Confusability

UK Napster - Games Without Frontiers (or a Service For Three Seaons)

I have been using the UK Napster service since it launched in May 2004 and have stopped using Wippit and MSN Music Club(OD2) as the Napster Experience is vastly superior to the OD2 offerings which appear to have been designed by Dilberts who may know their technology, but have never heard of usability.

However as time has gone by, I get the impression that the Napster UK colony is not taken too seriously by Chris and Brad, despite what Leanne Sharman has to say.

"Napster is a fantastic brand to launch in the UK and by carefully tailoring the service to the local market we have an unparalleled proposition for UK music fans," said Napster UK general manager Leanne Sharman.

Napster Press Release (May 2004)

Whilst Napster may know a little about usability they obviously aren't aware of the usability issues around internationalisation.

Chris Gorog - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Bradford D. Duea - President of Napster Division

I am currently paying £10 (which don't come for free!) a month for Napster and I just want to be treated as a 1st Class Customer instead of feeling like somone who's being taken for a bit of a ride.

In the US people are being offered a free mp3 player if they sign up for a year. When will I get the same offer?

The prices for buying songs are too high at (99p a song) so I just stick to the streaming jukebox and radio stations. If Chris and Brad want to treat me as an American then can I have the same offers and pay the same prices?

The customer support for UK napster is a sad joke. I have used the 'community' message boards and I suspect that the so-called uk support staff are just a few students who have been paid in beer to establish a presence on the boards but not actually provide any support.

I have started playing a game called 'doubles' where I choose two songs from an artist I know and put them onto a playlist and then look at the recommendations for that artist to lead me to my next doubles selection. This selection method means that as well as listening to some old friends I also get the opportunity to dip my toes into some new artists that I wouldn't otherwise have experienced. This game relies on the "Recommendations" links to make it anything other than a random selection exercise.

Well every now and then the Recommendations disappear from Napster. In July (2004) I have noticed this happening twice. There has been no explanation from Napster and you can see the reponse from napsterukstaff in the screenshot below.

"Seems to be working fine for us" - well that's OK then, as long as all is well in Santa Clara why waste time worrying about the colonies?

American arrogance really gets on a lot of peoples nerves, Chris and Brad should realise that they can't get away with treating us as cash cows indefinitely.

Here is some free advice for Chris and Brad: In the UK we don't have a season called "Fall", it's called "Autumn" !

It's a shame that you didn't do any usability testing with users from the UK as they would have told you about the Fall/Autumn issue. Although I suppose that I should be grateful you managed to display the dates in the correct dd/mm/yyyy format on the message boards.

In addition, can you make your chart list consistent in it's display. You have go the most recent year at the top of the list, but when you open the year folder you see the seasons displayed in the opposite order with the most recent season at the bottom.

This means in a couple of months when Autumn comes around the list should look like this:

2004
  Autumn
  Summer
  Spring
  Winter
2003
  Autumn
  Summer
  Spring
  Winter

If you would like to spend a little bit of money on finding out about some of the other usability problems then contact me and I can recommend some people who can help you.

The Perils of Copy, Paste and (sometimes) Edit

I spend quite a lot of time looking at pages on web sites to see when they have changed so that I can add new articles to usabilityviews.com

Two of the sites I watch are InfoVis and BCS-HCI. I have been watching these pages for a few years now and have become accustomed to scanning them for recent dates in my search for usability related content. I am also date dyslexic, which means I have to spend a lot of time checking that I have got my dates right (there was a period of two weeks in March when I thought it was still 2003.)

When I see a date that doesn't make sense it really disturbs me, so I thought I had better start letting people know when have made a mistake due to the overused Copy, Paste and (sometimes) Edit.

The Spanish version is fine.

But the English version is a year out

I know that global warming is affecting our weather, but how have the BCS managed this!

Maisie McEvoy @ Bristol

Maisie McEvoy exploring the hands on science centre in Bristol.

You can also see an Aardman Animation exhibition as well.

Does Chris smell?

I am used to being the number one google result for Monica's apartment, the number two result for How to make a flute, as well as number three for Plastic Hydrogen Bomb.

But I am a bit upset at being the number one result for does Chris smell?

designmuseum.org : A case of Design before Usability ?

Saul Bass Exhibition at the Design Museum

One of the great graphic designers of the 20th century, Saul Bass is the undisputed master of film title design. The haunting elegance of the titles he created for Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick in the 1950s and 1960s and, later, for Martin Scorsese transformed a banal medium into an art form. Before Bass, titles were simple lists of the cast and crew projected on to cinema curtains which were only drawn when the film began. As this landmark exhibition will show, Saul Bass turned the film title into a visual spectacle. From his stark cut-out's for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, and the spiralling circles of Hitchcock's Vertigo, to the frenzied neons of Scorsese's Casino, Saul Bass created some of the most enduring images in design and cinema history.
The Design Museum from 17 July 2004

designmuseum.org : A case of Design before Usability?

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen said that during the second half of the 1990s usability took second place to design and that bad design played a part in the collapse of dotcom companies because customers would not use difficult websites.

I was trying to get some details about the Saul Bass exhibition from the designmuseum.org site and I found it very very difficult. I was trying to use my arrow keys on my keyboard to navigate the flash version and when I switched to the HTML (reduced content) version I found it to be unusable if you have popups blocked.

I got worried when I saw the instruction "Rollover to reveal navigation".

They claim that they are "the world's most popular design site" with over 500,000 virtual visitors a year. They are happy to publicise the number of visitors to their site, but can they tell us how many users manage to find the location map that they are looking for*?

The self proclaimed mission of the British Design Museum is to "excite everyone about design" and act as "a champoin of design".

If this is the best that the British Design Museum can produce then god help British Design.

*Solution to task

From designmuseum.org Enter Flash Version.
Hover over "About the Design Museum" and you should see the word "visiting" flash by.
Click on "About the Design Museum" on the bottom navigation menu.

Click on "Visiting" on the top navigation bar.
Read content on both sections and fail to find map.

Hover over "Visiting" on the top navigation bar and see a new link titled "Map". This rollover link is only available after you have clicked on "Visiting" for the first time.

You should now be able to see a map with text too small to read and no print button.

The non-flash version of the site doesn't even have a link to the map.

If anyone would like to know where the British Design Museum is, then they can try this map instead.

Piwacy is a cwime!

They were wubbish, they were shaky, out of focus, camewawork was bad, they had muffled sound
Jonathan Ross on pirate DVDs

It has come to my attention that tax proceeds from Pirate DVD's have been used to buy weapons for so called elected leaders to use on smaller countries.

Here is evidence of the infamous Captain Blood handing over the proceeds of DVD sales of his biography whilst an official tax collector looks on.

Do your bit and refuse to buy the products shown below:

This is not a MISC category, honest.

I have just added a new category to Usability Views called "By Special Request".

This is for items that do not have their own site (for example I have just added Guuui as a new category).

If you want an item added to usability views but you don't merit a whole category then I may add it if you ask me nicely.

You can either e-mail me at chris@usabilityviews.com or leave a comment for this post.

I've been very naughty...

and just ordered a new PC as my current one is past it's best, at almost four years of age.

Jason was a bit upset, but I'm sure he'll get over it.