Of course, necking a few shots every time you update your website isn't great for your health - so is there another way?

Click the "🥴 Drunk" button at the top of the page and see what happens!

These are a relatively simple set of CSS rules which you can apply to any site in order to simulate inebriation.

(I may have changed these since writing the post. Check the source for the latest version.)

First, monkey around with the fonts. This sets all the lower-case vowels to be rendered in a different font - as discussed in "targetting specific characters with CSS rules":

/* Drunk */
@font-face {
    font-family: "Drunk";
    src: url("/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/assets/fonts/CommitMonoV143-Edent.woff2") format("woff2");
    /* Lower-Case Vowels */
    unicode-range: U+61, U+65, U+69, U+6F, U+75 ;
    size-adjust: 105%;
}

The rest of the characters will be rendered in the system's default Cursive font. Characters will also be slanted. The first character of every paragraph will be shrunk:

:root:has(input#drunk:checked) * {
    font-family: "Drunk", cursive;
    font-style: oblique -12deg;
    text-align: end;
}
:root:has(input#drunk:checked) p::first-letter {
    font-size: .5em;
}

Next, use the child selectors to rotate and skew various elements. While we wait for CSS randomness to come to all browsers this is a simple way to select various elements:

:root:has(input#drunk:checked) *:nth-child(3n) {
    transform: rotate(2deg);
}
:root:has(input#drunk:checked) *:nth-child(5n) {
    transform: skew(5deg, 5deg);
}
:root:has(input#drunk:checked) *:nth-child(7n) {
    transform: rotate(-3deg);
}

Make the entire page blurred and saturate the colours:

:root:has(input#drunk:checked) body {
    filter: blur(1px) saturate(2.5);
}

Make any hyperlink harder to click by having it gently bounce up and down:

:root:has(input#drunk:checked) a  {
    animation-name: bounce;
    animation-duration: 4s;
    animation-direction: alternate;
    animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
    animation-iteration-count: infinite;
}
@keyframes bounce {
    0%   { margin-top:  0px; }
    25%  { margin-top:-10px; }
    50%  { margin-top:  0px; }
    75%  { margin-top: 10px; }
    100% { margin-top:  0px; }
}

Does this really simulate drunkenness? No. It is a pale simulacrum. What it is, however, is deliberately inaccessible to the majority of people.

How does it make you feel using the site in Drunk-Mode? Does it frustrate you? Do your eyes hurt due to the garish colour scheme? Do you keep missing the thing that you try and click on? Are the words so hard to read that it takes you extra time to do anything useful? Will you recommend this experience to your friends and family?

I've written before about cosplaying as being disabled. Strapping on a pair of Glaucoma Goggles will give you an idea of what a visual impairment is like. But it won't give you the experience of living that way for months or years.

You should test your stuff with people who have cognitive impairments or physical disabilities. Find out how usable your site is for someone lacking fine motor control or for those with learning disabilities. Pay disable people to take part in usability studies. Integrate their feedback.

Faffing around with CSS will only get you so far.

the spreadsheet, initially shared in 2022, and thought to contain data related to a small number of applicants, had contained hidden data related to more than 18,000 people. 

ICO statement in response to 2022 MoD data breach

Why are people still sending files to each other? I remember having a stand-up argument a decade ago with a project manager who wanted us to email a completed Word template to him every day. He'd then spend hours merging the various documents together. He couldn't get his head around the collaborative document suite the company had purchased a licence for. I tried showing him that we could give specific people write-access to the document and they could edit it live. No more emailing back-and-forth.

It just didn't stick. It wasn't that he was ignorant about what computers could do, but his entire mental model was built around files. Discrete packets of data with a fixed metaphor from the real world.

Collaborative online documents don't have an easy analogue analogue. It is rare to see a dozen people scribbling on the same whiteboard or using the same typewriter keyboard.

Permissions are another things that aren't intuitive. The idea that only specific people can see something doesn't match our expectations of paper. Sure, anyone could grab a pen and deface it, that's why we have one person in charge of the "master copy".

Copy. What a hateful word.

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked.

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I see the same issue in the WeTransfer kerfuffle. Very Serious People saying it was intolerable that the untrusted 3rd party they were using to share Very Sensitive Information was going to read that information.

At which point you have to throw up your hands and ask why people are sending files to each other in the year of Our Lord 2025?!?!? If you have a sensitive file, use proper access controls. Or at least use a password so the FTP-as-a-service provider can't steal your IP.

And git! Don't get me started on git! The best minds of a generation stuck in a paradigm of downloading files to their local machine, making changes, then emailing git pushing them up to be approved? Madness!

Look, there are some times when you need a local copy. I want my own copy of my insurance documents - but that's not a living doc; it is an agreed artefact. Sure, it's handy to have access when there's no network connection - but that's what background sync is for. OK, you're on Office 365 and I'm on Google - so we'll have to work a little harder to set up access.

But all of this is possible!

We rant and rave about the 💾 icon being a skeuomorph. But the very concept of an individual file is also a skeuomorph! Data are not stored on paper files. There is no such thing as a filesystem directory - it's just a convention to make computing palatable for people born in the 20th century who lived in a world of A4 paper and manilla folders.

Modern computing is still stuck in the past. Our computers are like cars which have been designed to carry a bale of hay to mop up the horse-piss.

To geeks, it is a compelling attraction. Something cool and esoteric lives in there! All sorts of goodies to explore and configure.

To normal people, it is invisible. Normal people don't go pushing random icons on their apps because computers are fragile and may break if you do the wrong thing.

