For example, the keyboard on the LG Quantum (a Windows Phone 7 smartphone from AT&T) is far from perfect, but it is still functional. The mode-select buttons (shift and function), used for capitalization and punctuation, are small and recessed into the frame of the case, making it difficult for anyone without Elvish ancestry to access them readily. Still, it’s a tactile keyboard, it works, and the spring to flip it out of the phone makes it feel like you’re holding a gun.

See? I’m a pretty forgiving guy. So take me seriously when I say: Windows Phone 7 OS, and the LG Quantum, are unusably bad.

Pretty screen, which is about all that can be said for it.

The LG Quantum was released in November 2010 and was running WP7 for almost a year before it got an update. The update has fixed some of the problems, but not many. I’m going to describe what the old OS was like, because, let’s face it, this was what Microsoft expected people to use for a solid year before rolling out something better.

1) No vibrating alarm.

I took the train to work every weekday, and with a brand-new smartphone, I expected to be able to set a vibrating alarm, tuck the phone into my jacket and catch an extra hour or so of sack time. Unfortunately, there was no option for a vibrating alarm at all. Seeing as my original Nokia brickphone from high school had this functionality a decade ago, it must have taken a whole lot of stupid to leave this one out.

2) No copy/paste, or any means of referencing a URL.

If you’ve got the power to surf the web, you’d expect to have the ability to send an interesting site to a friend via SMS or e-mail. That’d be quite a trick, as a feature that has been part of smartphones since 2009 was left out: copy and paste. (Microsoft finally patched this, albeit extraordinarily clumsily.)

3) No other browsers.

IE9 is not the most horrifying web browser to use, but it does lack a great deal compared to many other mobile web browsers. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to lock all competing browsers out of the Windows Phone 7 application market, so if you didn’t like IE, no internet.

4) No other default search engine.

Bing is not a completely useless search engine, but it’s certainly not on-par with Google. The WP7 version is also stripped of any advanced user functionality, holding your hand so forcefully that you’re better off taking the three steps to launch a browser and Google your question. It’d be nice if you could change the default action of the search button on the phone to do this automatically (or even better, to have a Google search replacement), but Bing is all you’re allowed.

5) No app store worth a damn.

Not surprisingly, if you only let app developers code in your proprietary platform (Microsoft Silverlight), and you have draconian restrictions on what they’re allowed to code…you don’t get a lot of quality apps. If you add an app store that doesn’t differentiate between applications and music (so a search for “weather” returns both weather apps and songs by “Weather Report”), you have a massive pile of crap. How big a pile of crap? A search for “vibrating alarm” returned no fewer than 50 “personal vibrating massager” applications, interspersed with various covers of “Good Vibrations.”

6) No way to export the address book.

The final insult to injury came when I decided I had had enough and bought a small phone running Android. I searched through menus in the LG Quantum for hours to try and find some means of exporting my extensive list of contacts to my new phone, before discovering (from a spoken line in an online “how to” video from AT&T) that it was impossible. Not only were the designers of WP7 so inept that they made the oversights listed above while trying to enter a mobile phone market already saturated with pretty good OS designs, they were audacious enough to believe that, once you bought their unusably terrible phone and imported your SIM contacts (which IS an option), you would never want to use anything else.

Windows Phone 7 was so bad, I teared up a little the first time I used my generations-behind Android phone, because the experience was so much better. I sincerely hope that Microsoft either learns how to make a decent mobile OS or gets out of the market ASAP, as they’re currently throwing good development money down the drain.

The USS Cassin Young is a Fletcher-class destroyer, formerly in the service of the US Navy, and she is a beautiful vessel…with a dark secret.

Not that I'd ever talk badly about her, what with those massive frickin' cannons.

She has a pretty outstanding service record, protecting several other Navy ships during World War II and rescuing many sailors from situations where they might very well have perished…and never accidentally firing torpedoes at anyone. This last point might seem odd, but you haven’t seen the torpedo control board yet.

"The deck officer wants to speak with me? Alright, I'll just OH MY GOD!"

In case you don’t feel like reading some of the teeny-tiny labels on these very same-y controls, allow me to read them from top to bottom, starting on the far left. They read:

• OFFICERS CALL BELL
• TORPEDO CONTROL/TORPEDO COURSE
• TORPEDO FIRING

…wait what?

