Not particularly...

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox.  I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually.  That way, my potential down-side is limited.  If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account.  If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken.  Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

1. Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
2. They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
3. The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you.  I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it.  Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case.  Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop.  But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Wait, what?

Today a co-worker sitting next to me in the lab sent me a file on Skype.  A moment later he said, "Oops, wrong file, cancel it."  So I clicked on the "Cancel" button next to the Skype file transfer bar and was greeted with this dialog box:

That's right, to cancel the file transfer you have to click "Ok," and to NOT cancel the file transfer, you click "Cancel," which is to say, "Cancel the cancellation."

I went looking around and Microsoft does indeed discourage this kind of silliness.  In an article on correct UI design here they say:


"... Never use OK and Cancel for yes or no questions.

Incorrect:

Correct:

Better:
"

Of course, this is made more amusing by the fact that Microsoft recently completed their acquisition of Skype.    Maybe they'll fix this in the next update.  Oops, nope, according to the release notes for the latest update it looks like they're focusing on more important issues:

"Changes:

• Removed Google product bundling..."

So, what goofy or needlessly confusing user interface designs have you run into recently?  Leave a comment!

Thumb Writing

Whoa! Sometime I stumble onto something that just surprises me. Following up on my post a week ago about writing these with my Droid phone, I thought I would try again, taking the advice of my cousin-in-law about using the soft keyboard because I couldn't get uppercase or alternate characters (pretty much any punctuation other than period or comma) and digits when I was using the Droid's slide out keyboard.

The first realization as I tried to do that just now was that I can't seem to launch the soft keyboard... I tapped on the text entry box, but it just sat there, instead of giving me the soft keyboard.

The second, and much cooler realization, however came when, on a lark I held down the SHIFT key while I pressed a letter. To my astonishment, I got a capital.  I then tried the same with the ALT key, and that worked to give me the alternate keys.  In the last year I have used this keyboard literally EVERY DAY, and I have never seen it behave like a "regular" desktop keyboard. It has always been modal... You press shift, and then the next key is capped. Or you press shift twice, and it is in caps lock mode until you hit shift again. I wasn't even aware that the key matrix could support the simultaneous key press behavior...  Maybe everyone else with a Droid already knew this, but it was news to me!

The text entry still isn't perfect, because the self resizing text box keeps dropping the soft buttons on top of the line I'm writing at the bottom of the screen. I also keep hitting the SEARCH button next to the ALT and below the 'X' key which opens up the web search dialog. Also, the keys are so small that hitting ALT or SHIFT plus any of the adjacent keys at the same time is really difficult. Of course I just realized that the last gripe is easily avoided by using the other set of ALT and SHIFT keys, although I forgot they were even there because in modal keyboard mode I *always* use the left hand ones. And the Droid browser won't let me scroll down far enough to get to the Labels box, so I'll have to add those to this post later.  But even with all these minor gripes, it is really exciting to discover a new capability of my phone. Even if I probably should have known it was there all along...