To me, it is a sign that product managers are a menace and must be stopped. A hundred thousand icons vying for your attention have been stuffed away because no one has the authority to prioritise user needs.

As a | user who has received some spam

I want to | easily report it as spam

So that | Google's AI can become ever stronger my inbox is easier to manage

How do you report spam? On the web, it is possible if you're prepared to enter the forbidden lair of ⋮. Click the one nearest the message and you'll see:

But there is no "report spam" button in the Gmail app. Try to find it. I promise you it isn't there.

No, not even behind the door of mysteries which is ⋮. See:

Ah ha! FOOLISH USER!! You thought that you could transfer a mastered skill from one environment to another? You are an idiot. A buffoon. The Eloi at Google mock your Morlock ways.

Here is the report spam button in the Gmail app - hidden in the top ⋮ menu!

And, just for completeness, here's what the top ⋮ on the web has.

Why?!

Why do the Monkey-Punchers at Google have such scorn for its users? Is it because their illegal monopoly means they don't have to compete for users? Do their perverse internal politics only reward employees for adding features, not removing them? Perhaps the web team and the app team are engaged in holy war around a doctrinal schism over icon placement?

We may never know.

OK, but why?

Why do the overflows on the web have icons but on the Android app they're barren?

Why is the order of the options completely different on both?

Why are the names different for the same functions?

We can only assume that the web team are Montagues and the app team Capulets.

What is going on?

Moving a UI from the big screen to the small screen is difficult. Some options aren't relevant in either context. Some labels are too big. Some prioritisation needs to happen. I accept that.

But users only have limited cognitive plasticity. They have a mental model of how a UI works and they expect it to be reasonably consistent.

I keep making the same mistake. Whether I'm on the web or app, I always go to the wrong option! This makes me feel like an idiot. I have a hundred apps to use, each with subtly different UIs - I can't be expected to keep them all straight. But I do expect the a common set of paradigms if the services are under the auspices of a single company.

Why are there two ⋮ menu options? I think the top relates to the conversation whereas the second relates to the specific message? But maybe I'm wrong.

Two out of three ain't bad

I lied earlier. There's a third way to report spam.

On the web, hover over one of the mysterious small icons - the ones with ridiculously thin lines and low contrast - and you'll be rewarded with this:

Make it make sense!!

At least, that's what I thought. A few days ago my little cybernetic helper suddenly started speaking!

Not exactly a Shakespearean soliloquy, but a hell of a lot better than trying to decipher BIOS beep codes.

All of my electronics beep at me. My dishwasher screams a piercing tone to let me know it has completed a wash cycle. My kettle squarks mournfully whenever it is boiled. The fridge howls in protest when it has been left open too long. My microwave sings the song of its people to let me know dinner is ready. And they all do it with a series of tuneless beeps. It is maddening.

Which brings me on to Star Wars.

Why does the character of Artoo-Detoo only speak in beeps?

Here's how we're introduced to him⁰ in the original script:

                THREEPIO
        We're doomed!

The little R2 unit makes a series of electronic sounds that 
only another robot could understand.

                THREEPIO
        There'll be no escape for the Princess 
        this time.

Artoo continues making beeping sounds

There are a few possibilities. Firstly, perhaps his hardware doesn't have a speaker which supports human speech?

Artoo demonstrably has a speaker which is capable of producing a wide range of sounds. So perhaps he isn't capable of complex symbolic thought?

This exchange from Empire Strikes Back proves otherwise.

INT.  LUKE'S X-WING - COCKPIT

Luke, looking thoughtful, suddenly makes a decision.  He flips several 
switches.  The stars shift as he takes his fighter into a steep turn.  
The X-wing banks sharply and flies away in a new direction.

The monitor screen on Luke's control panel prints out a question from 
the concerned Artoo.

                LUKE
            (into comlink)
        There's nothing wrong, Artoo.
        I'm just setting a new course.

Artoo beeps once again.

                LUKE
            (into comlink)
        We're not going to regroup with 
        the others.

Artoo begins a protest, whistling an unbelieving, "What?!"

Luke reads Artoo's exclamation on his control panel.

It could be that Artoo can't speak the same language as the other humans. C-3PO boasts that he is fluent in over 6 million forms of communication¹ - so it is possible that Artoo can speak but just can't speak out language².

Speech synthesis is complicated but playback is simple. Artoo can play recordings. His memory could be stuffed full of useful phrases which he could blast out when necessary. So perhaps he only has limited memory and doesn't have the space for a load of MP3s?

Except, of course, his memory is big enough for "a complete technical readout" of the Death Star. That's got to be be be a chunky torrent, right?

The only reasonable conclusion we can come to is that R2-D2 is a slave³. Sentient organics apparently hold some deep-seated prejudices against robots and "their kind".

The Star Wars universe obviously has a version of this meme:

Which brings me back to my home appliances.

This isn't a technology problem. Back in the 1980s microcomputers had passible speech synthesis on crappy little speakers. Using modern codecs like Opus means that pre-recorded voices take up barely any disk space.

The problem is: do I want them to talk to me?

• When I'm upstairs, I can just about hear a shrill beep from the kitchen. Will I hear "washing cycle now completed" as clearly?
• Would a manufacturer bother to localise the voice so it is in my regional language or accent?
• Is hearing a repetitive voice more or less annoying than a series of beeps?
• If the appliance can't listen to my voice, does it give the impression that it is ordering me around?
• Do I feel a misplaced sense of obligation when inanimate objects act like living creatures?

