Lets start "The most depressing day of the year (tm)" with something appalling.
This one is for Microsoft and the One Drive team. In the screenshot on the left from the Windows File Explorer one of the documents is an Excel spreadsheet. But of course you can't tell which one (or at least I can't).
If the tick was in the bottom right corner things would be a lot easier.
I use Squarespace to host my blog. Most of the time it is wonderful, but the web based page editing is a bit of a pain to be honest. One of the things I really hate is this dialogue, which appears if you click outside the post editing window.
It carefully explains what Discard and Save do, while neglecting to tell you anything useful about Cancel, which is the button that you really should press.
Discard throws away your work, Save ends the editing session and closes the window (meaning that you have to open it again if you want to keep working on the post) and Cancel takes you back to editing the post, which is almost always what you want to do.
Ugh.
I seem to need to have an Apple phone. My favourite, Windows Phone, doesn't do all the things I want, and I've tried Android and that was fairly appalling too. What can I say? I'm picky.
One trick that the iPhone plays drives me completely nuts. The phone provides "Siri App Suggestions" based on the things that you do most. You can use these favourites to slightly compensate for the horrible way that the iPhone manages large numbers of apps on the device.
The suggestions are based on your use of the phone and are updated each time you visit the screen. But here's the appalling bit. They update and redraw themselves in the fraction of a second between the page appearing and you actually selecting something.
So your finger can head for the Nest icon, but by the time your digit touches the screen the icon underneath can be replaced by a different application. So the wrong thing is selected. Most annoying.
This single piece of stupidity makes the feature completely useless to me. Here's a tip Apple, why not update the sorted list before you display it on the screen?
Ugh
I still like my Apple Watch. I still like my Apple phone. But mainly for what they can do, not the way that they do it. Going back to my Windows Phone always puts a smile on my face, as I get to use a user interface that is properly usable and scaleable. Then the smile disappears when I find I can't read books or do anything much with it.
For a company that prides itself on design Apple should be ashamed of the above screen. Take a look at it and decide whether or not the watch will make sounds. After a while you might deduce that if silent mode is off, the watch might make sounds. Although you might also be confused because the icon shows a bell with a line through it which might imply silence. The icon is not lit up - although it can be - something that you need to know to make sense of what is happening here.
Ugh, ugh, and ugh. Anyone who thinks that user interface design is easy should take a long hard look at this and consider how they would do it. They are almost certain to come up with something better than this mess. Me, I'd take away the icon and use the words "Noisy" and "Silent", it would be a lot clearer for your's truly.
Update: Turns out I can't spell appalling. That's ..... not good.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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