The Avatar is NOT the User

A lot of effort goes into the user interface of laptops these days – but there appears to be a big disconnect in the thinking.

The effort goes into screen layout and display and reaction to the use of input devices – all the electronic stuff. What a pity the same effort isn’t going into design of the physical machine. After all, the user is a person interfacing with a physical device, not a dematerialised avatar.

These thoughts came as the DeliveryDemon alternated between two laptops – a five year old, small footprint, lightweight laptop and a rather more modern larger laptop which doubles as an office desktop.

The right side of the small machine is taken up by the CD reader, flush with the side of the machine and operated by a button above the keyboard. At the back of the left side is a USB slot, well out of the mouse space of a left handed user. Towards the front of the left side is another USB slot with a rather tacky plastic cover. While not a problem for right handed users, a device in this slot would tend to impinge on a left handed user’s mouse area. Apart from this, the physical interface is quite well designed, taking into account the limited physical size of the machine.

With the larger and more modern machine, it’s a very different story. Despite the extra space available, little if any thought has gone into the physical aspects of the user interface. The USB ports are to the front of the right hand side, and USB cable connections create a mouse no-go zone for about 5 inches to the side of the machine. Given the size of the machine, that makes the keyboard / mouse area about 24 inches wide, with a 6 inch dead area between keyboard and mouse.

Worse still, USB cable connections make the DVD drive inaccessible, as the cables foul the opening area, unless the user either trails the cables across the front of the machine, or reorganises every workspace to take account of the deficiencies of the laptop design.

Most of the population, like the DeliveryDemon, are right handed, which begs the question of why the much less frequently used access points are concentrated on the left side of the machine while the right side is a messy clutter.

Vaio sells itself on smooth design concepts. The DeliveryDemon thinks it’s about time they put just a bit more effort into delivery of a well-designed physical interface.

You don’t have to be paranoid……

The DeliveryDemon was looking at security settings on the laptop recently after the moderate paranoia setting started blocking WordPress cookies. To check what was happening she used the ‘prompt’ setting, requiring manual approval of cookies. Cue a very tired hand, and the site concerned was a perfectly respectable one! A big disconnect appears to have grown between website development practice and security practice. It appears that we are offered two choice

•  blind reliance on automated cookie approval / rejection
• total unusability.

This little experiment has the DeliveryDemon asking a LOT of questions:

• What are these cookies doing?
• How much of my storage / processing power are they hogging?
• What’s going on when a ‘respectable’ website (not WordPress) wants to install 20 or more cookies per screen?
• Why don’t website designers realise that a cookie plague makes the most honourable of organisations look dubious?
• Whatever happened to respecting the right of the user to choose an appropriate security setting?

The DeliveryDemon appreciates that there’s a balance to be struck when it comes to website stats and marketing requirements. But if the designers come up with something better than forcing the user to change security settings for all sites to fit the requirements of one particular site, there’s something wrong.

If the medium paranoia setting stops a website from working, then someone has delivered a very poor level of security.

Delivering Spurious Accuracy, Demanding Constant Attention

The DeliveryDemon did a double-take. The hospital receptionist had actually offered a follow-up appointment time of 8.48 a.m. Not 8.45, not 8.50, 8.48 precisely!

Great efforts were made to get the patient to hospital for the prescribed minute. As the seconds clicked by, the DeliveryDemon gazed at the white blocks on the bilious yellow screen, idly wondering whether the developers were aware that the inability to distinguish between yellow and white is a common form of colour blindness. The clock ticked over to 8.48…… Nothing happened! At 8.55 the appointment pinged up for its allotted 3 seconds then disappeared into the ether, never to re-appear.

There is a huge disconnect between the design of this system and practical reality. The underlying driver may well be a target of fitting 5 x 12 minute appointments into the hour, but that 12 minutes is an average. Pinning appointments to an exact minute means that overruns delay subsequent appointment, but nothing is gained if an appointment finishes early – an approach which increases the likelihood of targets being missed. It also invites mockery.

The mechanism for summoning patients is equally poorly conceived. It relies on the assumption that patients gaze non-stop at the single screen, waiting for their numbers to flash up for those 3 short seconds. In reality, pillars obscure the screen from some seats, and passers-by may obscure it from any position. The area, lacking sound absorption, is noisy, so any audio cue is lost. A patient with poor eyesight may need to move closer to the high-mounted screen to read it, and age or infirmity would make those 3 seconds of visibility completely inadequate. And of course real patients are chatting, reading newpapers, watching the world go by, as the clock edges beyond the allotted minutes of their appointments. That sickly yellow screen is by no means the cynosure of all eyes.

Part of the DeliveryDemon wanted to laugh at the absence of basic common sense in the design. The reason she is not still in giggling thrall to those ridiculous flaws is the context. This was an NHS hospital. Huge sums of taxpayers’ hard-earned money went into the creation of the system. The appalling design is unlikely to result in patient fatality, but the blatant absence of commonsense in a patient-facing system must call into question the quality of other systems which are life-critical.