It is clear that the technology exists. Cheap home appliances have more than enough processing power to play a snippet of audio through a tiny speaker. But perhaps modern humans find something uncanny about soulless boxes conversing with us as equals?

Stressful, annoying, and - until relatively recently - commonplace.

When services like Just-Eat and Deliveroo came in, I suddenly was a lot happier ordering from local restaurants. Online ordering offers a highly predictable interaction.

I can take everything at my own pace. I can see the total cost as I go. I can be confident that my address has been understood. My card is automatically charged.

It is bliss.

Many interactions are unpredictable. For example, ringing up for a doctor's appointment (will I get through? Will the receptionist laugh at me?) or buying clothes (do they have my size? Will the shop be open late?).

Thankfully, it seems that the world is slowly drifting towards an embrace of predictability.

Yesterday, I needed to book a boiler service. I looked at half-a-dozen local companies and picked the one with an online calendar. Normally I'd ring up an engineer (with their arms halfway up a flue) and try to negotiate a mutually agreeable date and time. Then spend the day worrying about whether they'd accept card payments. Instead, I flicked through their calendar, selected a slot, and paid online.

The engineer doesn't waste time looking through a diary. I don't have to spell out my address over the phone. We each gain a little bit of calm.

The journalist Marie Le Conte has a different perspective:

… humans need friction. Convenience is alluring but it is dangerous, because getting used to it means forgetting that being alive isn’t meant to always be easy. We should run our errands in person and queue at the Post Office and eat in restaurants because it is good to remember that sometimes we have to wait around, or go to several shops because the first one didn’t have what we needed. Resilience is one of the most important traits a person can and should develop, and it works like a muscle. Glide effortlessly through life and, when something bad does happen, because it always will, you won’t know how to react.

The introverts are winning

And, surprisingly, I agree! There's nothing quite like wandering through a new city, peering into the restaurants, and going on a culinary adventure. But imagine if you went into a restaurant and they told you they only take payment in obsolete Deutsche Mark. Not predictable and not fun!

I don't think a desire for predictability is about being antisocial. Nor is it about dividing people from each other (I have an unfounded theory that many of the people who bemoan having to place a restaurant order by app are generally those who made wait-staffs' lives hell). But it is a recognition that complexity and unpredictability are delightful in context.

We should have unpredictable experiences. But our lives are greatly enhanced when interactions are highly predictable.

Of course, not everyone is the same. For some people, unpredictability is an enrichment activity. People with relatively simple and predictable lives seem to derive benefit from uncertainty. They enjoy the complex interactions, ill-defined challenges, and uncertain outcomes.

That's great for them! I'm happy for them to call for restaurants and plumbers. They can spend all day wandering around hoping they get to their destination.

But, for lots of us, unpredictability is pain.

Taking the road less travelled is only exciting when you choose to take it. Otherwise, you're just lost.

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 numbers using the number row on my keyboard. My 2FA code appeared.

WHAT IN THE SAINTED NAME OF ALPHONSE CHAPANIS IS GOING ON?!?!?

Developers often use JavaScript to "improve" the standard features of HTML. For example, using <input type="number"> has some accessibility concerns and using inputmode="numeric" is great for showing a number key board on mobile, but not much else.

So a developer wants a reliable way to make sure a user can only type numbers. Fair enough.

There are two ways to do this - a right way and a wrong way - using KeyboardEvent.

One way is to listen for the character being sent from the keyboard - known as the key.

The other is to listen for the button being pressed on the keyboard - known as the code.

A good demo of this is at keyjs.dev - play around with it to see what keyboard buttons your browser can detect.

When I press 7 on the top row of my keyboard, the key is 7 and the code is Digit7.

But when I press 7 on my number pad, the key is 7 but the code is Numpad7.

The JavaScript on the website was rejecting any key code which wasn't a "Digit"!

Perhaps I am a weirdo for insisting on both having and using my numpad? Perhaps developers need to test on something other than MacBooks? Perhaps JavaScript was a mistake and the Web would be better without it?

Either way, don't be like that website. Let users type in using whatever keys they like.

Google used to have some beautiful logos for its apps. Each had a distinct shape, style, and colour. Then, someone decided that they all needed a consistent visual language. And this mess was born.

*sigh* I get it. I really do. Brand is a thing. Users often use visual heuristics to identify similar groups. Having each team go wild on an icon design doesn't always reflect the professionalism and consistency that you want to project. The logos aren't awful - but I find them a little boring. Not the worst sin in the world. Though that's only half the problem.

In Google's Android, they've decided that - for consistency - all icons must be firmly encased in a white circle. It makes everything look clean, consistent, friendly, and...

...oh.

I apologise for getting old. My visual acuity isn't what it once was. When I'm staring at my phone, with its screen caked in fingerprint grease, on a juddering bus, after a long day at work, all I want is a quick way to identify the app I want to use.

Like most people, my brain has evolved to take mental shortcuts. It looks for a distinct shape and colour to identify things. I simply can't do that with modern Android's adaptive icons. They all look like white circles with a splodge of colour in the middle.

A few years ago, I wrote about fixing Android's circular icons. Sadly, I don't have the skill to produce my own icon pack. But using the open source Iconeration I was able to manually set my icons to be beautifully inconsistent.

With a glance, I can immediately see which is which. Do I care that they're not all aligned perfectly? Nope!

I've got a high-resolution screen, I want high-resolution artwork. Look at that Firefox icon! It is gorgeous! It isn't a pale, flat, blob - it has texture and uniqueness.

Phones used to be wild and unique - now they're all boring black rectangles. User Interfaces used to reflect the aspirations of their designers - now they're just a bland corporate mediocrity.

