Hackers face life imprisonment under ‘Anti-Terrorism’ Act. [via Slashdot]
Online banking prototype. [via John Rhodes] My online banking sucks. I used to use Quicken, until my bank said they were no longer supporting the Mac version. Then I used their web site, which was slow and only supported IE5 (although it did support the IE5/Mac).
Then I moved and got a new local bank, whose online banking also sucks. Click “Bill payment” and you see a list of pending transactions, which is nice if you have lots of recurring payments (which I do). But to pay a bill, you click the “Variable Payment” button. I am not making this up. It took me ten minutes to figure that out the first time, and it still burns me up. And then I have to enter a transaction date; they don’t default it to the next business day.
This is a case of “well, users might want to schedule some payment in the future, so we have to make it an option.” Yes, please, make it an option — AND THEN GIVE ME AN INTELLIGENT DEFAULT. My boss at my last job had the same problem. We called it the “1% syndrome”. He was a power user, and he always insisted that we couldn’t possibly make the interface simpler because he (or someone like him) might want to do something wacky 1% of the time. I ignored him whenever I could, provided intelligent defaults, never made the software ask the user a question it could reasonably answer by itself, and provided a way to override the defaults behind an “Advanced” menu or button or tab. That always seemed to satisfy him when he saw it, but he never designed that way, and it never occurred to him that other people in the world just wanted to get work done and did not sit around thinking about what sort of wacky stuff they might want to do someday.
Bottom line? I like my bank anyway. I don’t spend very much of my time paying bills, I’ve learned how to use their stupid web site, and you can’t spit without hitting one of their ATM machines around town. I hate to say it, but usability isn’t everything. I doubt it would even be worth it for them to fix their current system. I sure wish they could figure out what day it is, though.
Section 508 guidelines. [via Cameron Barrett] If you design web sites for a living and don’t know what section 508 is by now, you’re toast. There are new federal guidelines for all government web sites that mandate accessibility, above and beyond the recommendations that the W3 consortium has been making for years. I’ve been warning my company about this since the day I got there (fall 2000). Now we may actually have some work upcoming for the federal government; guess who’s going to be the point man for accessibility? It ain’t gonna be the Interdev script kiddies, that’s for sure. This isn’t 1995 anymore. Welcome to the regulated millenium.
Windows XP has stable system; keeps users in Microsoft corral. [via Cameron Barrett] It’s as if you finally had a chance to buy a sleek, reliable new car
after owning a series of lemons, only to find that the new car was rigged
so that the manufacturer could track which garage you kept the car in,
blare its ads at will through the radio, and steer you toward toll roads it
owned.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim