Fake power outlets at airports??

Encountered recently at an airport: I did the old find-a-power-plug dance, sat down next to this one, and only then noticed that it's fake. It's a sticker, a photo-realistic image of a power outlet, made all the more convincing by the scars and damage. Where did this come from? Who did this, and why? I laughed; I may have cried. Then I moved on. Maybe it was to make me feel human in an environment of cold practicality - or maybe some jerk just likes messing with people. Who knows?

Kaiser, you can do better than this!

I know health care is complicated, but really, "amount you owe or have already paid"?? How about adding "or we owe you, or it's a different amount entirely." The customer's cognitive disconnect between services and pricing is already a big cause of complication in the health care market; every little bit counts.

And the award for Most Unnecessary Signage goes to...

This. As Rain Noe perfectly explains on Core77, "the entire point of [the two symbols] is that they don't require an explanation and can be understood by those who cannot read English." The complicated clarifications, filled with text of three different sizes and styles and variable underlining, ruin a simple and effective design. I'll be so lost in puzzling over all this that I might just ignore the steady red hand and wander into the street!
[Core77]

Emergency-alert buttons should be unpressable!

Recently, poor UI design led to a false incoming-missile alert in Hawaii. This is a terrifying accident - and a failure not of the user, but of design. According to reports, the alert was in the same drop-down menu as test alerts used regularly for various internal purposes; the addition of an "Are you sure?" dialog box didn't help, since most people cruise through dozens of those every day. Buttons with serious consequences really should be unpressable - it should take unusual thought or action to press them. These kinds of designs already exist at all levels; examples from severe to mundane include the classic "turn two keys at once" to launch a missile, "break glass" to pull a fire alarm, the recessed "panic" button on your car keys, even the slightly-longer press required to engage caps lock on a Mac. I hear the employee who pressed the button has been reassigned - but the designer of this button is truly at fault.

Hey, pressure-washer warning label...

...if you don't want me to do it, don't make it look so fun!

Bricking Unsecure Devices: Good, Evil, Both?

Millions (or tens, hundreds of millions, or billions?) of IoT devices are shipped with default usernames and passwords, which users seldom change, and which malicious hackers can then use in attacks. A hacker by the name of Janit0r released his own virus for these devices, which simply bricks them before they can be used for larger bad deeds. And so the moral question: is this bricking of devices good, evil, or both? Gizmodo's Adam Clark Estes seems to argue for the "good" side, but there are good arguments for each. I'll stay neutral, and make sure to change my default passwords!
[via Ars Technica]

Smart Keys and Unpressable Buttons

I'll admit it: I love my minivan. As long as it's considered for the function of transportation instead of the excitement of driving, there's nothing it can't do. It doesn't skimp on conveniences either, which include smart keys and power sliding doors. However, there's a literally unpressable button in that mix. The idea of a smart key is that it can be in a pocket or bag, and you never have to touch it. To allow you to lock the car without having to find the key, there are "lock" buttons on the outside door handles. The problem is that you can't use the lock buttons until all the doors are closed - so the convenient-but-slow sliding doors force me to wait by the car so I can press the lock button after they close. A simple change seems feasible, where the car could beep to acknowledge the lock button with the doors open, then double-beep when the doors close and successfully execute the lock command. It'd save a few seconds every time, often many times per day, and that adds up. Making buttons more pressable can make smart keys smarter!

A Frorking Joke

That misshapen red lump is McDonalds' Frork, which uses french fries as the tines of a "fork" (quotes, I believe, are necessary). It's a corporate/PR joke, and I want to write a blistering rant on it, but I absolutely can't do better than Kat Bauman's at Core77 - so read that instead. Frork you indeed, McDonald's.

Juicero, the poster child of over-engineering...

By now you may have heard of Juicero, the $400 (originally $700!) home juicing machine whose job can be done, and faster, with your own two hands. It's a story of excess, ego, and rampant over-engineering. Bolt's Ben Einstein did a thorough teardown of this beast, identifying a slew of unnecessary custom parts and expensive manufacturing processes. So, how did it happen? Some possibilities:

• Improperly specified requirements. Does it really take "four tons of force" to squeeze out all the juice? If so, the Bloomberg reporter who did it by hand is quite the hulk.
• Bad engineering. Over-engineering is just as bad as under-engineering, it just results in runaway costs instead of functional failures.
• Hype. With $120M in funding, I'm sure the pressure was on to deliver the greatest juicer of all tiiiiiime! With that kind of cash and even a little ego, more is always better - and the CEO even bragged about all the "custom components" and other over-engineered elements in the machine. Dude, that's not a good thing.

