adam bondurant

The holidays are over, but there’s an issue that was bugging me all throughout the season: Holiday hours. During the months of November and December, store hours usually change as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve (among other holidays) approach. There are two ways to handle these variations:

• Just ignore them: If you’re like most stores, you don’t care that people are trying to find out if and when they can visit your establishment. It’s not like there are thousands (or more) potential customers for your business anyway, so you might as well ignore them.
• Do something about it: Cost Plus is one of the businesses that chose to post their holiday hours on their Web site. Not only was this a practical thing to do, it also gave them one more customer during the holidays: me.
  

  Holiday Hours

There are so many people moving online these days, desperate for good customer service, that ignoring low-hanging fruit like this isn’t going to do you any favors.

Call it a resolution, or just personal growth rearing its head. During my brother’s wedding, I delivered a speech that meant a lot to me, and to my brother, and it choked me up a bit, causing me to stumble midway through.

Being the perfectionist I am, I got flustered, took out my notes, and continued where I had left off. After the ceremony, my former co-worker, Dan, came over to me and told me he really enjoyed the speech I had delivered. I immediately thanked him, but went into a rant about how I had messed up my lines and wished I had delivered them more smoothly. Dan stopped me abruptly:

“This is where you say, ‘Thank you.’,” he said.

I’d like to start taking compliments better. I’d like to think I take criticism pretty well, but I tend to brush off compliments and put asterisks next to them, as reminders of how I could have done better. Maybe that’s a good quality to have, but I think accepting compliments at face value is a better one, and it’s one I need to develop. Here’s looking forward to 2009.

I’ve been using Songbird at work since it was officially released a week or so ago. There are things I enjoy about it, but also things that confirm its “1.0ness.” Suffice it to say, I’ll most likely be using Songbird on my PC at work, but it won’t dethrone iTunes on my Mac at home.

Songbird is based on the Mozilla technology platform, which is the same basis for Firefox and Thunderbird, among other products. As such, there are a few aspects of the application that feel very “browseresque.” This, in my experience, is both good and bad: On one hand, I think leveraging the Mozilla plugin system is a very smart move. Plugin authors are able to easily deliver new skins and functionality through a consistent API. However, there comes a point where a product can lose a sense of self, and I fear that could happen with Songbird if the developers do not enforce a sense of being into the application. It’s easy to say that an application can do anything or be anything, but losing scope and control over what an application actually does (especially an application that’s supposed to sustain a business) can be ultimately harmful to the organization. It would do well for the creators of Songbird to keep in check what, exactly, they want the application to become.

While I believe the plugin architecture is a huge benefit to Songbird, there are things I wish I didn’t have to do. As the software is still in its initial public offering, I’m not entirely concerned, but I would like to throw out a few suggestions for a 1.5 or 2.0 launch. Certain features are almost universally recognized among music-playing applications. Songbird, by default, does not offer the ability to minimize the application to the system tray (in whatever form that may take across the various operating systems it supports). Nor does it “jump” to the currently playing song when viewing songs in library mode. These two features, among others, are readily available as plugins, but casual users may be hard-pressed to install plugins for features not included by default. I would suggest that, having a somewhat active community of plugin authors, the creators of Songbird bundle certain “gimmes” into the application for future revisions. While some users might not want to minimize the application to the system tray, I feel like installing a plugin to do it is tedious, given the availability of the feature in both iTunes and Winamp. Even if it’s a third-party plugin, as long as I don’t have to install it in the first place, you’ve effectively added a feature without really doing any extra work.

Usability issues aside, there appear to be some playback issues with Songbird, too: I’ve had problems playing both MP3s and FLACs alike. Adding to the unfortunate nature of the playback issues is their sporadic nature. I’ve been able to play an MP3 fine from the first second, but when skipping to any point in the song, Songbird might refuse to play anything. Likewise, there have been times where no audio is played from a track if the song is played from the beginning, but when skipping just one or two seconds in, it plays fine. As much as I’m a usability nut, these issues obviously take precedence in a music-playing application, and I’m hoping they’re addressed in the coming weeks.

Taking everything into consideration, I’m still using Songbird at work. It feels more Windows-y than the PC version of iTunes (Sorry, Steve) and promises to function better than Winamp (plus, who wants to support AOL these days, really?). I think a good takeaway on the application is this: My co-worker installed Songbird on Ubuntu the other day and said that, although it had crashed during playback two or three times over the course of a couple days, it was still the best media player he had ever seen for Linux, period. I enjoy that advancement is still being made in the PC and Linux music playback arena, outside of applications like Windows Media Player and XMMS. Keep up the good work, Pioneers!

