New, beautiful, design?

Companies keep changing their web sites in the interest of “improvements”, but they more often make them more complicated and user-unfriendly.

I’ve been using Yahoo! Finance for years to get daily quotes for a small list of stocks.  I made the request from a very obvious text block on the home page.  Then either Firefox or Yahoo! Finance stopped allowing drag and drop, a very long-standing feature of the Macintosh.  Then Yahoo! Finance moved the quote text block somewhere else.  All in the name of improved interface for the users.

Boy!  I never did make it through all the user complaints about the changes.  I gave up on Yahoo! Finance and used TD Ameritrade instead.

Even with Ameritrade and its constantly changing home page it took me awhile to figure out how to consistently get the quotes I wanted.

But Ameritrade’s news page is a humble-jumble of hidden information

Where are the numbers in

Net Investment Income
Net Realized ST Cap Gains
Net Realized LT Cap Gains
Return of Capital or Other Capital Source

They are off the screen and can only be gotten by copying the area and pasting into a text document.  Even then, the lines are all a humble-jumble.

Google’s Blogger has also been “re-designed” by making text alignment non-workable.  I think I’ve sent feedback twice on this, but I guess Google is too busy on more “beautiful improvements”.

Even that great promoter of user-friendliness gives great features and takes away great features.  Once upon a time Apple worked very hard on ease of use.  Now they seem more concerned with “beautiful” document and spreadsheets.  I’m sorry I don’t want charts with bubble points; I want a chart with connected dots.

What if the horseless carriage hadn’t been horseless?

From the loose notes on my desk, my cartoon about designers’ efforts to make systems backward compatible:

Serendipity and corporate stupidity

I picked up an old note off my desk:

“You are a wise person if you do not make mistakes;
you are  clever person if you make a mistake but do not repeat it;
you are a stupid person if you make a mistake and repeat it.”

It is “an ancient proverb” quoted by Effy Oz in “When Professional Standards Are Lax: The CONFIRM Failure and its Lessons”, Communications of the ACM, October 1994, Vol. 37, No. 10.

Professor OZ was a professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Pennsylvania State University.

I have long thrown out most of my copies of the Communications of the ACM (Association of Computer Machinery), but I did find the article online.  For a PDF copy, look up “EP23_Confirm”.

CONFIRM was an ambitious project to bring together the registration systems of American Airlines, Budget Rent-A-Car, Hilton Hotels, and Marriott Corporation.  A subsidiary of American Airlines proposed it to Marriott in 1987, by 1992 the project was disbanded.

The article details much of the finger-pointing for the failure, but I think it is higher management not understanding what is possible and middle management trying to sugar-coat the problems.

Isn’t ironic that despite the glitches of the Affordable Care Act, the far more complex system is working in less than four years?

Apple's stock may go up

A few days ago I attributed the drop in the price of Apple stock to a problem that many iPhone and iPad users are having.  See "Why Apple's stock price went down".

Thanks to Candy in Apple Support I have the solution.

Candy listened patiently to my tale of woe about not being able to access some feature because of password problems.  She then walked me through the steps to resolve it.  What she pointed out was not in any of the published Apple solutions and was not even visible on my screen without scrolling down.  In 15 minutes or so, I had the problem fixed on my iPad and iPhone.

I thought I could fix the problem the same way on my Mac, but the applications and screens were not anywhere near the same as on the iPad and iPhone screens.  Fortunately, there was another discussion on the Apple forum that had the solution for the Mac.

If you need these solutions, see https://discussions.apple.com/message/21108977#21108977.

Support people like Candy are probably worth twice as much they are paid.  Too many companies have support people who use flowery language ("my pleasure to serve you") and too often have no real solution other than pointing you to a document that doesn't have the solution either.  People like Candy make a customer very glad they chose a particular company's product, and it is very difficult to measure their value.  I know her value to me was saving me more hours of frustration.

So if you are an Apple shareholder, I hope the news of Candy's help and the resolution of many people's problem makes the value of your stock go up.

