Bad Design

[buzby]

No idea if it's actually used but a lot of card terminals are essentially phones sending data back over gprs/3/4/5g so location data could be sent via that.

Card readers generally don't have a GPS receiver in them, so the location information is being generated by the cellular network using cell triangulation from it's 3G/GPRS modem connection, which is why it's not very accurate.

The Zettle terminals use a Bluetooth connection to an applicatiion on the merchant's phone.

[cosmic-hearse]

(Off topic, but the last exhibition at ICA was like a parody of pointless art. Free with an art pass and I still felt ripped off, and didn't buy a coffee out of spite)

Last ICA exhibition I went to (Moka Cherry) was excellent, but it is a fairly dismal art space, design wise.

I appreciate it's location is important (it was set up partly in opposition to the Royal Academy), & there's something slightly subversive about Throbbing Gristle et al performing so near Buckingham Palace, but Admiralty Arch & The Mall is such a grim, oppressive area. It reminds me of Albert Speer's plans for Berlin. The ICA should be in a building that looks like Lloyds of London, the Hayward Gallery or some outlandish Archigram scheme.

[Mobbd]

@Mobbd - location information derived from where? Did you use a bank card to top up your travel card, or did you pay by phone banking app?

It's hard to believe that the card machine has next door's location info (though not impossible), but much easier to believe that the banking app set the location using the phone's location data.

Hmm. I don't know from where. Surely not from my phone. This was a bank card payment.

[dissolute ocelot]

Edinburgh tram ticket machines are astonishingly poorly designed. If you want to buy a single ticket you need to press about 5 different buttons on the touch screen in succession. One of these is to choose the destination, which are printed in a ridiculous zig-zag up-and-down pattern on the screen unconnected with actual geography.



And then once you find your destination you discover it's completely pointless unless you're going to the airport, because there are 2 travel zones, airport and everything else, and the ticket doesn't even show the destination only the zone. Having a single button on the first screen saying "buy one single ticket for travel in the city", or options for "airport/everywhere else" would be much simpler. Railway ticket machines at least have common journeys on the front screen.

Also some of the touch screens appear not to work if it's raining.

[Norton Canes]

When I turn on my smartphone's Bluetooth, I don't want to be confronted by a list of serial numbers. Just show the devices' actual names.

Bluetooth is the worst thing ever.

[greencalx]

And then once you find your destination you discover it's completely pointless unless you're going to the airport, because there are 2 travel zones, airport and everything else, and the ticket doesn't even show the destination only the zone. Having a single button on the first screen saying "buy one single ticket for travel in the city", or options for "airport/everywhere else" would be much simpler. Railway ticket machines at least have common journeys on the front screen.

Yes the machines are astonishingly shit. They should just have the one question: "Are you going to the airport?". At the airport they don't even need that.

EDIT: Although I suppose this is the machine version of the classic tourist-bus-driver interaction: "How much is it go to Courstofine?" "Where?" "Courstofine?" "Where?" "Courstofin?" "Where?" "Costofine?" "Where?" "Costorfin?" "That's two pounds."

[Dex Sawash]

This one is quite bad but horseshoes it way around almost to good




Tastes like suntan oil but in a good way

[touchingcloth]

Why is Mr. Chips wearing a red afro and carrying an upside down Hungarian/partial Kuwaiti flag?

[dissolute ocelot]

Why is Mr. Chips wearing a red afro and carrying an upside down Hungarian/partial Kuwaiti flag?

It's a very bad attempt at the Italian flag by someone who saw it once 30 years ago?

[touchingcloth]

It's a very bad attempt at the Italian flag by someone who saw it once 30 years ago?

Or an equally bad attempt by someone who thinks Hawaii is in Mexico?

[pigamus]

When I turn on my smartphone's Bluetooth, I don't want to be confronted by a list of serial numbers. Just show the devices' actual names.

Bluetooth is the worst thing ever.

I've got some Bluetooth headphones and I have to pair them with every single device every single time, it does my head in

[touchingcloth]

I've got some Bluetooth headphones and I have to pair them with every single device every single time, it does my head in

I think this depends on whether the bluetooth speakers have "multipoint" or not. Our bluetooth speakers will connect instantly to the last device that was using them, meaning that if I want to play something from my phone and my partner last did it from hers then I have to get her to turn bluetooth off before resetting the speakers. My headphones are multipoint and will quite happily pair to my phone and laptop(s) at the same time.

[Faringir the Poorly]

Why is the red horse walking?

Because nobody smashed off his fucking legs!

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think this depends on whether the bluetooth speakers have "multipoint" or not. Our bluetooth speakers will connect instantly to the last device that was using them, meaning that if I want to play something from my phone and my partner last did it from hers then I have to get her to turn bluetooth off before resetting the speakers. My headphones are multipoint and will quite happily pair to my phone and laptop(s) at the same time.

Mine does this but when it loses one of them it beeps every few seconds until you turn them off and on and I regularly do that by playing music from my phone just as I'm leaving my flat and it's paired to my laptop.

