The Bloj

Today I failed my Turing Test

Posted on April 27th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Product Design, Thinking Outside the WTF.

1 comment.

One Paragraph Blog: People Like DRM

Posted on March 17th, 2008 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, Thinking Outside the WTF.

…as long as it’s cheap.

Ever since the RIAA crackdown on illegal downloading, there’s been quite a drop in CD sales. And iTunes sales have gone up substantially. But the reason isn’t that users feel that DRM is bad, just that illegal downloading and iTunes are both cheaper. The Kindle not selling enough? Maybe because it’s $400. [no citation available, just see for yourself] At least the books are cheap.

Perhaps, it’s not about restricting rights all the way to the point of controlling everything we see and do. Maybe it’s just about the money.

0 comments.

Reason iPhone is the best smartphone ever? No one else makes a smart phone.

Posted on December 28th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, General/Misc., Product Design, Thinking Outside the WTF, UI Design.

(changed for readability)

Me: I hate windows mobile.
Tim: Why?
Me: In what universe do you get a smart phone that’s too smart to make calls with?
Tim: Yours must be defective, i’ve never had a problem with that.
Me: No, it’s not. I’ll explain.
Me: My mom got a palm treo 750.
Me: This should have incited my “ruh roh” response.
Me: somehow it didn’t.
Me: That was fine, even though she never uses mobile web
Me: but then, she got this plantronics headset
Tim: ruh roh
Me: and she was telling me how she couldn’t get the regular phone speaker to work anymore
Me: she disabled bluetooth
Me: but she could still only make calls with the headset
Tim: hmm
Me: soo, I removed the device from the partnership. Now, it still doesn’t work, bluetooth’s off, and when i call i don’t hear anything.
Tim: Did you check the volume?
Me: Furthermore, it requires some ridiculous YES I CHECKED THE VOLUMEFDSFDSF
Tim: and does speakerphone work
Me: –anyways, ridiculous passkey (no speakerphone doesn’t work)
Me: and without the pass key you couldn’t reattach the headset
Me: So now i couldn’t talk on the phone,
and couldn’t talk on the headset.
Me: ==with a palm treo and winmobile, you can do everything but make voice calls
Me: We called tech support
Me: They had us do a hard reset
Me: The lady’s basic explanation was “you have to think of the phone as a little computer. and just like your computer builds up cookies and stuff and slows down, your phone can also get cookies and slow down as well, so you need to turn it off regularly”
Me: (I congratulated myself on keeping a straight face through that one)
Me: but it seems to have worked
Tim: treos suck

Tim: the phone is clearly better than my old one
Tim: but the cpu sucks, and the screen configuration is retarded

Me: it’s totally unacceptable to have to whip out a stylus just to turn off the headset
Tim: there’s not a button on the headset?
Me: there is….it doesn’t work
Tim: my friend josh has a blackjack and bluetooth headset and has zero problems with it
Tim: it’s clearly the treo that sucks
Me: menu->cancel bluetooth
Me: so….go to the MENU menu
Tim: whaaa
Me: i want to find the idiot who dreamed that one up
Me: and give them their phone back
Me: with my fist
Me: the button on the headset hangs up
Tim: funny
Me: not when mom’s on a 2 year contract
Me: there are three buttons on the headset
Me: volume up, volume down
Me: and the “multifunction button”
Me: which i believe is mainly for hanging up

1 comment.

Transparently Asinine

Posted on August 23rd, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Business/The Software Industry, Chris, TOS Collection, Thinking Outside the WTF, UI Design.

There are some things that are so obviously demonstrate that companies hate consumers that we take them for granted.

Here’s one all-too-familiar example:


The Terms of Service, or TOS, are a standard prerequisite for signing up for almost everything on the internet, from Amazon to Neopets to Flickr. This document usually contains all the rules required to join the service. These cover all sorts of policies, from standards of behavior to giving away your phone number to telemarketers [1] to waiving your right to legal action. [2]

Try applying principles of UI design to a TOS. You should notice immediately:

Everything about your average TOS screams out, “Don’t read this, but skim it and check the box that says you did.”

(1) The box is usually packed into an unnecessarily small space (in the nVidia example, it’s actually clipping most of the available room!)

(2) The page looks like it’s from the Web 0.1 era. Ever see links on a TOS?

(3) It’s totally impossible to read. Look at any TOS. It’s called a table of contents, geniuses. Use it.

(4) Doesn’t contain any interpretation. The legalese is required to get through in the courts, obviously. But why shouldn’t they provide a side-by-side translation or basic explanation?

(5) The check box almost never requires you to read the agreement.

This is something that has been around since the pre-Internet days; the fine print is nothing new.

What’s different now is that the Internet has made everything so much easier that, when it comes to Terms of Service, it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t want you to know what you’re agreeing to. We should demand better.

From now on, the Blog of Justice will have its own TOS, available here.

2 comments.

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