Let's all learn this lesson from Juicero, so that we need not learn it from ourselves.

[via Core77]

The Lyft/Uber Option We Really Want

Make it happen. I know a lot of people (myself included) who'd pay the premium.

Artificial Intelligence: Not quite there yet.

I've generally been impressed with the abilities of virtual assistants in recent years - Siri, Alexa, Cortana, "Okay Google" - to come up with the right answer to real, factual questions asked verbally in natural language by flesh-and-blood humans. However, it turns out we shouldn't trust those answers quite yet. Tom Scocca writes an account of his misadventures regarding an article he wrote, correcting a widespread falsehood about the time required to caramelize onions. He found that Google was extracting a quote his article specifically identified as false, using that as the "correct" answer, and crediting Tom for it. A convoluted path, and it'd require impressive artificial intelligence to parse the correct context - but that's what's needed if an AI assistant is to be truly trusted. It's since been corrected - possibly manually? - and the right answer is shown in the image above. But be warned: AI just isn't quite there yet.
[Gizmodo]

Designed Response: Earrings to catch AirPods

Apple's totally-wireless AirPods have the cool sheen of being The Future, but they battle the persistent fear that they'll fall out of your ears and be lost forever. 3D printer company M3D has designed a response: 3D-printable earrings that act as baskets to catch falling AirPods. It's a cute example of design as commentary on another design; a designed response. It's also mainly a marketing move: M3D has made the design files available on Thingverse, and gotten some nice publicity practically for free. The product isn't serious, but the commentary - and the brand awareness - certainly are.
[via Gizmodo]

Chip card readers' bad sound design

Here's a little gem from Roman Mars of the excellent podcast 99% Invisible. A recent episode was about sound design, specifically the NBC chimes, which are one of the few sounds ever successfully trademarked - worth a listen! Anyway, quoth Roman: "My current least-favorite sounds are from credit card chip readers that blare an obnoxious warning buzz that clearly signals to normal humans that something has gone wrong, even though it actually means everything went right, and it's time to remove your card." He's right: people do need to be reminded to remove their cards, but there's a huge disconnect between the intended message and the received message. Is there a more pleasant sound that also gets attention? Or can it be accomplished with any of the other senses? ("That smell means it's time to remove your card" - nah.) It's definitely a design problem in need of a good solution.

"New Mac" Scented Candle

One way you could look at the "New Mac" scented candle from Twelve South is that $24 is a lot to pay for a candle. Another way is that it's a lot less than the grand you'd drop on an actual new Mac. So if you really need your fix of sensory stimulation to trigger memories of new tech toys (which apparently smell like "mint, peach, basil, lavender, mandarin and sage" - who knew?), maybe this is for you. I mean, consumers have been craving that new car smell for decades...
[via Gizmodo]

Olympic Matching Luggage Folly

For all the things that could have gone wrong at the Rio Olympics, here's one that nobody expected: the patriotic efforts of Team Great Britain to provide its athletes with dapper matching luggage was perhaps a bit misguided. Windsurfer Nick Dempsey's photo - and expression - nicely sum up the problem. It's another instance of a design tradeoff I've mentioned before: uniformity is aesthetically pleasing, but differentiation is more usable!
[via Deadspin]

Get your beer out of the way of your TV!

It's football season, and that means beer and TV. Unfortunately, you never know what amazing play you'll miss during those few seconds when your glass blocks your view, so you'd better play it safe with the TV Beer Mug. Of course it's ridiculous and you shouldn't buy it (what else would you expect from a site called Perpetual Kid?), but it's still clever enough for a laugh. Cheers!
[via Gizmodo]

Design & engineering during an active shooting...

In a recent active-shooter crisis at UCLA, many students found themselves in rooms without door locks. It's a grim and terrible situation, but one that can still benefit from quick design and engineering. Pranasha Shrestha shows one example of the lengths some went to keep the doors closed - copied above, complete with hashtags - and Gizmodo cataloged many more. Locks are basic tools, whose presence or absence can be used for good or bad; the ability to improvise a change to the lock situation can be, literally, a lifesaver.