Yes, on the Cassin Young (as well as several other Fletcher-class destroyers), the switch that fires the torpedoes is the same color, the same shape, and in the same location as the switch that rings a bell to call an officer to your station, in order to reassure them that you haven’t accidentally fired torpedoes at anything while attempting to call them.

Controls with potentially dangerous systems hooked to them should be distinct, in both appearance and location, from those which are routinely used and innocuous. Space is a concern on any vessel, but even grouping the torpedo controls on one side of this panel and isolating the call bell switch would have been smarter than this.

Sam was quite terrified of being raped. I was a very stupid teenager, and I had a hard time understanding why it was such a big deal. (After all, sex of any kind sounded like the most amazing thing in the whole world to me.) Long story short, Sam explained in very powerful language what exactly it was about using sex as a weapon to hurt someone that was so terrifying.

At that moment, light flooded my mind, and I was able to see from her eyes just how frightening a world where rape happened was. I felt a slight panic well up at the back of my throat as I scanned the room for shady-looking guys. I checked over my shoulder when we left to make sure nobody was following. I realized why going to the bathroom with someone else wasn’t just a quaint social phenomenon, but a survival tactic…

Both my friends had to listen to me yammering like I was on speed for the next few hours. As we left the park, I told her, in a moment of epiphany: “This is what I want to do with my life.”

Now, I had a lot of epiphanies when I was in high school. Most of them were either things that I ought to be embarrassed about taking me so long to figure out, or things that were patently untrue, but this one happened to be right on.

Intellectual connection is still my raison d’être.

Many people I’ve talked to say that I’m a very open person, and it’s probably true. I think it’s largely because, whenever I talk to anyone, my mind is surging to get out of my head and into theirs. I want to share my innermost thoughts, the nightmares that keep me awake at night, the possible answers I have for the burning questions that I see at the core of human existence, my guilty pleasures, my deepest regrets, everything. All for the off-chance that, knowing so much of me, they might share some of themselves, hopefully the things that make them who they are.

This is a problem for me in a world where the vast majority of conversation is about the weather. Most people simply enjoy the company of others, telling them about their day & decompressing from work. When you’d rather know how they feel about death, or whether they think there’s an objective morality worth having, or what sort of things make them get out of bed in the morning, idly chatting about what they had for lunch, although sometimes fun, doesn’t feel quite as fulfilling. I want to know people & how they think, all the way down to their bones. Maybe it’s because many feel vulnerable talking about things that really matter to them, but for whatever reason, there have only been a few who have felt comfortable enough to let me glimpse their thoughts.

When I saw a video in college about design consultancies (places where people who are very good at having ideas share & develop them to improve things), I fell in love. I’m almost sure that everyone else in my engineering class did too; IDEO is like Pixar in that everyone who’s ever heard about it would give both legs and their non-dominant arm to work there. But – the big thing for me? Brainstorming. An activity where the walls between minds came down and everyone’s thoughts are laid bare to everyone else, where a group of brains hum together to come up with something amazing. It’s like a special time set aside just to indulge in that feeling that makes me giddy with excitement, and to imagine getting paid for it?!?

That’s why I’m in New York right now (aside from living with my girlfriend). I’m trying to find a place where I can sit down in a room with some other adventurously open individuals and share, really share ideas, and there are more design consultancies per square foot in New York than anywhere else in the world.

Sam wrote “Good luck with your goal of intellectual connection!” in my high school yearbook when I graduated. Thanks, Sam, I’m gonna need all the help I can get to get into one, but once I do…

My girlfriend and I have been playing through the entirety of the Myst puzzle game franchise together, and for the most part, we’ve done it sans hints. However, when we got to a game called “Uru: Ages Beyond Myst,” we ran into a wall.

Before the rabble-rabbling regarding my n00bishness begins, allow me the indulgence of some qualification. We hauled ass through the first three Myst games (realMyst, Riven, and Exile), finishing each with deliberate and thoughtful understanding of the mechanics of each puzzle (i.e. not clicking controls at random until something happened). I’ve played all three before, but that was so long ago (>10 years) that there were still many frustrating bouts of deep contemplation before we managed to lock down the puzzles. Both of us are above-average puzzle-solvers, and we have both been playing Myst games for the past couple of months, so we’re no foreigners to D’ni thinking.

And then, Uru happened.

Uru is a departure from the general gameplay formula of Myst games, in that it is third-person and grants the player significantly greater freedom of movement. The suitability of the free-motion component to Myst games was demonstrated in realMyst, a free-roaming version of the original Myst game (which consisted of a collection of static screens, like a Powerpoint presentation), but unlike realMyst, Uru incorporates this motion as a necessary mechanic of gameplay.

