A week or two ago I bought some brake parts for my car.
As I entered the site and entered my plate number to get parts recommendations I saw a notice saying that unlike many auto parts webshops they would try to only show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed.
As someone who doesn't have much training or experience from the field this felt great. And as only one alternative showed up, and even in a bundle consisting of all the parts I needed I happily added it to the cart and checked out.
Imagine my surprise and when – a few days later – I had raised the car, removed a wheel, disassembled a lot of stuff only to find that the parts were way too small.
The following day I contacted the webshop to ask for an explanation and after waiting for a long time and being hung up on when the first representative tried to transfer my call[0] I finally got through to someone who could tell me what had happened[1]:
It turns out my car exists in two editions: a normal edition and a heavy-duty edition. My car is the heavy-duty edition.
Also on the webshop there's another ux hack that filters away products that aren't in stock.
Turns out the combination of
Showing only one product if possible (and pointing it out very clearly, causing me to lower my guard)
Not showing out of stock items
The correct part for my car being out of stock
caused me:
several days of extra waiting time,
extra work as I had to reassemble the car without fixing it and disassemble it again 5 days later to finally fix the problem
extra hassle as I have to return the parts I first ordered
compared to a number of my other posts about ux where I wonder what designers were thinking or if they had thought closely about the design at all, this is a more interesting case since in this case it was actually the sum of two somewhat good ux ideas led to very poor ux in the end.
[0]: and here I realize call forwarding might be a good starting point for a new post on ux problems, they seem notoriously hard to get right).
[1]: he could also tell me that I wasn't the first to report this problem and their dev team had already gotten it on their plate.
It is now 0607 in the morning and I just heard some seriously loud music outside and the only reason why it is surprising is because there's an ongoing pandemic.
Every year in May, students who are finishing their twelfth (or so) year celebrate russetid, (“russ” time) by driving around, getting drunk, and generally being teenagers – but in Norway this has to be done before the exams 🤯.
When one thinks about it it is so amazingly stupid it is hard to describe, but here we are: even in the middle of a pandemic, getting drunk, getting way too little sleep, and generally wasting a few weeks on partying has to be done. And it obviously has to be done before the exams it seems.
Recently my bank delighted me by replacing the steps to transfer money between my own accounts by a vastly simplified version. Here's what the old version felt like:
Step 1: First move to the transfer tab.
Step 2.1: Open the drop down to select an account to transfer money from
Step 2.2: Select the account to transfer money from
Step 2.3: Touch Select
Step 3.1: Select the account to transfer money to
Step 3.2 and 3.3: repeat step 2.2 and 2.3.*
Step 4: click on the amount field, then type an amount and click OK (yes, I'm feeling generous here).
Step 5: finally click transfer
This gets old really fast but I wasn't aware just how bad it was until an improved flow showed up as part of the beta program that I participate in.
I'll leave this here in case anyone wants to give it a stab, and I'll try to get around to posting their solution.
BTW: illustrations are created using the excellent excalidraw, open source and reasonably easy to work with.
Feel free to send me a message @eitland@mstdn.io if you have a better flow. I don't exactly have many readers so I don't expect this to happen but at least it is an option. I don't care. I write because I think writing is smart.
This is just an idea and I haven't thought to closely about it yet, but what if we made a browser similar to Opera Mini? I.e. a proxy server on the backend would download the pages, render them and ship a snapshot of the DOM to the actual browser, only with all the links rewritten to point to itself?
Alternatively this could even work without a separate browser instance but the ux would be harder.
Obviously this could create a lot of privacy issues but it is not completely clear cut that it couldn't be better for some people:
running ad and tracking scripts on my actual devices also comes with privacy problems.
the server could be open source and the business model could be to sell access to pre-configured, hosted proxies.
During the weekend I enjoyed fixing the armrest on my porch swing.
I also ordered some brake parts which I hope will be here by tomorrow.
Yesterday, after trying to work a full day from my spare bedroom/office I filled the back of the car with assorted garbage and drove it to the recycling center. I feel kind of lucky compared to some friends of mine that I met up there that were dumping their third trailer full of stuff from their garden and basement.
