March 27th, 2008, 11 Comments »
Two weeks ago I stayed at the Sheraton Wall Centre for a few days. I made liberal use of their Internet access (priced at about CAN $12 a day, which is a deal at a four-star hotel). As usual, to sign up for their service, you had to complete an online form that popped up when you opened your browser. Here’s what it looked like (as always, click for a larger version):
Hilariously, the bottom half of the form is labeled “Ignore the Following Fields and Click Submit”. Then there are three fields, each labeled ‘Ignore This Field’.
Obviously this is a UI disaster. I’m sure there’s some peculiar explanation why the developer could edit field labels but not actually the form itself, but that’s not really satisfactory, is it?
There are actually two separate design disasters here. The less obvious one is the use of the software design term ‘field’. I don’t think the average hotel internet user understands that those blank areas are called ‘fields’. Most people just call them ‘boxes’.
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June 7th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Because I’m a bit slow on these things, I just learned (or possibly just remembered) that Stephen King’s Dark Tower books are being adapted to comic book form. Or, at least, a chunk of the first book is.
Can you order comics on Amazon? I’ve never done so.
I visited the Marvel Comics website associated with the project to learn more. They’ve got a little trailer for the series, but when I tried to access it I got this cheeky message:
Really? “A potentially unviewable experience”? Ignoring the fact that ‘unviewable’ is not a word, what exactly are they talking about? Will the trailer become a black hole, absorbing all light? Is it like an eclipse, and it’ll blind me if I look directly at it? Will it Goatse me (if you do not know what that is, do not try to find out–trust me on this)? Or, even worse, will it Gigli me? “Ah! It’s Unviewable!”
The hotel connection was a bit dodgy, but is this really my fault? And even if it is the user’s fault, surely that’s Marvel’s problem to solve. How about offering two different qualities of trailer? How about making it downloadable? In any case, they need a more helpful, friendlier error message.
I did eventually get a chance to watch that trailer, and it was pretty naff. Anybody who’d actually read the books wouldn’t opt for a narrator with that absurd accent.
7 Comments »
