A friend recently asked me to review their UI/UX design in a private app they’d written. I responded with the following in an e-mail, reproduced and lightly edited/extended here for limited posterity.

The following factors strongly influence and/or limit the kind of review I’ll be able to provide.

• You dropped the app into my lap with no introduction whatsoever. I don’t even know what the app is supposed to do.
• I don’t know what experience you have in UI/UX. I’m assuming not a tremendous... [More]

The documentation page Stories of Web Users / How People with Disabilities Use the Web by W3C (WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)) describes nine users, each of whom describes how they work with the Internet, as well as which assistive technologies they use to access text, audio, and video content. Each of them also has a list of use cases (“Barrier examples”), accompanied by solutions that would work for them and their particular restrictions.

Stories

The people range widely in capability.

There’s Marta, who is deaf and blind and who... [More]

I recently turned on two-factor authentication for my relatively rarely but still occasionally used Google account.

In the screenshot below, at the very top of the page, Google sure makes it seem like I need to finally add that phone number that Google has been begging me for … for, gosh, it’s gotta be decades by now. Now, they’re not just begging me, but are outright lying to me that I will no longer be able to use my account unless I divulge my phone number.

Is a phone number required for two-step verification?

I don’t wanna add a phone... [More]

There isn’t that much more to say than that it seems like a $4T company is incapable of making something as straightforward as music search work in anything approaching a comprehensible manner. The evidence is below.

I searched for the album Apple Cores by the James Brandon Lewis Trio. The top hit was Danny Elfman, for no discernible reason, followed by a smattering of completely random search results, like Greatest Love Story by LANCO, Sweet Child O’ Mine, a playlist called “Family Time”,... [More]

Fielmann is a vendor of eyeglasses. Their stores are great! The people there are super-friendly and I’ve gotten nothing but great, well-fitted glasses from them. Their prices are absolutely fair and their customer service is top-notch.

However, their online presence is … not good.

Navigation debacle in 2021

Fielmann is also a repeat offender in terrible usability. I wrote about them in Fielmann: an online-store safari, where I described their nearly deliberately obtuse navigation.

Online-account... [More]

Way back in mid-February, on the night before the Super Bowl, I opened the SunriseTV web page in Opera to set up the recording. That worked just fine.

I left the page open on the recordings, so I wouldn’t forget about it in the morning, when I started working in home office. The next morning, I refreshed the page and was confronted with the following dialog box.

Sunrise TV: login not possible

I tried logging in again, but was denied again.

Had my account broken overnight? Had my subscription expired? No, of course not.... [More]

I use a Jabra 65 headset at work. I have both the one-ear and two-ear variants because I’m still trying to debug my way through a complete shutdown of Bluetooth functionality for the last couple of months.

I think the one-ear one is more comfortable because I can hear the rest of the office a bit. The two-ear one is extremely deadening and fits oddly on my head. It’s very noticeable and not very comfortable.

Jabra popped up a dialog today asking me how likely I would be to recommend Jabra... [More]

Sometime at the end of last year, I found a coupon for one free month of TacX, a cycling service offered by Garmin that integrates with their app to provide courses, routes, maps, and head-to-head competition online. I wasn’t interested in head-to-head or in doing anything that involved watching the app, but my own custom routes had grown a bit stale, so I decided to try it.

The coupon code worked just fine—even after almost five years—and I was registered.

Got in one good ride…

Then I... [More]

A friend had told me that they’d been to a concert on the previous Tuesday. At the time, I forgot to follow up during the conversation because we were distracted by other topics.

A couple of days later, I realized that I still didn’t know who they’d seen in concert. All I knew was the date. And, I realized I knew approximately where it was because I saw their walk to the venue on Strava. 🙌🏼

The purpose of today’s Internet is to facilitate commerce, not knowledge.

Even with the venue and... [More]

The Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (Wikipedia) was built in 1996. I don’t have much more to say about it, other than I just learned about it and I think it looks amazing. I dug up a few pictures from DuckDuckGo’ image search.

Beach view

Long view

Closeup, from below

View up the ramp

Long line

Swica is my private health-care provider in Switzerland. By all polls and evaluations, they have some of the best customer-care available. They also have a mobile app called Benevita for tracking some personal information.

Attempt #1: Registering via mobile app

Benevita offers to let me register an account. I chose an email that identifies the sender—it has a +-sign in it—and a generated password. The page told me that an error had occurred without telling me what I could do to correct... [More]

The other day, Fortinet decided that it wanted to restart my computer. Fortinet is a commercial-grade, Fortune-500-level VPN solution built by a company that writes “Global Leader of Cybersecurity Solutions and Services” right in the title of its web page. It’s on the S&P 500. Their VPN client is their flagship product. It is a product that huge, important companies use to ensure the security of their data and communications.

This is what its restart dialog box looks like:

Fortinet restart message

My goodness, what a... [More]

I was looking up something[1] about my account in Microsoft Teams (Teams) the other day.

As I was looking at that, Teams showed me the following tip on the dropdown menu.

Update work hours?

Does it look like that? Does it really, Teams?

How could it possibly look like that if you’ve been paying attention at all?

Teams is on all day on my machine. When I log in at 07:00 every day, Teams is active. When I log out around 16:00 on a workday, Teams knows about it.

I work 07:00–16:00 on about 90% of my workdays.... [More]

I’ve noticed the Apple Music search acting quite wonky over the last couple of years. It seems utterly incapable of finding certain songs, even when you enter the exact title and artist.

I’ve had cases where Apple Music has dozens of albums from that artist, so that I’m almost certain that the song is available. It just will not show it to me. In those cases, I’ve instead searched with DuckDuckGo using the same title and artist to find out the name of the album. With the album name in hand, I... [More]

A major bank in Switzerland has an MFA that uses PhotoTAN. It took me dozens of attempts over three days to finally be able to register the app.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. I’d reset my phone in July and I’d had to go through this for a couple of days then. When my partner reset their phone in August, it took days to register. In September, I’ve moved into a new phone and had to set up the app again.

• It often failed to even send an SMS
• 17 times it managed to send an... [More]

What happens when you hate scrollbars so much that you forget what they were for in the first place?

You end up making a dropdown chooser that looks like this:

SmartVote Menu

The drop-down is for “level of education” and, for a few seconds there, I couldn’t figure out why the highest level of education available was Anlehre (“Apprenticeship” in German). If I hadn’t been familiar with the content, I wouldn’t have suspected that there were more entries.

Yes, you can see that there’s a bit more whitespace... [More]

This time chooser is obviously dumb—because it puts the hours in the wrong place.

A bad time chooser

But what about if it had two concentric sets of hours, with 1-12 on the inside and 13-24 on the outside? You could spin the “hand” to the right position, then adjust the radius to the inner or outer ring, depending on whether you were selecting e.g., 2 or 14.

You could even make a “little” hand that you could spin to the right position, like you were setting a cuckoo clock.

It's not a bug, it's a featureThe issue report Can’t edit Wiki after default branch policy applied (Microsoft Developer Community: Azure DevOps) is about a nice feature in Azure DevOps called Branch Policies that allows you to protect the default branch in a given repository, or in all repositories. If you have a lot of repositories, it’s quite convenient to be able to set it once for all of them.

However.

However, Azure DevOps also has a nice feature called the Project Wiki, which includes an online editor that makes editing easy enough for any user with even the... [More]

The article The importance of having a design system by Reindeeraintreal (Reddit) shows the following UI elements from the gaming platform Steam.

The various UI elements of Steam

That looks pretty bad, right? There is no consistency at all.

However, the first comment is pretty astute: “Steam, being as successful as it is, makes me interpret this post as saying that having a design system is not important.”

Design’s not the only thing, that’s for sure. Market dominance definitely trumps design. But you could do your users a favor and lower the... [More]

For years, programmers have been searching for the one, true, perfect font for code. They keep making changes and coming up with dozens, if not hundreds of new fonts. Most of these are fixed-size, but some are proportional. Some have extra ligatures for common combinations, like ≠or ≥. Some look cursive, which I suppose is a matter of taste.

I saw one recently in a video presentation that seems like a big step backwards.