I hope, one day soon, the fashion pendulum will swing back and interfaces can become interesting again. Until that day, I'll use Iconeration to make my phone easier and more delightful for me.

By now, you're probably sick and tired of shoving a swab up your nose and / or down your throat. You've grown blasé about the little medical marvel as it reacts to whatever antibodies are flowing laterally. You don't even bother reading the paper leaflet any more. Right?

But that swab test wasn't the only option on the table.

One of the (many) tasks our team was looking into was how to make the experience of taking the test more digital. Instead of black-and-white pamphlet, how about... AN IPHONE APP an interactive website? It could show you videos of exactly what to do! It could have a built in timer to remind you when to check your results! It could have multiple languages - including British Sign Language! AMAZING!

Sure, there would be a cost to producing and updating it - but making it easier for people to take accurate tests could save lives. And that'd be worth it, right? We wrestled with several different ideas and sketches of prototypes. Testing them to see if they were actually useful. In the main, they weren't.

But this wasn't the only digital process we were considering. One proposed Covid test was digital. I don't mean there was a circuit board examining your results. I mean digital - as in it used your finger.

I placed the tiny needle, safely trapped in a plastic sheath, against my forefinger. "With a quick stabbing motion," read the leaflet, "prick the skin." I did so. I suppose the best thing I could say about the experience was that it was a different kind of pain to the brain-piercing horror of the nasal swab. *shudders*

The leaflet continued, "Milk three drops of blood from your finger." I had to pause for a moment. "Milking" blood isn't high on my list of super-funtime activities. Nevertheless, I persisted and managed to spill just enough of the red stuff into the provided capsule.

What was the next step? I looked at the leaflet. "PTO"

So I grabbed the leaflet, flipped it over and stared vacantly at the blood-stained mess.

Ah.

There were many reasons - so I am told - why the finger-prick tests weren't widely rolled out. There was significant cost, the risk from sharps was hard to manage, and people simply didn't like cutting themselves to bleed. It didn't matter how much more accurate the test was - if you can't convince people to take it regularly, it isn't worth it.

Also, it was messy.

Would a whizzy digital service to accompany it have helped? Perhaps a video from a friendly face with a reassuring accent to calm your fears? Gently smiling as they sliced into their fingers? Probably not. People would have just ended up with blood-soaked iPhone screens.

Ew!

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 like? Here's the keyboards on the various streaming services I have:

Amazon Prime

Three rows. A-M. N-Z. Then a full number row 1-0.

Apple TV

A 6x7 grid. All lower case letters, with numbers appearing directly after the letter z.

BBC iPlayer

A 10x3 grid for the letters, and a separate number pad which goes 1-4, 5-8, 9-0 - unlike any other number pad I've seen.

Channel 4

The same letter grid as Amazon, albeit in upper-case. The space and delete are at the top, rather than the bottom.

Netflix

(I'd learned how to take screenshots from my FireStick by this point.) The same A-F grid as Channel 4 - but space and delete are reversed.

UKTV Play

The same A-F grid as C4 and Netflix. But this adds a "Clear" button. Oh, and numbers start from 0, not 1.

ITVX

The same A-J grid as the BBC, but space is bigger and delete is somewhere else. Also, the numbers are on the top row like a QWERTY keyboard!

BTW, does anyone need a # & £ button on a search?

Others

Feel free to supply your own screenshots for whichever streaming platform you prefer.

WTAF?!

What I don't understand is why they're like this. I assume each of these services have conducted extensive user testing to see what layout people prefer, and which is faster for the average user, right? Do none of their users have a smartphone? Do they turn away from their smart-TV and handwrite letters with a quill and ink?

I get that an A-Z layout is more logical than QWERTY. But surely there are more people who use QWERTY than not? Perhaps the technophobes generate more support calls? Maybe it's just too complicated to ask users if they want a choice of layout?

But this is my plea to anyone who has to display a virtual on-screen keyboard. Just use QWERTY!

"Alexa... Notifications?"

"You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…"

And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday!

What happened to cause this? I maintain several Amazon Wishlists® of things I want to buy. One of those is for presents I might want to buy my wife - and it is set to private. If you want to buy me a present, you can view my public wishlist. But my private ones are private to me.

If you go to edit your wishlist's privacy settings, you'll see this small disclaimer:

Going over to https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexashopping/notification there's this toggle switch.

So, there's no way to switch off notifications from private lists. You have to switch them off for everything.

In this case, the harm was minimal. I'll have to find something else as a surprise gift. But imagine if I had a "private" wishlist for something embarrassing or upsetting? I don't remember ever switching on the option for my Alexa to announce to my entire household that there is a price-drop on my weird fetish.

I've written before about anti-social app design. The tech bros working on apps often don't consider that people have families. And that they live with people that they want to keep secrets from.

According to the UK's Office of National Statistics - only 28% of households contain a single occupant. The majority of people live with other people.

What to do next

If you use private wishlists, and have an Alexa, you have a few of options.

1. Stop using Amazon's wishlists, and keep a separate list elsewhere.
2. Turn off all price drop notifications.
3. Write a ranty blog post and hope a product manage at Amazon takes notice.

Pre-empting Your Comments

Before responding to this post, please consider the following:

"Why didn't you read the disclaimer?"

I set up this wishlist long before the Alexa was invented. The disclaimer didn't exist then.

"You should have gone through every single option and made sure you were happy!"

That's unrealistic. Options should be set to preserve privacy by default. Asking the user to go through dozens of different pages of options to prevent their privacy being violated is an unreasonable burden.