[touchingcloth]

Mine does this but when it loses one of them it beeps every few seconds until you turn them off and on and I regularly do that by playing music from my phone just as I'm leaving my flat and it's paired to my laptop.

Yeah, it saves the hassle of having to repair them all the time, but brings new hassle of having to remember to disable Bluetooth on the device I don't want to connect to due to things going wonky when I leave the house or the headphones connecting to my laptop when I've nearly arrived back home.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah, it saves the hassle of having to repair them all the time, but brings new hassle of having to remember to disable Bluetooth on the device I don't want to connect to due to things going wonky when I leave the house or the headphones connecting to my laptop when I've nearly arrived back home.

Why isn't there a button sequence on the device for 'no not that one!'?

I bought an Onkyo Google speaker from CEX for £30 recently to replace the minirig I had in there because I got fed up of it going flat (the batteries had died completely and I've replaced them with lipo cells and they work a lot better than it did but it still self-discharges a fair bit when it's not used). I hoped it'd sync with my chromecast audios and allow grouping, as it did when it came out, but Sonos patent trolled Google into disabling that feature on whatever version of software the speaker uses and because it's old Onkyo won't update it. It also has the 'OK Google' stuff I don't want and you can mute the mic, but it occasionally starts shouting "just so you know, the mic is muted'.

Sounds good though and it just about does the job. Glad I went for one from CEX rather than new stock at closer to a ton.

[touchingcloth]

Why isn't there a button sequence on the device for 'no not that one!'?

I guess because Bluetooth receivers don't tend to have screens? If the sequence was something like five taps to lock out the device which has just connected, you'd either need another sequence to allow locked-out devices back in, or your original lock out could be designed to last for a 30 minute period or whatever after which time you're back at the same point if you haven't disabled the device sending the signal.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I don't think a screen would be required, a 'not that one' button push would just put the currently connected (and paired) device on an ignore list for a few minutes and go back into discover mode.

[touchingcloth]

I don't think a screen would be required, a 'not that one' button push would just put the currently connected (and paired) device on an ignore list for a few minutes and go back into discover mode.

What if your phone is connected to the headphones intentionally, and then your laptop connects and starts playing unintentionally? Ignore both devices? Just the most recently connected one? And then you need to turn the Bluetooth off on your laptop to stop the same thing happening again when the ignore period finishes.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Lock on the first device, manually bump to second.

Less annoying than trying to be clever or leaving it up to chance.

[touchingcloth]

My partner has a Bluetooth transmitter that as a 3.5mm jack as an input, the idea being that you plug it into an old amp or whatever and make it wireless.

She bought it to use with her Bluetooth headphones on a transatlantic flight using the inflight entertainment system, but it proved impossible to pair because it involved a screenless transmitter and a screenless receiver trying to pair with each other and only each other on a plane full of hundreds of people with hundreds of other Bluetooth devices.

[touchingcloth]

Lots of software these days support markdown-style enclosing things in backticks to turn them into inline comments so that `hello` becomes hello

Atlassian's products all do this, but only if you type the backtick at the start of the word first. I can't write

Code Select Expand

hello`and then go back and add the initial backtick.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Altassian's products are all bloated pieces of shit.

Jira is a good example of software that has been designed by only consulting managers, it makes it very easy to make reports at the push of a button with almost no regard to the friction it adds to people working away having to stop and feed it with information. As evidenced by the fact if you want to use Jira less, one of the best ways to get that to happen is force your managers to interact with it more.

It's also badly written, an old fool of a boss insisted on self-hosting it because they thought it'd be cheaper than paying for it as a service, it wasn't because they regularly lost hours trying to stop it crapping out with memory leaks every few days.

[Gurke and Hare]

It's also badly written, an old fool of a boss insisted on self-hosting it because they thought it'd be cheaper than paying for it as a service, it wasn't because they regularly lost hours trying to stop it crapping out with memory leaks every few days.

I'm not saying that it isn't badly written and shit, but after the first few times did it not occur to anyone to schedule a daily server restart at midnight?

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm not saying that it isn't badly written and shit, but after the first few times did it not occur to anyone to schedule a daily server restart at midnight?

It was in a container on amazon ecs with adequate healthchecks to restart it, but the problem was when it restarted it would return in an unusable state until an admin logged in and rebuilt the indexes because my boss would refuse to put the index on a persistent nfs share due to worries about performance, I don't think they even tried it to see if that issue was imaginary.

[touchingcloth]

Jira is a good example of software that has been designed by only consulting managers, it makes it very easy to make reports at the push of a button with almost no regard to the friction it adds to people working away having to stop and feed it with information.

Which reports are these? The default Agile ones or whatever?

A chunk of my job involves cleaning reports from the various systems we use. We use Jira to manage our requests, but don't use any of the inbuilt reports it has or even bother to extract data from it because it's hands down the worst of all of the systems for getting data out of. Why did they bother making JQL, for fuck's sake?