What is the point of making parentheses look so similar to square... [More]

I’m consulting on a private project with a couple of friends. They use Discord for communication. It’s quite a nice app, but there is no app in the MacOS app store. When I search for it, Apple shows me the following, wildly irrelevant hits.

Discord in App Store

You could also just say that you didn’t find any hits, Apple. This isn’t even close. The top hit is a 1/5-star reviewed product, with one review. What is the point of ever even showing this product to anyone who didn’t search for it?

So I installed the... [More]

I’m very open to the possibility that it’s just me, but this kind of stuff happens to me all the time. I approach an app that the entire rest of the country manages to use every day and fail to make it work for me, even for the simplest tasks.

In the screenshot below, you can see what happened when I tried to run a simple search for a route from “Kempten” to “Basel”.

SBB can't even make a simple form

I’m mystified as to which field the form thinks should be filled out.

Maybe I’m in some A/B test where I’m the only person... [More]

I wanted to watch a Swiss TV show that broadcast last Tuesday. I have a wealth of choices available to me.

UPC media box?

I have a “media box” from UPC, but it’s not connected because it draws too much power, even in standby mode. We (almost) never need its features, so we leave it off almost all the time. Maybe during the Olympics, we’ll hook it back up. We’ll see.

Anyway, I didn’t want to mess about with hooking up the media box—It’s not that difficult; I’d just have to connect the cable... [More]

Hoo-boy, no wonder this app has a two-out-of-five-star rating on the App Store. It’s absolutely terrible.

This is one of the first pages I saw:

Cut-off options

I had used my Swiss ID card as my proof of identity during the purchase. Now, I was supposed to actually send a photo of it to UPC so that they could verify it.[1] Unfortunately, I couldn’t see my option in this list. I was not encouraged that the second button was labeled “Passp”. I clicked that first, thinking that maybe the app just thought that all... [More]

The Strava “your year in review” is back in 2021.[1]

Strava Year In Review 2021

I just wanted to point out a couple of things:

1. This overview is only available on the mobile app. Desktop users are out of luck.
2. The overview and statistics is only available in animated form. You can’t stop the animation nor can you browse the pages in a normal fashion. The presentation is utterly and completely accessibility-unfriendly. You can only screenshot a page as it slides by.
3. Although the version from 2020 suffered from the same... [More]

I’m in the market for a mobile plan, so my wife forwarded me a link to this page at UPC:

Dein Persönliches Angebot

I’ve taken the liberty of adding some notes to the screenshot, but I’ll also list them here:

• They write that this offer is for me, personally, but there is no identifying information in the URL or cookies. This page looks the same in a private window. Stop lying to me, UPC. This offer is for literally anyone who stumbles across this page.[1]
• I was kind of shocked to see that WhatsApp is given preferential... [More]

I’ve used Google Meet twice in the last month. In both conversations, I exited the meeting room completely inadvertently and was forced to scramble back, profusely apologizing for my lack of technical proficiency.

It all starts with the Google Meet page losing focus, then “detaching” itself from the main window. This seems like a “feature” that prevents the user from switching tabs away from an open meeting. It’s bossy and intrusive.

The first time this happened, I ended up looking at a large... [More]

It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to start biking indoors. 👎

That means the TacX comes out of the basement and I am, once again[1], confronted with the awfulness that is TacX Desktop. I fired it up and was confronted with all of the same bugs and UX missteps that I’d noted a year ago. It’s like the app hadn’t been updated at all.

I got suspicious because I have a friend who uses his TacX regularly and he wouldn’t put up with this crap…so what is he using? I searched the App Store... [More]

Normally, in a UI, when you click or tap on a thing (e.g. a button), but complete the click or gesture away from that thing, the “tap” or “click” is not signaled. The gesture is ignored because the user did not complete the gesture, aborting the operation. That’s how we’ve been trained; if you press down on something by accident, just move off of it and release and you it won’t count as having been clicked or tapped.

DuoLingo Gems Purchase ScreenHowever, in the DuoLingo Settings screen—where they’re trying to get you to... [More]

…doesn’t mean you have to use light-green text on a white background.

Die Grüne Partei