The long and short of this is that Uru requires players to jump over gaps, teeter over narrow ledges, and other highly kinetic activities. In adopting this gameplay element, Uru’s creators were forgetting a few key points regarding their game and its target demographic:

• Players who buy it are probably puzzle game fans, not platformer game fans.
• Its developers are puzzle game developers, not platformer game developers.
• The control scheme sucks a lot compared to real platformer controls.

Needless to say, due to these points, Uru had frustrating “puzzles” which were “solved” via jumping around like an idiot, rather than the quiet contemplation that marked its predecessors. My girlfriend and I started looking up walkthroughs when we got stuck, just to make sure there wasn’t some step that read “Blindly leap over the edge of the chasm right about here, and you’ll land on an invisible platform about halfway down.”

At least Zelda had the common decency to TELL you when you had to do this shit.

One level in particular (Kadish Tolesa, named after a Jewish prayer for the death of good puzzle gaming) revolves around a hint room, very much like the rotating tower in the original Myst, with stained glass figures that provide clues on how to solve the various puzzles. You’d think that it’d be relatively straightforward to decode the proper courses of action from the figures and input them into the appropriate puzzles. However, we ended up visiting walkthroughs every few minutes for nudges, shoves, and sometimes flat-out solutions to the puzzles which permeated the level, frequently finding these solutions to be more baffling than the puzzles themselves. For example, take this one:

This seems pretty straightforward, right? You switch on the lights, the symbols in the floor are illuminated, you switch them off, they glow with different symbols. Hey, what’s more, these symbols are found on some pillars with D’ni numbers on them, indicating that they are related somehow to these numbers! Obviously, you have to walk across the floor and step on a “one” first, then a “two,” and so on. You may have to do some planning ahead of time, because some of the symbols can only be seen when the lights are on, but this stuff is child’s play.

For a puzzle gamer, these assumptions are like assuming that gravity points down.

After three days of numeric analysis with increasingly desperate-sounding theories (only primes, Fibonacci sequence, the works), we finally were frustrated enough to look up the solution. So what was the pattern of numbers, I hear you ask?

You walk across the trees.

No, the numbers don’t have anything to do with anything. You just walk across the tree-shaped symbols. Not the pyramid-shaped symbols (which also form a path) because you’re in a pyramid, or some variant on the order of symbols that you find in the hint room’s upper level, or anything else requiring some cerebral investment. You walk across the trees, because there are some trees outside the puzzle room.

I was pissed for a long while at that, and comtemplated just reading straight from the walkthrough and plugging answers into the game from there on out, but I relinquished when I saw the final puzzle in the age:

This is quite interesting. You’ll notice the not-number-symbols appear again, but they must have some greater numeric significance here, because they weren’t used as numbers in the previous puzzle. If you look at the layout of symbols on this panel, you’ll notice some delicious symmetry of the symbols about certain axes, including from the far-left to the far-right of the figure! That must be significant, because not only the numbers are identical, but the selection of symbols for those numbers is identical as well! With some deft mental shuffling, I was able to collapse the identical symbols on the panel into a three-dimensional figure that looked a little bit like a folded napkin at a fancy Thai restaurant…

Awesome!

…I’m going to stop here out of respect for you. You probably know where this is going, and let me assure you, it was just as maddening for me when I broke after a week of frustrated scribbling and symbolic analysis of what the hell could possibly be going on with such an obviously complex and multifaceted puzzle. (Liz actually figured it out, but she was similarly infuriated.)

The fact that there are three different symbols for each number doesn’t matter.

The fact that there is symmetry in the layout everywhere, and that it may be collapsed onto itself, and that the positions of the symbols map directly to the shape of the door, and that the stained-glass figure above the number-columns has some very suggestive asymmetrical shapes in it, and that there are sequences of symbols laid out very deliberately upstairs in the hint room (and mirrored in other ages), not one of these things matter.

There are two numbers missing from each group. You just have to pick the groups of symbols in the only possible numeric order of these missing numbers, starting with the one that’s marked with a D’ni “one.”