Beer Trough Picnic Table: Impractically Fantastic

I know it's impractical: tough to fill, quick to melt, hogging precious table real estate, and more. But damned if it isn't gorgeously inviting, like a cornucopia of booze right there for the taking! You don't even have to stand up to get a new drink! Sometimes maybe the un-usability of a product (or DIY project, as most of these seem to be) is justified by a fleeting moment of sweet, satisfying perfection. Now let me grab another beer out of that trough.
[via Core77]

Visual Voicemail on Android: An Unfulfilled Promise

Another reason I'm relieved to be going back from Android to iPhone: Visual Voicemail on Android hasn't worked out. It was a truly innovative part of the original iPhone, forced by Apple on carriers as a condition for carrying the must-have handset (and removing a sneaky profit-making annoyance in the process). As Apple tends to do, it took full control of the feature and implemented it with high quality.
Android is different, with the vision that "carriers are free to implement their own vision of Visual Voicemail!" But with nobody enforcing it, the task was met with near-apathy by carriers who know the feature isn't central to their profits. And so we have the sad, half-baked abomination that is AT&T Visual Voicemail, guilty of the following sins:

• The phone will double-notify of voicemails: once with a prompt to dial the non-visual voicemail number (what am I, a caveman?), and once much later to notify that the visual version is available. Separate apps, of course.
• For a loooong time, the app didn't use the proximity sensor to turn off the touchscreen when listening to a message without headphones or speakerphone. My ear usually triggered the notification shade and pressed god-knows-what buttons up there.
• The current version of the app doesn't keep the screen alive while playing back a message over headphones or speakerphone. So the phone falls asleep halfway into playing the message - which also causes the audio to stop (unlike most audio-playing apps). I have to wake the damn phone up and press "play" again to resume the message.

Bugs are bugs, and the first issue may be more related to insufficient integration at the OS level. But the prox-sensor and stay-awake behavior are basic, easy design issues that shouldn't have made it past a single design review - if there ever was one. So in this case, it'll be a relief to go back to an ecosystem overseen by a zealous tyrant obsessed with user experience - it's better than a wild-west where nobody's motivated to offer something competent.

There and Back Again: iPhone to Android to iPhone

This post is about my personal experience choosing between phone ecosystems, which (to possibly overstate the case) is one of the most impactful decisions many of us make as tech consumers. The difference between iOS and Android is significant, each carrying features and restrictions that have real effects on daily life. I'm not a professional tech writer, so I don't have test units to constantly test-drive and switch between; for me, like most people, the chance to choose only comes once every year or two. It's not to be taken lightly.

Just after the dawn of the smartphone era, I hopped on the iPhone train - it was objectively ahead of anything else, and I loved it. But after four years with an iPhone 3G and 4S, I needed something different: a bigger screen (available on many Android phones but no iPhones at the time); more freedom to tweak and customize; a device that worked natively and by default with my many Google services. So began three years with Android phones, a Nexus 5 and 5X. I loved them too; but when the next round of phones comes out this fall, I'm switching back to iPhone. It breaks my heart, but it's also a relief. Here's why:

• My original reasons for switching are less valid now. iPhones have larger displays, iOS is more open, and Google services are almost universally available and work smoothly.
• iMessage Purgatory burned me. I was dropped from conversations by iPhones that still thought I was on iMessage. Texting is perhaps the most crucial thing phones do these days (it sure isn't phone calls), so switching back will be a real relief - but I still blame Apple for the technological fumble.
• It's just tougher being an Android user. Lightning cables and iPhone-compatible headphones are everywhere, but USB-C and Android-compatible (3-button) headphones are tough to find. Other accessories are the same way, as iPhone leads the premium US market and makes it easy on accessory makers with only 2 or 3 models they need to accommodate.
• You know what you'll get with an iPhone. You'll get a damn good camera, a good-looking (if not crazy-hi-res) display, a highly-polished experience, and killer build quality. With Android phones, those things are all up in the air, so you need to do your homework.
• Things I'll miss about Android: wireless charging (though the 5X dropped that anyway, much to my dismay), low cost (though for something I use many times every day, I've come to the belief that it's worth the price to get just the right thing), widgets, custom launchers, the "back" and "menu" buttons, the plastic body that feels so drop-resistant. The feeling of being a techie who goes my own way.
• Things I'll welcome back with iPhone: getting new apps earlier, tighter control of the experience (it was sometimes choppy on Android), 3D Touch (if I ever use it?), Find My Friends (so I can stop wondering or asking about ETAs), iMessages actually working, compatibility with my AppleTV, the silence switch, the metal body that feels so good. The comfort and ease of being part of the market majority.

What might happen that'd make me switch back? I suppose Apple would need to open its services (iMessage, Find My Friends, iTunes music and movies) to Android, or at least definitively fix iMessage Purgatory. Or, Android would have to pull so far ahead in some respect that it would override those things, or in a very un-Google way, choose to make some of its services exclusive to Android devices. None of those things seems likely in the short term, so it's time for me to bid Android a fond farewell, and welcome iPhone back with open arms.