch screen menu that just doesn’t make intuitive sense.

How is it that the user interface of almost everything we do now is more complicated than necessary? Why is it that every single place we go to online we’re expected to login or create an account, or at the very least close one or two pop-up invitations to do so? i’m looking at a website for 30 seconds, to find out one piece of information, do I really need to decide whether or not I want to accept cookies?

My microwave has a touch dial where I have to spin my finger in a circle to get to the appropriate time. I don’t think I can ever hit the time I want without toggling back-and-forth. This takes me significantly longer than if I had to punch three number keys on a touchpad and hit ‘Start’. There is nothing convenient about this. And that’s my point…

We live in an era when things should be getting a lot easier, user interfaces should be intuitive and natural to use, but instead everything seems to be getting a little more difficult. I just don’t get it.

Too many tools

I’m editing a video and I’m struggling to do it well in one place. I’m using Descript for most of my editing, but I wanted to put in a narrated slide show before the video and Descript wasn’t making the intricate edits I wanted without a major amount of effort. So, first I used Garage Band to edit the audio (after recording it on my iPhone). Then I used iMovie to put that together with the slide show (after making it in Powerpoint). Then I added the recorded slideshow into Descript.

I recognize my frustration is my own fault because I haven’t done these kind of thing in almost a year, and so now I barely remember the tips and tricks that used to come naturally to me. That said, I’m also frustrated because Garage Band and iMovie have had updates that put things in unfamiliar places for me. These updates seem to complicate rather than improve the user interface (UI). Meanwhile, the Descript UI seems improved, but it’s different enough from the last time I used it that I feel like I’m using it for the first time. Still, I could see myself eliminating the need for iMovie with the current Descript updates, so that’s one less tool I’ll use next time.

Most of my frustration is that I’ve spent over 15 hours doing about 5-6 hours worth of work. I spend so much time knowing what I want to do, and not knowing how, and then googling and watching YouTube videos that take 5-12 minutes to tell me 2 minutes worth of important information. I just want one tool to rule them all, and then I’m sure that I can get more done in less time.

Not so techie

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.

User Interface and user experience

It’s a delicate balance: providing a multitude of options and also creating a good user interface that isn’t confusing. Today I went to an online menu and there were several options that only showed up as buttons with tiny icons on the top right of the screen. I would never had known there were other options available if my friend hadn’t mentioned these tiny bubbles were whole other menus.

The concept was good, not overwhelming the page with too many options. The interface was bad, putting tiny icons at the top of the page, which I wouldn’t be looking for as I head to the menu. These icons are not what I came to the page to see, and not having them either float on the screen as I scrolled down or added at the bottom of all the other choices, lacked usability.

This is where design thinking, and focusing on the needs of the end user are so important. Why add features a user either doesn’t see or doesn’t know how to access? Why create unnecessary steps, extra features that are challenging to use, or pop up screens that break the flow of creativity or general use? The answer is almost always that the disconnect is unintentional. Good ideas, bad user interface… bad from the perspective of the end user.

The starting question might be ‘what does the user want’? But the question that most needs to be thought about is ‘what is the user experience?’ The experience is what ultimately matters.