"This is your fault for being tied in to Amazon's ecosystem!"

Possibly.

jEfF BeZoS Is aLwAyS LiStEnInG To yOu!!1!!!!111!

As long as he gives me cheap same-day delivery, IDGAF.

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 interact with it. There's no scrollbar, no handle, no "more" icon, nothing.

Let's talk about doors for a while.

I'm sure you've all come across a door with an ambiguous handle. This is what usually happens:

perry

@SloanPerry

when you push a pull door and the person behind says "you need to pull" aye cheers lad sure next plan was to start lifting from the bottom

---

Ideally, all doors would look like this:

Even if you don't speak the language written on the doors, the physical nature of the handles tells you what you can do with them. A flat panel can only be pushed. The protruding handle is designed to be pulled. This design feature is known as an "affordance".

If you're involved in design, at any level, I urge you to read the classic book "Design of Everyday Things". This is what it has to say on the subject:

How can design signal the appropriate actions? One important set of signals comes through the natural constraints of objects, physical constraints that limit what can be done. Another set of signals comes from the affordances of objects, which convey messages about their possible uses, actions, and functions. Where do we grab it, which parts move, and which parts are fixed? Affordances suggest the range of possibilities, constraints limit the number of alternatives. The thoughtful use of affordances and constraints together in design lets a user determine readily the proper course of action, even in a novel situation.

(Emphasis added.)

Let's go back to that accurs'd Android panel. I tried swiping it up - that's what I've learned most panels do in Android. But it did nothing. So I gave up. I didn't feel like battling with my computer to achieve a simple task. I just assumed that Google had chosen a set of default options and I was not allowed to stray from them.

As I went to dismiss the panel, my thumb slipped transversely. Nudging the row a few pixels to the left. The fucking thing was a horizontal slider!

I felt like a bit of an idiot. And that violates the unwritten 0th law of robotics - no computer interface shall make a human feel stupid.

I vividly remember being pissed off 12 years ago at the iPhone's inability to delete podcasts. It turned out that, once again, you had to magically know that swiping a podcast revealed hidden buttons.

The thing is, it's easy to add an affordance. Here's my crappy paint attempt showing a couple of options:

Either an arrow to let the user know there's more to the side (maybe even give it a jaunty animation) - or a scrollbar to show how far through a list they are. I'm sure you can think of a dozen better ways to represent a scrollable area than literally nothing!

Apple's solution is to bisect the final icon in a row, to indicate to the user that there's more available.

That's a cute way to do it. But there's evidence that Apple are slowly undoing their great usability work in the name of elegance.

Modern design is so beautiful to look at - but an absolute nightmare to use. You either need to use trial an error on every element, or hope that someone else can tell you what you need to do.

Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.

Here's a list of countries from the Curve Credit card (join and we both get a fiver!) - I scrolled all the way to the bottom looking for the UK, only to find it nestled between France and Greece!

The more you look at the list, the weirder it becomes. Why is Spain next to Estonia? Ah! Because they are Espania! Croatia next to Hungary? A sensible location for the Republika Hrvatska!

I assume they've been sorted by each country's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code:

• EE
• ES
• FI
• FR
• GB (Because UK might be confused with Ukraine, I guess?)
• GR
• HR
• HU
• IE

I know there are loads of falsehoods that programmers believe about names, flags, languages, countries, and addresses. So I guess we need to add a "falsehoods programmers believe about sorting lists of countries"!

We were both horrified. Excel is a perfectly good spreadsheet program - but it is categorically not a database!

OK, it has rows and columns which sorta look like a database table. And you can put constraints on cells which mimic a schema. And, yes, you can sort and query data. And you can join data across multiple tables. And... you know what...? Excel is a pretty decent visual introduction to databases. Sure, it isn't ACID and you wouldn't want to run a production environment off it. But Excel is a reasonable introduction to some database concepts.

My wife had to visit a hospital recently for a COVID test. Hospitals are often large and confusing buildings. But the hospital's website had a handy "Click here for a map" link. She clicked it, and I heard her scream from across the house.

What?

WHAT?!!?

Yes, some enlightened person had decided to use Excel to draw a building map... I can't even...

There are many reasons why this is bad. A user might not have Excel installed on their phone. The thin grey lines are easy to confuse with thick grey lines. There's no way to see entrances. The plain text means it doesn't have familiar icons for toilets. I'm sure you can think of a dozen more reasons.

And yet... It was probably easier to get permission to install Excel on a machine than it was to procure a specialist graphics tool. Just about anyone can use Excel to draw boxes without training. It's easy to edit if a room is closed or changes function. The text is searchable, unlike a graphic. It doesn't overwhelm the user with colours and extraneous information. At 41KB it's easy to download over a crappy WiFi connection.

As a quick hack, to get a vaguely usable map up on the website, Excel is... well, it isn't fine. It is barely even adequate. But it fulfils the brief. I hope that this was a quick bodge done one day with the aim of fixing it later. But, 7 years later, it is still there. Do people complain, or do they sigh and move on?

Or am I wrong and Excel is the perfect tool for the job?

You can see people's reactions to this map in the following Twitter thread.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

My friends, please do me a small favour...

🏥 Go to this website - dgt.nhs.uk/patients-and-v…
🗺️ View the hospital map.
↩️ Reply to this tweet with a GIF of your immediate reaction.
🚫 No screenshots - just your heartfelt opinion.

THANKS GANG!