Now, I have no background in game design, or puzzle design, or anything of the sort, but were I asked to design such for Myst, I would closely examine my puzzles for any accidental, meaningless patterns which might mislead the player about the nature of the puzzle. If I were going to make a symbol puzzle, for example, I would make sure to not make the symbols numbers, lest I imply that it were a number puzzle. If I were going to make a number puzzle, even a number puzzle using nonstandard numerals, I would choose one numeral per number, lest I imply that the different numerals had different values. (Because what kind of retarded counting system would have multiple symbols for the same number?) I would not design symmetry in places of meaning (like diagrams, etc.) unless the symmetry was important.

And that’s why Cyan should hire me the next time they make a Myst game.

Why is Dick Clark still on TV??? LEAVE HIM ALONE YOU MONSTERS!

The last of the 200X’s draws to a close, and a lot of really terrible design decisions lay in our wake. Toyota’s brake debacle, the iPhone 4, and worst of all, there are still symmetrical doors haunting our most populated buildings, making fools of us all.

However, not all is despair. As is always the case with design, evolution presses on, human beings get a little less stupid, and the world spins a little closer toward its bright and glorious future.

To contribute to this future, I resolve the following things for 2011:

• I resolve to use regular dimensions wherever I can. No more “3.63345126 inches” on my drawings when 3.5″ will do.
  
• I resolve to make backups of all part revisions. I will not assume that whatever brilliant idea I’ve had will fit within the original part profile, and only check this after I’ve saved over the previous one.
  
• I resolve to update my drawings with revision data properly, preserving their formatting, instead of fudging it.
  
• I resolve to ask my mom or someone similar to test anything I’ve built for usability. Naive user tests aren’t really naive if all your friends are engineers & scientists.
  
• This one’s a neat trick that I’m going to use elsewhere: every time I’m about to make a design decision, I am going to imagine a conversation with a frustrated user some time in the future where I have to admit that it was a retarded decision. If the conversation sounds probable, I will rethink my decision.
  
• I resolve to keep materials in mind while I’m modeling something.
• I resolve to use fillets and chamfers in a responsible fashion, rather than on every edge I see out of some obsessive need for things to look “polished.” 

Do you have any design resolutions for the new year?

If you give your user a big, shiny, green button that says “GO,” you probably won’t need to spend a lot of time writing a manual, but the user will be limited to whatever function the button executes. If they want to do something slightly different, they’ll have to buy Big Shiny Green Button v2.0.

Conversely, if you supply your users with tools and materials, they can build whatever it is they want…so long as they know how.

This dichotomy can be mitigated slightly by using dynamic interfaces. For example, the visible controls in a file navigation utility are generally pretty minimalist. (Go up one level, go back, open, delete, etc.) However, there are context menus accessible by right-clicking or some other meta-command that grant a slew of functionality. Copy, paste, cut, archive, set program association, create a pointer, compile, edit, view properties, set permissions, e-mail as attachment…quite an extensive set of commands, all hidden unless you know where to find them.

However, with a bunch of features, the same problem crops up again. Now, instead of needing to know a whole bank of commands (like Alt codes, for example) and their effects, a user has to remember a menu path/path of commands (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map > double-click > click program> Edit > Paste > é). You could put an “é” button on the keyboard, or on a toolbar, but you’ll have to stare at it whenever you’re not typing in French.

(Quick aside: I realize that menus shave a bit of complexity by using logical categorization which doesn’t require memorization, but the principle is still applicable.)

So what to do? Do you cripple your design in the name of user-friendliness, or do you blast your users in the face with power and overwhelm them with your interface?

Obviously, some sort of balance is necessary, and many companies have flourished by offering “sweet spots” somewhere along the spectrum. For example, take operating systems. Apple offers intuitive interfaces that you really have to put the screws to in order to do anything they decided you didn’t need to, Linux lets you build your entire OS from scratch (so long as you know how to cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6), and Windows is somewhere in-between.

Personally, insofar as software is concerned, I like having a simple frontend interface with mountains of configurable preferences that allow the program to do just about anything. (Launchy is still my favorite example of such.

I'll get to the bulb in a second.

This Ikea lamp has an in-line switch on the power cord (already necessitating that it be exposed, rather than hidden), and places it a good foot away from the lamp. If you put your lamp in a standard lampy spot on the corner of your desk, the switch will slip quietly away, never to be heard from again. It won’t call, it won’t write, and it certainly won’t make your life easy if you want to read something.

The exposed cord is part of the (questionable) industrial aesthetic of the lamp, so the presence of an inline switch is excusable. However, a foot of cord between the lamp and the switch is only really suited to floor lamps, which will have at least that much space before the cord snakes behind anything. For desklamps, however, it’s safe to assume that the cord will leap behind the back edge of the desk after just a few inches. Putting the switch any farther along the cord than that is tantamount to requiring the user to get down under the desk and plug the lamp in every time they use it.

