design

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I really don’t want to be writing this. Well no, that’s not true. I don’t want to have to write this, but sex education is lacking as it is and far too many people are being rather lackadaisical about the whole thing. Because I can’t in good conscience let condoms which can’t reliably condom be on the market […]

Source: A Pox On Your Box: The Problem of LELO Hex – Lorax Of Sex

It’s makes all the difference whether something fails silently or something fails and explodes in your face.

For most programming code written out there, you want some indication that it failed (that is, it sets off a small explosion or it sets off a big explosion) so you can know something is wrong and can fix it. When something fails silently you don’t even know there’s a problem until something happens that you literally cannot fix. Like your backups silently failing until you need to recover something… to find the information has been lost. Forever.

In the case of this condom design, the consequences of it failing silently are literally of life and death important:

  • You could get an STI and not know.

    • You would then become one of those asshole people that don’t even bother to get tested for STIs because “it could never happen” to them.

  • You could get pregnant, or get someone pregnant.

    • When a regular condom fails you know it failed and you can take measures. In this case the only alternative will be to have the baby, or have an abortion.

These things are important and fact people are falling for the hype means sex education is simply not keeping up with the reality of the world.

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Plume 3

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I wrote this review on the Android Market, but the service mangles all formatting so comments end up looking like crap.

I’m sorry to say that the interface changes implemented for 3.00 changed the app for the worse, just by removing two key pieces of functionality:

  • “Go to top” option.
  • “Pull to Tweet.”

Between those two, your actions will be that much slower. Gone is the ability to begin a tweet, pull up to review your timeline, then pull down again to finish it. Looking through old tweets and want to get back to the top? Too bad, you’ll have to flick through all those tweets in between.

Interface now has a “Home” screen, allowing access to search, favorites, trends, lists and “columns”, headers for which are always displayed. From here you may setup which columns you want to see on the interface, and in which order. Sadly, the “home” screen itself cannot be removed. In previous versions the “home” column was the timeline, but apparently users cannot figure that out. This all makes for additional wasted screen space.

This new version feels, all in all, made by developers who firmly believe their users are idiots who need to be hand-held to use the app. You are better off staying with the last version of Plume 2.x, at least until that basic functionality is re-implemented.

Emphasis mine.

It looks to me that in their rush to make the app compatible with Android 4.0, the developers threw aside some of the things that made their app unique. These things had been there since the first versions of the app, so it makes you wonder if the Google UI guidelines were written with an “all our users are idiots” mentality.

These changes to the app made a lot of the things that were understood implicitly about functionality to be displayed explicitly. Attempting a better User Interface made for a poorer User Experience.

When it comes down to it, another case of the UserFriendly Police beating down a good app.

Plume 3 Read More »