---

I decided to sign a new contract with Virgin Mobile. After a brief chat with customer services, I agreed a contract for two new pay monthly SIMs and negotiated a handy discount.

I was told the SIMs would be sent out, and I could expect them in 3-5 days! That's the first mistake. We live in a world where people can buy the cheapest, most trivial items from Amazon and have them delivered the same day.

Indeed, if I go on to Amazon right now, there are a bunch of cheap SIMs I can order which will be in my sweaty hands before the sun sets.

Even 3 days... Are they sending these out by 2nd class post? Am I a 2nd class customer? I want to give them money - I'm not expecting them to personally courier it to me. But next-day delivery is the minimum acceptable standard for most customers.

Two days after I placed the order - and with no sign of the SIMs - I received an email from Virgin.

It was my bill. For a service which I had not received.

What message does that send your customers? "Sorry we haven't delivered you anything. Please give us money!"

To make matters worse, the bill was dated from when I placed the order. Not from when my SIMs were expected to arrive. That means I'm paying for 5 days of service I simply can't use!

The kicker? The bill was wrong! It made no mention of the discount that I'd negotiated.

Is this the experience that you want your customers to have?

What happened next

Eventually, the SIMs arrived. I was already a Virgin Media customer, and got a good discount because I've got their cable Internet package. Despite that, I need to set up a brand new account just to manage my phone contracts.

If you're offering a multi-play service, it's important that it is a seamless experience for the user. I don't care that you're multiple trading entities with a bewildering array of backend systems. It's not my job to make life easier for you - it's your job to make life easier for me.

The sign-up process was the typical clusterfuck that you expect from old companies who can't afford to update their systems.

Signing up required a new password.

What an annoying experience!

• Can't paste in a password.
• Maximum of 10 characters.
• No special characters.
• Must start with a letter!

What on Earth are those restrictions for? I kinda get the first three - although I disagree with them - but what system are they running which can't store a password which starts with a number?

The final icing of sick on this cake made of shit was the series of welcome emails that I got from Virgin Mobile. I have a bog standard Android running Gmail. Those emails are unreadable. This tells me that VM haven't tested their end-to-end journey. Or they tried it once on an old iPhone and it seemed to be fine.

AIBU?

I'm paying a tenner a month for two contracts. I am an extremely low-value customer.

But do I deserve to be treated like this? Should everyone be treated as though they were a precious and valued customer?

To be honest, I expect that the experience is identical for high-value customers.

Virgin Media have a long-standing problem with sending out well designed billing emails.

I'll put up with this because I'm paying an insignificant amount of money. And I'm only likely to stay until a better deal comes along. But this was an excellent exercise in how not to build brand loyalty.

We spend far too much time staring at our screens. We obsessively tend to our digital gardens and rarely spend the time to enjoy them. Our smart watches constantly buzz with news from the social media service du jour. Where are the apps that respect our time?

Tado° is the most boring app on the planet. I used it once to set up what temperature we wanted the house to be. Then I told it what to do when my partner or I are out of the house. I haven't touched it since.

The app sits in the background. If I'm away from the home, it lets the temperature drop. If I start getting closer to home, it begins to warm things up. That's it! No nagging notifications, no microtransactions, no constant exhortations to recommend it to my friends, no begging to share my temperature on Twitter. Nothing! Beautiful simplicity.

This is what app designers and service designers should be aiming for. When we measure how long a person spends on our website or app, we should be aiming for the lowest possible number! Engagement is a vanity metric. If someone can visit our site and complete their task in under a minute, or buy our products in seconds flat, we should be celebrating.

We have to stop stealing our users' time.

I got rid of dozens related to previous employers. I hope the passwords wouldn't work after I left but 🤷‍♂️.

I scanned through the list and deleted old bank details, failed social networks, and obvious duplicates.

I'm left with seven-hundred and ninety-five different login details!

How has it got this bad?

Partly it is my fault. I seem to have three different passwords for PlayStation. I'm not sure which is the main one, and I'm too afraid to delete the others in case they are important.

Some is the fault of companies which insist on separate logins for their website account, discussion forum, and help centre.

I've been online since the 1990s and have accounts all over the place. I have no easy way of knowing which of my accounts still work.

Is this actually a problem?

I don't trust centralised logins. If everywhere offered, say, Twitter logins - then I've put all my eggs in one basket. If the login provider breaks, or goes out of business, or blocks me - then I've lost access to everything!

It also means that one provider can't track me around the net. I don't want Facebook knowing every time I log on to my electricity provider's site.

But... It puts the onus on me to be responsible. There are risks associated with password managers - but I doubt I could remember eighty complex passwords, let alone eight-hundred.

(I know some people recommend a password algorithm like pass1234-fb for Facebook and pass1234-tw for Twitter - but this doesn't scale when sites ask you to update your passwords, or have different complexity requirements.)

Can this be fixed?

I don't know which companies have merged or vanished. It's tedious going through every account testing whether my login works.

My friends in WICG have a solution for this. A new "well-known" resource called "change-password".

Basically, websites should have a page called /.well-known/change-password. If you visit twitter.com/.well-known/change-password, you'll be taken to a password change page.

A password manager can use that to test whether my password can be changed - that might tell me if a service is still live. But given that the proposal doesn't yet have wide support, there will be lots of false negatives.

So I am left with two options:

1. Accept the clutter. Live with the pain of searching through nearly a thousand passwords every time I want to log in somewhere.
2. Spend a few weekends deleting the accumulated crud of a few decades.

Does this password spark joy?