As I browse around retail Web sites for all my holiday shopping needs, I’m realizing more and more that a lot of them opt the “show n items per page” paradigm. While one of my largest beefs with these sites is their generally horrible pagination techniques, there’s also the question of why they give us the options they do when determining page size.

The first issue is the number of items per page themselves: Some give you multiples of 10, some give you multiples of 9, some flip-flop between 3 and 6 (like the image above), and others choose completely arbitrary options like 21 or 99. If you’re going to give me more than 2 options, at least make them consistent. Multiples of ten or twenty seem to make sense. But that’s really not good enough, which leads me to my next point.

To everyone making a retail site, let me save you some time. I need only two options when determining page size: whatever the default is (15 to 20 is good), or “all” items. I’m not going to choose 18 when 24 is an option, nor am I going to choose fewer items than you originally gave me. Either give me your default, or give me everything. It’s really not that hard.

There are certain usability patterns that one would think would be in use almost universally across the Web in 2008. Unfortunately, pagination is one of those patterns that companies just can’t seem to get right, and I really can’t understand why.

Retail shops seem to be big offenders when it comes to pagination issues. Piperlime, for instance, not only chooses to use 11px fonts around its site (that’s damn small, kids), but their pagination looks like this:

Piperlime Pagination

I scaled down the image a bit, but the thing to realize is that the click target for each (single-digit) page’s link is about 5 pixels wide by 11 pixels tall. The “>>” (next page) link is double the width with a click target of 10 pixels by 11 pixels. That makes each page’s target 55 pixels, and 110 pixels for the next page link. In case you’re not with me yet, that’s an extremely small target, considering that on a 1024×768 pixel display, you’ve got 786,432 pixels to work with, so each link takes up .006936% of the screen (.013987% for the next page link) Try to hit that without really trying. If Piperlime’s designers had added CSS padding of 5 pixels on the left and right and 3 pixels on the top and bottom, they would’ve increased the click targets of each numbered link to 255 pixels (15 x 17), and 340 for the next page link (20 x 17). Just by doing that, they would increase the click target for the next page link by 309%, and by almost 464% for each numbered link!

This might sound like I’m just being a nag. Please trust me when I say that your users appreciate the little things. This is not a huge change, nor a revolutionary change. But it’s a welcome change, and it’s thinking about these kinds of usability decisions that will keep me and other like-minded consumers buying from you versus your competitors.

A few days ago, I bought a new dining table for my house from IKEA. I took it home, opened the box and tried to begin putting it together, but it was clear that each of 24 different screws needed to hold four brackets in the sides of the table just would not go in all the way. I think I got one of them in about half way, but I would’ve had to strip each and every screw in order to even try to get them flush against the wood.

Frustrated, I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t want a table that could not be properly assembled, especially given what I had spent on it (it wasn’t a cheap $50 table), and decided to disassemble what little I had put together and take it back to the store. I had been forewarned this experience might not go well, but didn’t really know the correct way to handle it without just going in and seeing what would come of the return process.

My first conclusion is that if you’re going to return a piece of furniture to IKEA, make sure you take everything apart, including taking out the cam locks. I couldn’t fit two pieces of wood back into the box and, unfortunately, those two pieces had cam locks and the clerk noticed that right off the bat. She asked if I had put together the furniture and I told her I hadn’t (realistically… I had put together about 10% of it before I decided it wasn’t worth it). She went back to talk with her manager for a bit, came back out and told me that although their policy is that once you put together a piece even a little, they won’t return the item. This flies in the face of the return policy listed on the back of my receipt (depending on what your definition of “unused” is), but I was glad they were “letting it slide.”

The next oddity was that although there was a large sign posted behind the woman telling me that money given through returns would be given in the form it was originally paid (in my case, debit card), I was paid cash. That’s not a complaint, but I just didn’t get why they would go out of their way to put up a sign, then do something different.

Finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t think I’ll be buying any furniture from IKEA anymore, unless it’s in the range of $20 - $50. If I had cracked the wood at all while trying to force in one of the screws on my table, I’m sure they would’ve poopooed my returning it on the grounds that they couldn’t sell it. My argument is that they shouldn’t be selling furniture like that in the first place, especially for the price I paid. If it’s going to be a painful — if not impossible — process to install the furniture, either drop the price considerably or let me return the item without batting an eye. Your customers will appreciate this, in the end.

I’ve never been wholly political, but something in me changed a few months ago. I think it wasn’t until I stopped thinking about politics as one person winning while another loses (my choice being the loser so many times) and started thinking about it as America winning as a whole that I really began to love the process.

Last night brought out so many emotions. I sat at my house with my friends, watching the networks call the election, watching Obama speak: There are few times I’ve been prouder to be an American. Reading the news this morning about the international reactions just confirms everything I feel. People are overjoyed. I’m overjoyed. We’re back on the right track. Life is just… good.