As a sidenote, whose idea was it to use E14 light bulbs in these things? I mean, E12 candelabra sockets, fine, standard sockets, fine, but E17? That’s like having an “M5.35″ metric screw; close enough to something far more standard that you’d have to be insane to use it.

Cars & trucks have all sorts of special equipment & adaptations for driving at night: the instrument panel can be backlit, the rearview mirror has a toggle switch that reduces glare (and is great fun to play with), headlights have both normal and hi-beam settings (for expressing irritation and irritating other drivers, respectively)…hell, even the cigarette lighter/DC power socket gets lit, to prevent blind fumbling and potentially offending your date.

Headlights and tail lights were modeled after the lamp-signal system used in trains (which, in turn, was modeled after the electricians’ wire color-coding system), and standardized in the Geneva Convention on Road Traffic: white lights in front, red lights in back. Turn signals didn’t show up until around 1938, where the new Buick announced its “Flash-Way Directional Signal.” Since then, the general format of car lighting hasn’t changed.

As you’ve probably guessed, there are a few problems with this.

Firstly, as any amateur astronomer can tell you, point sources of light (like stars) require a certain quality of optics to allow resolution (the ability to tell that they’re different light sources). This trivia might seem irrelevant, until you reflect on the fact that car headlights and turn signals are pretty much point sources…and they’re always crammed next to each other.

What do you mean, "you didn't see me signal?"

At 120 MPH (two cars going 60 MPH in opposite directions), the proximity of the turn signal lamps and headlights makes it difficult for drivers to correctly determine when an oncoming car is going to turn. A better solution exists in the newfangled rearview-mirror-arrow turn signals on luxury cars. Their distance from the headlights makes these significantly easier to spot, and avoid.

This same problem is taken to an extreme in a classic North American automotive design: the combination tail light/brake light. Now, instead of trying to differentiate between two light sources located a quarter of an inch apart, you’re trying to differentiate between dimmer/brighter luminance of the same light source.

Is it stopping, driving at night, or turning?

Automotive manufacturers have since realized the problem with this design and created a centered lamp called a CHMSL (Center High Mounted Stop Lamp) which increases visibility of brake lights, but more importantly, gives a clear indication of when the driver is braking. They work, too; in the first year of implementation, they reduced the number of crashes by more than ten percent.

These examples just go to show why a degree in astronomy or astrophysics is totally relevant for a job in industry.

One poorly-mapped key can ruin your whole day.

The Blackberry Bold 9700 has a tactile keyboard, which puts it a leg up on some other smartphones. However, the action of typing has two interfaces that both need to be considered when evaluating human factors: the human/input device interface, and the input device/software interface.

“No problem!” my muscle memory confidently says. “The backspace key is like a ‘cancel’ button. If you’re in some sort of shift/special character mode on any smartphone, generally you can hit the backspace key and you’re good to go. I mean, that’s the way it worked on the last Blackberry you owned!”

And so my eager thumb keys the backspace, with the urging of muscle memory and its thousands of texts of experience.

And the message disappears.

Apparently, someone on Blackberry’s dev team thought that it would be useful to make a function like “delete everything I just wrote” super-easy to access, even by accident, and so they removed that pesky “escape from shift mode” functionality from the backspace key and substituted their favorite new one in its place.

It’s a bad idea to change your user interface without good reason, but it’s outright malevolent to add destructive functionality to previous special command keys. Imagine if Microsoft replaced the “Alt-Tab” menu (switch window) with “Alt-F4″ (close window). Users would go berzerk. If you add in the quirk that Blackberry has no “Undo” function in SMS messaging, you have a recipe for massive amounts of angst.

Blackberry: The “lock” and “mute” keys on the top of the Bold 9700 are genius. This, however, is stupid. Fix it.

Looks like someone just ran 'em over a bandsaw.

Not that impressive, right? It’s just a plastic glass with a cut in the bottom lip. What could possibly…

...OK, that's cool.

Each glass can support up to four additional glasses atop it. This means that the waiter/waitress can carry the beverages for a family of four and grandma in one hand, without any contortion or finger-dipping, leaving their other hand free to carry onion rings or fries.

I really dig clever little things like this. No additional machining/manufacturing required, no additional cost, incredibly increased functionality. Awesome.