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

The most boring app I have is Tado - it controls my central heating. I never need to use the app! It sits in the background requiring no interaction. When it sees I am home, it sets the temperature accordingly. If I'm away overnight, it doesn't bother turning on the hot water. If it sees me travelling home, and it is cold, it pre-heats the house.

Other than my initial set up, I don't have to press any buttons. The app becomes the perfect Butler.

(To clarify - this isn't about learning. Most people's lives are too chaotic for a machine to adequately learn. We very rarely all fit the 9-to-5 grind, with 2.4 kids, and brunch every Sunday. It's one of the problems the Nest thermostat has with its "learning" feature - and why people disable it - our lives are too noisy.)

The app anticipates what you need and delivers it without asking.

Boring is Beautiful

I don't want your app. But if I have to have it - I certainly don't want to interact with it. I don't want your notifications cluttering up my screen. I know your brand-manager harps on about "engagement" and "eyeballs" - but I don't care. Prove to me that you are useful by never interrupting me.

There are so many things competing for our attention. Too many things. It's really easy to make your app noisy and engaging. It looks great on a PowerPoint when you can show how often people open your app, I get that. But every time I get a perky email from my smoke-alarm telling me how wonderful it is, I want to rip it from my wall. Do your job and leave me alone.

So, dear app designers, refrain from sending constant, pleading emails in the vain hope that your click-through-rate will inch ever-closer to perfection.

No. Refine your service so that it can work silently. Let the absence of interaction be a selling point.

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 all Amazon sent me. A fob and a bit of card. No instructions, no welcome pack, no getting started guide. What does the circle do? How do I use it with Android?

The plastic is cheap and doesn't look like it would survive in a pocket full of keys. In short, it looks like a freebie USB stick - not an expensive piece of security hardware.

OK, let's get started!

Linux Set Up

Do I need to do anything special to get it working on Ubuntu? Who knows - the Yubico pages literally just point to StackOverflow.

A quick lsusb shows ID 1050:0116 Yubico.com Yubikey NEO(-N) OTP+U2F+CCID - so it seems to be detected correctly. So that should be fine, right?

When I push the button on the YubiKey, it spits out a 44 character password - all lower case characters. It's the same every time. Shouldn't this be unique, like a normal one-time code?

Firefox Woes

Fine, let's follow the steps needed to set up Facebook with a security key.

Ah... Turns out that U2F support will be coming to Firefox in Version 57 which is scheduled for release in mid-November.

Chrome Test

OK, let's switch my browser to Chrome temporarily. That Firefox page alerted me to Yubico's demo server at https://demo.yubico.com/ (which isn't linked from anywhere on their main site). With that I was able to confirm that the key worked. I guess. I touched the button on the key, it autotyped the password and I was logged in. Yay?

I don't really understand what I did or why it worked.

GitHub

The GitHub help pages give a range of scary warnings about setting up 2FA.

There are 12 steps to setting up a U2F. Step one is setting up 2FA via an app - which is a 10 step process.

The short version is:

1. Go to https://github.com/settings/two_factor_authentication/configure
2. Give the key a name.
3. Press the button on the key.

That's it! Pretty simple.

After logging in with a username and password, you get this screen:

I pressed the button and IT WORKED!

Android

OK, so this key has NFC and therefore should work with Android. But how? There's nothing on the Yubico website.

I held the Neo against my phone, and it popped open the default web browser.

I don't understand what this screen is telling me. Apparently I have been "successfully authenticated" - but with what? I haven't typed in a password or given a user name.

That serial and identity - should I keep them safe? Private? Are they dangerous if they get leaked? Do I need them backed up?

Oh, great, yet another app I have to install, configure, and update.

The app

The app is also substandard. The Android version only supports American and German keyboards.

The company encourages you to contribute new layouts to their open source project. But it, like the app, hasn't been updated since 2015!

Back to GitHub

So I tried GitHub via the Chrome browser on Android.

Nope. Just wouldn't work. I held the key to the phone, the app copied the 44 character password, I manually pasted it in. And I got this error, repeatedly. My 2FA codes from Authy worked fine.

I don't know how to fix that.

The other app

There is another app! It isn't linked to from the default page you get when you hold the Neo against the phone. That would be too easy, apparently. After clicking around on the Google Play store, I found Yubico Authenticator

Yubico Authenticator allows you to use a YubiKey NEO to store OATH credentials (TOTP and HOTP supported, as used by Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Amazon and many more) used for 2-factor authentication.

Aha! I think this is what I need. And it has been updated recently. Well, May 2017.

Again, it is as ugly as the last app. Compare it to Authy which uses icons to help you find the code you need, strong colours to remind you which service you're using, and large numbers to help when copy-typing.

Which of those apps would you rather use every day?

There's no way to copy credentials from another service - so I had to manually set up all 21 accounts again. That was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

1. Scan the QR code of the service.
2. Give it a memorable name.
3. Tap the YubiKey to your phone to store the token.
4. Repeat.

To get tokens out:

1. Tap the YubiKey to the phone.
2. The Authenticator opens up.
3. Scroll to find your code (hard without icons or colours as a guide).
4. Tap a tiny square to copy the code.
5. Swap back to your app and paste it in.

Honestly, I thought I'd be at the login screen of the app, then just have to tap the YubiKey to the phone and have it do it automatically.

Why did I think that? Because that's what the website promises!

LastPass

I use LastPass to manage all my passwords. If I want to use U2F with it, I need to pay them $2 a month for their premium product. LastPass is the only company I'm aware of who charge extra to enable security features.

But I can still use the YubiKey code generator app. Just not the key itself...?

I AM SO CONFUSED!