Mozy is a service for backing up your data. They’re owned by EMC, so hopes are high that they’re good at what they do (although they didn’t start as an EMC company: They were purchased). I started paying $5 per month for the service a while back because I realized my backup strategy wasn’t very good and for unlimited storage, it seemed pretty enticing.

But Mozy hasn’t backed up any of my data in 163 days — that’s over 5 months. Now, ultimately it’s my fault that I didn’t catch it sooner, but when it comes to backups, I’m paying this company to “set it and forget it.” Not once did Mozy’s icon in the system tray alert me that backups had failed, but they’d silently been failing for a little under half a year, while the company happily charged my credit card every month.

If it’s too hard for developers to pop up a notification bubble that something has gone wrong, I guess it’s also asking a bit much for a backend tool that would shoot off an automated email alerting me as much. But it’d definitely be nice, and wouldn’t make me dislike them so much right now.

I’ve got an email into their customer support box (although I’ve emailed them before about a synchronization issue with their Mac software and never received a reply), so my fingers are crossed. I guess I should start considering my options, though. It seems like they may just suck at what they do.

I was pretty excited when I heard about the new KOR ONE water bottle. All the water bottles I’ve had in the past have annoyed me, so I welcomed the chance to try one that looked better in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, after my water bottle arrived last night, I realized there are things that already annoy me about it, and I’m fighting the urge to give it away.

The first thing you’ll most likely notice about the KOR ONE is its height: The thing is huge, and not in a good way, in my opinion. It stands almost 11.5″ tall, which is at least an inch taller than all my previous water bottles. It sticks out like a sore thumb and also suffers from not fitting in certain cabinets/my refrigerator. The KOR is also not circular, so it’s a bit tough to grab onto. The fact that it’s 3.5″ wide at the base doesn’t help that, either. It also doesn’t seem to fit very well in standard cup holders.

The top of the bottle is also a tad clunky. You press a button on the side and the lid flips back, but it’s a tad top-heavy and almost made me spill a few times when I flipped it open. On the plus side, the mouth of the bottle is very wide, so actually drinking from the thing isn’t a challenge, as it can be with other water bottles.

Overall, I generally like the look of the KOR ONE, but I think it suffers from a few design choices that make me question whether or not I’ll keep using it. If they can come out with a shorter, rounder version, I can definitely see myself picking that up and using it. Let’s hope this bottle is the first of many from KOR.

I set out this morning to buy a new microwave oven. Long story short, I left empty-handed. Short story long, I left two stores ultimately frustrated with the design and user interface of the current crop of microwaves.

Microwave 1 (Emerson)

Look at your cell phone or your television’s remote control. Most likely, its buttons will be laid out in a familiar fashion, like so:

This is a familiar interface. You’ve been using it for a long time, and any time a manufacturer needs to display the numbers 0-9, it should most likely come in this form (excepting 10-key interfaces such as calculators). This is because your brain has created a memory map for it and can easily figure it out without conscious thought: You could find the keys blindfolded, your brain knows the keys so well. Look at the panel on the Emerson microwave:

Awful. Just plain awful. You literally have to re-learn how to press the keys, which could slow you down considerably. Furthermore, you’re not doing yourself any favors, as few other devices are likely to have the same interface.

Microwave 2

I like the tactile feel of the next microwave’s buttons, as opposed to the flush look most seem to be sporting these days. Unfortunately, this model fails two tests: First, the Start/Stop buttons are only slightly larger than the buttons in the column on the right. Second, there are no visual hints as to which button is which. Make the start button green and the stop button red or some variation thereof. With every button the same color, you have a very difficult time picking out a single button from the crowd in a hurry.

Microwave 3

One thing this microwave has going for it is the color variation on the Start button. Unfortunately, the designers chose to go for minimalism on the numbers, which ends up a very bad idea. Where does the 1 end and the 2 begin? When you are not given clear boundaries, you may accidentally press one button when you mean to press another. Also, I’d argue the Start button isn’t nearly large enough. You could easily miss it and instead hit the Timer/Clock button.

Microwave 4

This microwave fails in the same way as microwave 3, but it tops it by not offering any color variation nor border around the Start button. Another thing that’s difficult to see from the picture is that the lever to open the door is pretty well hidden. Granted, it’s in the “usual” position at the bottom-right corner of the microwave, but it’s difficult to tell the size of the button with no visual/color cue.

For a kitchen appliance I’m being asked to pay $100 or more for, I’d like these companies to hire someone with a background in usability! I know it may be too much to ask, especially since they’re largely a commodity, but I can’t help but think someone could come out as a clear winner in the arena just by paying attention to The Little Things. iPhone anyone?