This has to be the most infuriating bug report I've ever submitted. I went to type in my 2FA code on a website - but no numbers appeared on screen. Obviously, I was an idiot and had forgotten to press the NumLock button. D'oh! I toggled it on and typed again. No numbers appeared. I switched to another tab, my numbers appeared when I typed them. So I was reasonably confident that my keyboard was working. I swapped back to the 2FA entry and tried again. Still nothing. Then I tried typing the…
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Some of my best friends are designers. But I think we can all agree that - however well-meaning - they can be a little obsessive. Whether it is fretting over tiny details, or trying to align to a grid which doesn't exist, or spending time removing useful affordances in the name of æsthetics - they always find a way to make something prettier at the expense of usability. Google used to have some beautiful logos for its apps. Each had a distinct shape, style, and colour. Then, someone decided …
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I'm not thick. I know it doesn't sound like much of a boast, but I'm pretty competent at this whole adulting lark. But it appeared that I had forgotten a 4 digit number I'd set up less than a minute ago! The security guard smiled wearily at me, "It happens to everyone!" She said. Which, I'll admit was of small comfort. Work had taken the (sensible) decision that our entry cards weren't secure enough. In order to gain access to the building we needed to present our card and type in a 4 digital …
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The QWERTY layout is, I grant you, an illogical mess. I'm happy to hear your arguments that Dvorak is the one true way. Or that Colemak is several percent faster. But QWERTY is a standard now. Everyone uses it on their laptops and phones. It is used everywhere. Except, it turns out, streaming services. They use alphabetic keyboards. Worse, each one has a unique layout! Want to search for that movie staring that guy who was in the film with that one who does the adverts for that thing you…
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The best gadget I got in lockdown was a set of motion activated lights. They have no user interface. I walk by them in the dark and they turn on. Midnight piss? No fumbling for a light switch, no shouting to a digital assistant, no logging in to an app. Simple. I love it. It got me thinking about other things which have "zero interfaces". Once they're set up, they just keep quietly working. The most obvious is a thermostat. If set right, it keeps the heating off in summer and on in winter. …
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I am grumpy. As my very clever wife summarised, I hate when designers prioritise their æsthetic preferences over my usability needs. I tried sharing a website using Google Chrome for Android. I hit the share button, and a panel popped-up from the bottom of the screen. Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted. It was early in the morning - when I'm not at my cognitive best - and I was stumped. There is nothing on this screen - other than the icons - to tell me how I can …
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One of the frustrating things about computers is their limited input options. A "standard" PC keyboard only has about 100 keys. Sure, some have some bonus buttons for controlling the machine, but it is becoming clear that there simply aren't enough buttons to efficiently program computers. Most programming languages have the concept of relational operators. How does variable X compare to variable Y? If we want to ask if X is less than or equal to Y, we write X <= Y. Which is a bit weird,…
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Remember schlocky 1990s splatter film "Event Horizon"? No, me neither. But lockdown has us exhausting our supply of Sci-Fi movies, so we rewatched it. Anyway, I found some bugs! I'm a big fan of the Sci Fi Interfaces blog. It details the Human Computer Interaction design of the imagined future. It has primed me to pay attention to the interfaces in films. Look, you have your hobbies and I have mine! Early on in the film, a crew-member is watching a video message from home: Let's focus on…
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I walked into an unfamiliar toilet recently. You've probably done the same, looking around to find the stalls, work out whether the driers are near the sinks, if there's soap available. I was completely taken aback when I saw this monstrosity of a sink. It's well known that we Brits love our separate hot and cold taps - but I'd never seen anything like this before! Why are the taps so far away from the spigot? This is the Principle of Proximity. One of the oldest principles of…
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For years, my email address was registered with our electricity supplier. I got the monthly bills sent to me. My wife's email was used for the water supplier. This made sense when we were a young couple with separate finances - but now we're a smug an old married couple, with a joint bank account, it's a bit annoying. We both want to see the bills, and we don't want to rely on the other forwarding us an email, or sticking the PDF into a shared folder. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentCouples …
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Back when I used to help people design mobile phone apps, I would talk about the platonic ideal of an app. It's quite simple and effective. You press the button in the middle of your screen - and it makes everything better! You push that button and a taxi arrives, or a pizza is delivered, or your photos are backed up, or you fall in love, or you learn a language. Life is rarely that simple - and apps are rarely that smart. But let's look at what comes next. Anticipatory User Interfaces …
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Twenty One. I have 21 accounts which use Two-Factor Authentication. I use the Authy app to manage them all, but it is still a pain to scroll through and find the exact 2FA token I need. Encouraged by my friend Tom Morris's blog post, I picked up a YubiKey NEO for £50. It implements the FIDO U2F standard. Sadly, the YubiKey is substandard and frustrating to use. Here's what I found. First impressions count for a lot - and it is pretty disappointing. What you see in my fingers is literally …
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