PGP

I'm one of those daft people with a PGP key in active use. I set it up four years ago as a 4096 bit RSA key. This fifty-quid hunk-of-junk can only handle 2048 bit keys, like it is from the stone age. Why? Who knows.

If you can be bothered, you can generate yet another PGP key and store it on the device. There are no official apps to do this on Android, so you'll need to find yet another third party app to trust. I used OpenKeyChain.

Of course, if you lose the physical hardware you lose the key. There's no obvious way to extract the private key from the YubiKey. I mean, there may be a way - but good luck finding clear documentation.

What's the point?

I get security. I understand the benefits of 2FA. But I struggle with the YubiKey. It's a pain to set up and a pain to use. The apps are outdated, ugly, and underwhelming.

I had thought that this would be a "single use" solution - but it isn't. On a laptop I have to plug it in and touch the button, on Android I have to use NFC to open the app, find the right account, tap to copy, then paste the code manually.

There's no step-by-step guide for new users. It's all trial and error.

For fifty quid, I could buy a cheap Android phone and use Authy for free.

The kicker? When it is plugged into a laptop, a green LED flashes constantly. Urgh.

If you want normal people to adopt security best practices, the experiences need to be easy to use and beautiful. The YubiKey is hard and ugly. Which is a great shame.

In this clip from "Back To The Future" we get a brief glimpse at the controls for setting the destination date:

Ok, we can forgive Brown for not sticking to ISO-8601 - that is the eminently sensible Year-Month-Day-Hours-Minutes-Seconds format - the standard was finalised in 1988, a few years after he allegedly built his time machine.

But why are the "Destination Time" LEDs red - the universal colour for stop/warning? The "Present Time" LEDs are green - not great for men with colour-blindness.

AM/PM are positioned before the hour marker. WTF?

Generally speaking, humans read top-to-bottom. So having the "Destination Time" label in the middle of two displays could prove confusing.

There appears to be no "Seconds" setting - is this level of precision acceptable?

Let's move on and take a look at the sequel - the imaginatively named "Back To The Future Part 2":

OMG! In this latest revision, the AM/PM labels have swapped position!

It's unclear if this is a conscious design choice, or whether the labels have fallen off and been carelessly repositioned. This could lead to the unwary user arriving 12 hours before or after they expect. That is not a great user experience!

Finally, let's take a look at Part 3

Well isn't this just fanfuckingtastic!? The AM/PM has switched again! What utter contempt the designers are showing for their user.

It's obvious that the LED lighting isn't sufficient for either use in bright sunshine - or for viewing from the driver's position.

The label is "Departed Time" - rather than "Time Departed" which would keep it consistent with the other two labels.

And, if that weren't bad enough - take a look at the "Month" section. Yup, it has gone from being JAN/FEB/MAR etc - to a two digit representation!

Oh, and apparently, there's no support for TimeZones. FFS...

Seriously, if you are planning on designing a time machine, please don't take any advice from this nutcase!

I've already shared some of my thoughts on Android 5.0 Lollipop - it's slow, buggy, and shows that Google either doesn't bother with testing, or simply doesn't care about quality.

Let's take a look at a few examples - all taken from 5.0.2 (the latest release at time of writing) on the Nexus 7.

Widgets

The "Power control" widget allows users to quickly toggle settings. The top image is the widget in use, the bottom image is the preview of the widget as it is being dragged onto the screen.

• The WiFi toggles are identical.
• The Bluetooth logo has lost its border.
• GPS has changed from the pin icon to an arrow icon.
• Sync looks like the same icon - but has been rotated a few degrees.
• Brightness goes from a 32 point star, to an 8 point star.

Why? I mean, seriously, did some designer have to justify their salary by convincing the team that rotating a sync icon was a worthwhile improvement?

Perhaps someone, somewhere, can explain to me why changing the icons that users are familiar with is a fantastic idea. But why did no one test the damned widget, notice the problem, and update the preview?

Still, all those beautiful new Material Design icons are consistent now, right?

Let's drag down from the top and take a look at the quick settings bar.

sigh

• Brightness icon has been updated.
• WiFi here is a solid block, rather than showing signal strength bars.
• Bluetooth seems consistent.
• GPS has reverted back to the old design!

And, if we delve into the settings, we find the the Sync icon has shifted by another few degrees.

Want to share something with a friend? Have yet another Bluetooth icon!

That's the share menu, by the way - it's a list on the bottom of the screen. Except when the share menu is this style of list.

Or sometimes the share menu appears in the centre of the screen.

You get to the share menu by pressing this icon. Or, sometimes, this icon.

And this is the Photos icon. Except when it's the Terrain icon in Google Maps.

Still, at least the new Material Design has completely taken over the cold, austere Holo Blue Theme, right? Every so often, a little bit of Holo seeps through - to remind you that Google never quite finishes anything.

When you start the device, it tells you that you can resize widgets using the blue dots. They're actually white though. #LOL.

Perhaps these are all obscure settings which no one in their right mind will notice. Surely they don't affect parts of the system which are used with any regularity like, say, connecting to WiFi?

Or installing apps from Google Play?

GAH!

I'd raise a bug with Android - but they've all but abandoned their public issue tracker.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather use Android than the offerings from RIM, Apple, and Microsoft - but this kind of half-arsed effort just looks like Google has gotten bored of making a mobile OS which is fast, free, usable, and consistent.

There are dozens of little irritants like this. They're not show-stopper bugs, just a sign that the release team and QA team haven't bothered to do their jobs. If they've missed these basic flaws - what else have they overlooked?