Tag: usability

Citi $900m mistake

Last August, Citigroup Inc. wired $900M to some hedge funds by accident. Then it sent a note to the hedge funds saying, oops, sorry about that, please send us the money back. Some did. Others preferred to keep the money. Citi sued them. Yesterday Citi lost, and they got to keep the money. I read the opinion, expecting to learn about the New York legal doctrine of finders keepers—more technically, the “discharge-for-value defense”—and I was not disappointed. But I was also treated to a gothic horror story about software design. I had nightmares all night about checking the wrong boxes on the computer.

See, the “don’t actually send the money” box next to “PRINCIPAL” is checked, but that doesn’t do anything, you have to check 2 other boxes to make it not actually send the money.

Skeuomorphic hell

Alone, each plugin is hideous in its own unique way. A panel of 3D knobs here, a pixelated oscilloscope there. But when a project really gets cooking, one can amass 8 or 10 of these interfaces overlapping each other on the screen at once, and that’s when skeuomorph hell really comes into focus. I don’t know why audio software has looked like this for the better part of 20 years, but I’d like to honor these sins of UI with a tour of some of the most egregious examples.

Hospital alert fatigue

Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts, an average of 1 alarm beeping by the bedside every 8 minutes. For the entire month, there were 381560 alarms across the 5 ICUs. If you add the inaudible alerts, there were 2.5M unique alarms in 1 month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false

More icons won’t work

Insightful. Screens of icons isn’t scaling, most apps will never make any money, and at this point it’s mostly a sucker’s game.

The idea of having a screen full of icons, representing independent apps, that need to be opened to experience them, is making less and less sense. The idea that these apps sit in the background, pushing content into a central experience, is making more and more sense. That central experience may be something that looks like a notification center today, or something similar to Google Now, or something entirely new.

Realistic play

the 4-year-old of a coworker has pretend Skype conversations with imaginary friends on his toy-that-looks-like-a-computer, and the first few minutes of these pretend conversations go as follows: “I can see you but I can’t hear you. Now I can hear you but I can’t see you.”