Why Apple's stock price went down

Many attribute the big drop in the price of Apple's stock to iPhone 5 sales not being higher.  Could it be that it really is that Apple is not paying attention to the problems of its existing customers.  With the introduction of iOS 6 for the iPad and iPhone, many people are having trouble using passwords that had been working fine.  This has been going on since at least September, 2012, and nobody from Apple seems to respond to the problems addressed in the "Apple Community" forums.

As I said in "Why Facebook's stock price went down", "it's software is too buggy."

I posted the following today at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4316010?start=30&tstart=0.

I think that this Apple ID/password mess is just too much bother.  I don't know how many hours I've spent researching the problem and trying some of the solutions.

Like many of you, I've wound up with multiple Apple IDs; let's call them A, B, and C.  If I remember correctly, I got into this because I forgot a password.  At the time, I remember that the only solution seemed to be to create another Apple ID.  So now I can get into iTunes with ID A, but almost everything on my iPhone, iPod, and iCloud are for ID B.  I know that a month ago ID B had a password in a short list.

With the upgrade to iOS 6.1 and maybe before, none of the recent passwords for ID B are acceptable.  If I ask to change the password for ID B, it will not accept my birthdate as the first security question and it will not always send me email.

Even though ID B is in the list of email addresses for ID A, there is no way I can use the ID A change page to change the password for ID B.

I think this whole situation violates the Human Interface Principles for iOS of consistency and user control.  See http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Principles/Principles.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH5-SW1.

I've resigned myself to living without access to iCloud, with consistently clicking "ignore" or whatever when iCal and others ask for my ID B password, and a host of other annoyances.  I've already sent feedback to Apple.  I suggest you do the same at http://www.apple.com/feedback/, selecting iPad, iPhone, or iPod.  Maybe if a few hundred of us do this, Apple will come up with a better solution than the varied advice here that works in some situations and not others.

UPDATE: See "Apple's stock may go up" for the resolution of this problem.

Bureaucracy can exist in any economic model

Many people complain about government bureaucracy as if it went away everything would be so much better. Unfortunately, bureaucracies occur in organizations of all types and sizes. They occur in government, in non-profits, and in profits.

We should also note that some employees have flexibility in almost any type of organization. I had a water inspector accept on my word that our usage dropped because I replaced a washer, not that something had happened to our meter.

The incident that triggered this blog entry was an automated call from a non-profit medical center reminding me of an appointment in two days. Some hours earlier that department had called me to move the appointment to next week. Left hand, please meet the right hand!

A couple of weeks ago I had sent an online problem report to a well-known computer manufacturer. I received a boiler plate response about checking that I had the latest version of the operating system and the latest version of the software with the problem. That information was automatically included in my report.

Today I discovered there was a work around to my problem, but it was not obvious. There were several non-intuitive steps involved. I sent a report to the agent who had initially responded to my problem report, including the suggestion that what I wanted should be a menu item. She thanked me for the report and suggested that I send the manufacturer a feedback suggestion. Duh! Couldn't she and shouldn't she do that herself? Shouldn't somebody in the call center be looking at the reports and extracting trends?

See also my "The Federal Government has no corner on bureaucracy", Reader Weekly, 2008-01-03.

A computer screen is not a piece of paper

Many companies and organizations are making their documents available online. This can save many costs, including postage, paper, and printing. Unfortunately, they provide to their computer readers exactly the same format as they would in print. In fact, they often use the PDF files that go to the printer. Sorry, but my computer screen is not 11 inches high. And it is very difficult to read two columns meant to be on an 8.5x11 page.

I just found it impossible to read one document concerning Medicare supplemental insurance. The tables for comparison were spread across facing pages, that is a 17x11 document. The PDF file had the facing pages one under the other. I gave up trying to read it; we asked for the printed booklet.

Please, all of you information providers, please redesign your printed documents to be easily readable on computer screens. Have the information flow on seven to eight-inch high pages. Have all the information that belongs in a block on the same page, not at the end of one and the top of the next. Hire some good designers who understand these things.

If you do, you may find you have even less demand for the paper copies of your documents.