Yesterday was also the day where I decided to take down the tent in the garden as it was starting to get annoying to have to move it around in the garden to avoid damaging the lawn. It is starting to become a family tradition it seems to tent outside around easter or as soon as the snow is going away, but this year the tent stayed up until now, partially as an emergency office should it become too noisy inside the house and partially as a place for the kids to play when they weren't allowed to go elsewhere.
While packing the tent I found a bumblebee that had somehow got trapped inside. Poor creature. I try to help those in the spring and I tried to keep the tent closed, mostly as a precaution against cats, but when the kids play they leave it open and I sometimes forget to check that it is closed before I go to bed.
It now seems my iPhone alarm clock is enough to get me out of bed before 0400. That would be great as the Sleep app does not exist for iPhone and all the others that did exist lacked the killer feature from Sleep: an NFC scanner that could be configured to be the only way to turn the thing off.
This morning I have found some interesting software/websites:
We got a porch swing this weekend, and I made a new armrest:
The previous armrest was so rotten it could be picked apart by hand and was not in one piece when I got it so i had to be a bit creative and use everything I learned in the woodworking class in seventh grade and some and then apply some elbow grease on top :–)
When I was younger I downloaded extensions without thinking much. Mostly extensions for Firefox.
As I got older and interested in security I've become a lot more careful. I know I'm not completely safe against malware, but then again I don't wear a hazmat suit at work either.
I've found some reasonable heuristics that have worked well for me and I should probably write a bit more about that some other time – possibly along with some ideas for truly paranoid organizations, but today I want to write about some wishes I have:
for all apps and extensions and whatnot: if we could somehow make sure they cannot get data off my computer that would go a long way. Note however that solving this problem in a truly general way will be hard.
for web applications: someone should sit down and think really hard about the granularity of the permissions they expose. For example, last I checked with a certain SAAS company my ssh keys worked for all projects I have access to while I want them to work on per project basis. Same goes for the way I had to allow a certain build system access to access all my projects to use it with one of them. Or how a small crowdfunding solution for software wants read access to more or less everything just to allow me to log in to send money to another project.
And a day has passed since last I wrote. But it doesn't matter according to the rules.
When learning something, it can be very useful to put deliberate effort into repeating the winning moves. Depending on your background this might be obvious or not.
Probably less known is that this works in other areas of life as well, not just in sports.
For example I train my fingers for the shortcuts of my IDE and when necessary I even rehearse my getting-out-of-bed-without-waking-up-everyone-routine.
It is also possible to train “moves” that prevent oneself from getting distracted: an incredibly useful one for me is training my fingers to stop myself from mindless browsing: I once noticed that I had a habit of opening news sites too often when stuck. Remembering to stop is hard once it has become a habit.
Instead I find it easier to learn a new pattern. Say you want to stop mindless browsing of example.com during work hours. What I do once I notice this pattern is to deliberately repeat the first steps of my bad habit, only I choose my own steps at the end, in the case of example.com I'd do this:
ctrl – l to got to the address bar (others would maybe click the address bar instead).
start typing exampl as I would do in my bad habit.
instead of typing out the address I then hit escape to leave the address bar alone
Yesterday Tom Hagen was arrested and helt on suspicion of murder or complicity to murder. Police say they've been investigating this possibility secretly since last summer. I guess we all knew this was a possibility, and many had a hard time not saying it out aloud. I guess I should give kudos to media for being careful. It surely would have looked bad if they had written it out early and it turned out to be wrong.
Some criticize the police for not realizing this immediately. Personally I think they considered this from day one, only not as the most probable explanation until last summer and not publicly until now. After all police is 3 years higher education around here and it is popular so I guess the ones who get in are brighter than the average Norwegian.
Around here the sun is shining outside. I took some photos but won't post them, I don't have time.
Also I forgot to close the lid on my micro greenhouse tonight so I really really hope the tomato plants survived as I see hoarfrost on the grass. BTW: some nice images
Some ideas for future writing:
An UX challenge. My bank recently absolutely surprised (in a good way) by replacing the old kind of intuitive transfer-money-between-my-account-in-twelve-simple-but-oh-so-annoying-steps with a 5 step process. Edit 2020-05-06: I created the sketches the other day and today I posted it, here it is UX challenge: transfer money between accounts
Photos from the dawn.
In fact I've already sketched up the old flow in excalidraw and I'm excited to post it but it is already 0633 and I need to start working.
