Mil Milington has a close-your-office-door hilarious blog cum book called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and he parlayed his popularity to a facebook page with the ear-flattering name of Tiny Boons. The latter is a repository of little things that happen to you or someone else over the course of a normal day that prove that there are still reasons that we should rejoice in the human race instead of counting the days until the next massacre in Kandahar, Kisangani or Kent State. For a while I have been collecting examples of the opposite of tiny boons, and because I have the creativity of a piston I have introduced my inaugural list here with the ear-insulting title “little sucky things.” I am, it should go without saying, open to better ideas.

Without further ado:

• Alarm clocks that don’t have a battery backup and start flashing “12:00″ when you plug them back in after using the outlet for the vacuum cleaner.
• Appliances that have clocks and flash “12:00″ after a power outage.
• 3-way lamps with 2-way bulbs installed in them.
• Toilet paper rolls installed so the end unrolls in the back instead of the front.

Now, this isn’t the complete list that I have come up with so far – I have about 9 more (and growing) that I’ll use as fodder for future posts if I feel like it. But these four are related. Bet you can’t guess how – so I’ll tell you. They all represent examples of design flaws that lead to a poor user experience. When people start throwing out words like “design flaws” and “user experience” they are usually talking about software and writing for an online magazine that gets a lot of hits from slashdot. But whoever designs and markets simple items that we use every day and take for granted should pay attention (***alert! read this article and get a promotion!***) and think about little things they can do to make their product just a little more user friendly.

Let’s examine the examples above. I can knock out the first two really quick: a built-in rechargeable battery and a low frequency time signal receiver. These features will raise the production cost of your product but there is probably a VP that can be canned to recover that money, if removing the buttons and circuitry for manually setting the time doesn’t do the trick. People will actually start recommending your alarm clock to friends if you add this feature. Recommending an alarm clock – can you imagine? Brookstone will be ringing your office begging you to triple the retail cost and let them sell it on airplanes.

Considering appliances specifically, first things first – does your appliance really need to show the time of day? The stove – ok, maybe, if you ever use the delay start feature on your oven. But, then again, has anyone EVER used this feature, in the history of ovens? Microwave: no, it doesn’t need the time of day. Just because it has to show how many minutes left until you overcook your left-over Chinese food doesn’t mean it has to show squat when the radiation generator is not in use. And for the love of pete, why in the hell does my new glass-rimmed, stainless steel overhead exhaust fan (sexy as it looks) have a damn clock??? Might as well put one on the vacuum cleaner that you just blew your alarm clock’s brain away with.

Now, how do 3-way lamps fit in? Because, like the battery backup for the alarm clock that is sold with “battery not included,” anyone buying a lamp will  (a) not look that closely at the label to notice that it has a 3-way socket, because they are more concerned with matching their Ikea couch, and (b) use a leftover 2-way bulb in the lamp after they get it home anyway. And then what happens? The switch on the lamp does something that, after all these years, is still completely, heart-breakingly unexpected – it must be turned twice to turn the light on, and twice more to turn it off. Ouch. I cringe just thinking about it. This is a LAMP. With a SWITCH. If it is OFF, and you turn the switch, the lamp should turn ON. If it is ON it should turn OFF. This should be as true as death, taxes and the boiling temperature of water at sea level given standard atmospheric pressure. Switches should always change the state of the device they are connected to unless they are BROKEN, at which point they should be (again it should go without saying) donated to the local Goodwill store. Did I provide a constructive solution in that paragraph? No? Sorry – include the damn 3-way bulb with the lamp, plus a spare. By the time the user burns out both of them, the switch will most certainly be broken, or the couch will, and the whole lamp-shopping dance will start all over again anyway.

Finally, toilet paper rolls.  Frankly, though I think that there must be a simple design solution to prevent the innocent or (more likely) completely diabolical, sadistically evil practice of installing a new roll of toilet paper with the free end escaping downwards towards the rear of the roll, I haven’t actually come up with it yet. The solution may be to create a roll holder that sticks straight out so the paper unrolls to the left or the right, but I am not comfortable with that design yet. Something must be done, people, help me out here. Full disclosure: I am well aware of the fact that cats and very clever 1-year-olds will be foiled in their attempts to unroll an entire supply of Charmin on the floor by the backwards installation of the toilet paper, but to sum up this entire post: Solve the problem at the root, with clever, simple design. Don’t solve the symptoms.

hops, yeast

and water:

Reinheitsgebot!

This is the old way to make a good beer.

Take

a great

Recipe

And make it sing.

This is the new way to make good beer.

]]> http://sevensons.org/2010/04/06/tetractys/feed/ 0 http://sevensons.org/2009/09/16/pop-culture-moron/ http://sevensons.org/2009/09/16/pop-culture-moron/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:40:52 +0000 Edison MacGyver http://sevensons.org/?p=349 I know I shouldn’t wear it like a badge of honor, but today when I heard his name on the radio, I realized with some smugness that I must have been one of the few people in the entire nation who thought it was pronounced like “caine” instead of like “con-yay”.

NASA held an online naming contest for the last piece of the International Space Station that will be delivered by shuttle in the near future. They obviously wanted “Serenity,” which segues nicely from “Unity” and “Harmony,” the other USA-built nodes that are already in place. But, to the eggheads in Houstons’ mild regret I’m sure, they allowed write-ins on the voting page. Xenu, the top secret galactic overlord of Scientology, was winning the voting contest until Stephen Colbert anounced on his show that his surname would make a better node moniker (and, for that matter, a better galactic overlord). Since then, NASA has closed the voting and “Colbert” was the overwelming favorite. I’ll go on record as hoping NASA sticks with the will of the people on this one, but I’ll list the factors for consideration.

• It is admittedly risky to name a space station node after a living celebrity. While Colbert’s upstanding faith-centered family-man status is well known, he’s not afraid of dropping the occasional 4-letter word on prime-time television and you never really know who is going to be the next rifle-wielding water tower climber.
• NASA still has image stereotypes to battle, and naming a station node after a comedian would be a very positive step towards encouraging a hip new aura around publicly funded space exploration.
• The ISS won’t be there forever. And if Colbert really embarasses himself before its shelf life expires, they can always either re-christen the node or in a brave and aggressive public statement against the unspecified future moral infraction that the comedian commits NASA can push the eject button and let the node tumble into the atmosphere. Or they can deliver Colbert to his namesake node for good.
• There is no such thing as bad publicity.
• Flaunting the voters’ choice will take a lot of meaning out of any future polls. NASA will lose that marketing avenue if they go with Serenity at this point.