Infuriatingly Bad Designs, Part I
It appears — OK, we’ve all probably known this for a long time — that it’s not just us software folk who come up with incredibly bad designs now and then. Sometimes you come across a design “feature” that makes you wonder “Don’t these guys have even the smallest iota of common sense? And even if they don’t (some people just don’t) - don’t they do ANY usability testing?”
I recently received a nice, shiny, new Creative Zen Touch 20GB MP3 player. Yes — long after the iPod craze took hold, and aeons after everybody around me was already on their second or third device, I finally bought an MP3 player. The reason for this could go into another rant — I’ll just say that it has to do with open office doors and groups of inconsiderate fools who have to have hallway discussions about absolutely inane issues, seemingly at the tops of their voices, right outside my current office. Anyway — let’s not get sidetracked here.
The Creative Zen thingamybob is a great piece of hardware. With 20 GB of hard drive capacity it holds about three times as much music as I can ever think of carrying around at one time. It’s light enough to carry around with you, yet it’s hefty enough to appear sturdy and durable. It has great sound quality, built-in equalizer settings that actually do something and it has a very slick means of navigating through the menu via a touch-pad area recessed into the case. Neato!
Still, the bloody thing is driving me up the wall. It makes me so mad, I’m constantly about to destroy it, just to vent my anger.
It comes with a stylish leather pouch, with belt-clip, for full audio mobility. And this is where the problem starts. Apart from drowning out blithering idiots having their hallway discussions, I also use the Zen player to listen to music while doing the vacuuming (which I find incredibly boring but have to do, nonetheless). So, I’m rocking along, listening to the tunes I put onto my player, when along comes a song I particularly like. Of course, I want to turn up the volume — if only to drown out the sound of me singing along at the top of my voice. In addition to the slick finger-controlled touch-pad, the Creative Zen features six pushbuttons on the case. Three of these are familiar from the good old walkman. Play / Pause, Forward, Rewind (OK, skip backwards). Then there’s a “menu” button for accessing the play menus, and a “cancel” or “back” button, for menu navigation.
And then there’s the button labelled “Random”. Since the MP3 player is basically a computer with a hard drive, with lots of music on it, it’s a pretty trivial and straight-forward idea to implement a “random” feature, which plays all the music on the player in a randomized order. This appears to be a neat option, configurable somewhere in the preferences — the only problem is that the fools who designed this device decided to put this option onto a push-button on the control panel of the device. And, to make matters worse, position it in such a way that it absolutely impossible to take the Zen player out of the slick stylish leather pouch it came in without triggering the “random” button.
So, here’s me. I’ve listened to a long playlist, up comes a song I really like, I (very carefully!) take the player out of its pouch in order to turn up the volume for this one song, and in 100% of all cases - click - I trigger the “Random” functionality, which cancels my current playlist, sets the current play mode to “shuffle” (I’ll get to that in a moment) and catapults me right through my MP3 collection, to the middle of a Jeff Foxworthy comedy set, or into chapter 3 of disc 4 of an Agatha Christie audio book. Aaaaarrrrrgghhh!!!!!
To add insult to injury, in order to undo this one click of a button which I didn’t actually want to click in the first place, I have to stop what I’m doing, take the player fully out of its pouch, enter the menu, scroll to “Play Mode”, set the play mode back to “normal” (which I want it to be by default), go to my “Music Library”, select “Playlists”, select and start the playlist I was previously listening to and then skip forward to the track I was at (because, of course, after toggling the play mode, any newly selected playlist always starts over at the beginning) and then try to get back into the “zone” of doing the vacuuming. Again, at the risk of repeating myself, Aaaaarrrrrgghhh!!!!!
I bet it would have taken the folks at Creative only a couple of days of usability testing to find out that this feature, along with the standard pouch and the pushbutton, is an incredibly stupid idea. All they would have had to do is take a couple of early production prototypes of the device and handed them out to people. “Here - take this home and try it out; give one to your wife; give one to your kids. Use it a week and come back and tell us what you think.” I’m sure the results of this usability test would run along the lines of “Well, there was me doing the vacuuming, when I heard a song I really enjoyed. I wanted to turn up the volume, but ….”. You get the idea. In software design, this is “hallway usability testing”. Or beta testing. You can read a lot about it in software engineering textbooks and a lot of folks say we don’t do enough of it. Well, we should. Even if only to avoid mistakes such as the “random” button. Putting in a feature that seems neat at the time, but in fact ends up totally destroying the user experience and causing a lot of hassle (menu-fiddling and the likes), to undo the unwelcome effects of accidentally triggering the feature.
So, now I either have to shop around for a new case for the Zen or get somebody to do the vacuuming for me. Once more, it’s up to the user to find a workable solution for a problem the designers could have detected and fixed early on in the development process.
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