An example of bad usability
When I was in Las Vegas recently, staying in the Luxor, I experienced one of the worst designed pieces of technology that I've seen in a long time. Every day when I returned to the hotel, I had to get the lift back to my floor.
Each of the lifts had the same restriction in effect – you need to insert your room card, and wait for it to register (which sometimes doesn't work first time). Once it has been accepted, a green light will illuminate (if not, you get a red light or yellow light.) I have no idea why there are 3 possible states! Then you have about 4 seconds to press your floor button. If you press it in time, the floor button illuminates and locks in. If you miss your window (or someone else presses an illegal button) then you have to start the whole thing again.
OK, well it's a bit of a faff, but what's the big deal, you may ask. Well it's true that if you are riding the elevator on your own, it's awkward but doable – but as soon as you have more than a couple of people in the room the whole system resorts to chaos. Let's imagine there are 3 people, wanting to go to floors 3, 7 and 11. (It gets even more crazy when the lift has 6 or 7 people and not everyone can reach the buttons!). Anyway, in this example, Mr. 7 happens to be first, puts his card in, and presses the button. The lift starts moving towards floor 7. So now we have a lift that's in motion, but most of the people in the car haven't put their floor in yet. Mr. 3 puts his card in, and after a couple of tries gets it to accept. But we've already passed floor 3. So the button push is rejected. He has to wait until the lift is descending. Which means it's Mr 11's turn. He puts his card in just as we're arriving at floor 7. But before he can push the button, the lift (which now thinks its free) gets summoned to the ground floor. 3 and 11 are now right back to square one, on the ground floor. And so it goes on! It can take several minutes and unnecessary journeys to actually reach your floor, not to mention all sorts of unfamiliar social situations for which there is no established lift etiquette!
This is a great example of how designers can easily fail to consider their users when adding new features. The reading of the room card was clearly added for security – but they completely failed to consider the dynamics of how it would work in practice in a crowded lift.
Read MoreMalcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Just came across this talk by Malcolm Gladwell telling a story of how the food industry learned about the need to identify different types of tastes rather than looking for the “most popular”. This ties in neatly with some of the ideas I have blogged about before about the need for anyone developing a product or service to find out your user personas and decide which ones to target, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Brand new buses in Montréal
It seems a lot of money is being invested in public transport in Montréal at the moment. Not just the roll-out of hundreds of pickup stations for Bixi (the community bike scheme) across the city, but 300 new STM buses as well. I got to try one out tonight when we were catching the 535 at Guy Concordia. There was an STM official who stopped the queue boarding the 535, flagged it on its way, and beckoned up a brand new bus which was approaching behind, which we all boarded. I think we may have been literally the first paying passengers to board, it was completely spotless and everything was shiny and clean. I don’t think I’ve been in any city where they invest as much in public transport – and not only is there a really good network, it runs on time too. I can catch the 51 to Snowdon metro from the end of our road every 6 minutes at peak times, and the timetables are so accurate that I can plan journeys down to the minute even when changing from bus to metro to bus and back again. Enjoying the public transport lifestyle very much, and it seems to be helping me lose weight as well.
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Québec local music promotion
On Sunday evening we rented a car from Communauto (a great alternative to owning a car in Montréal). I noticed that each Communauto car comes with a Québec-government sponsored CD of local emerging bands & musicians. There were actually some really good tunes on there. Just thought it was interesting, there seems to be a strong trend of supporting anything local here. Which is fine.. just not something you always see.
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Google making use of Web History Data
Just spotted this, first time I have seen Google actually doing something with the “Web Search History” data. Could be actually quite useful. Although depending what you search for, you may now not want to check Google News with friends/colleagues around!!
BBC News – Air disasters timeline
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/2008892.stm
I think they missed an incident in 2001.. around september time
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