The name for this phenomenon that I observed comes from the circumstances in which it most frequently occurs, but I see it all over the place. In the face of a stressful event that is likely to make one behave irrationally, a person makes decisions that favor total immersion in work related to that event at the expense of everything else. For example, in its original form, my friends are studying for a final exam the following day; when I ask them if they want to grab dinner, they violently shake their head, “no, can’t, must study”.
As if getting dinner were to make any difference in the outcome so late in the game (if anything, getting something to eat probably increases your chances of doing well).

I can spot this syndrome a lot in other scenarios, often when I least expect it; my friend told me that he would really like to get a driver’s license by can’t think about it until he gets a new job. Why not? We were born to multitask!

I thought for a long time why I don’t like elevator music. It’s, after all, not clear–it seems to fulfill its purpose of filling the otherwise awkward silence when several (often too many) strangers find themselves confined to a small space for a little longer than comfortable.

What I have a huge issue with, however, is how it’s termed as “music”. As such, elevator music (and derivatives: phone line music and before-takeoff music on an airplane) is designed not to evoke any emotion; to be as neutral as possible. It can’t be catchy, it can’t be singable, it can’t be appropriate for or put you in a mood. It must not be differentiable from noise; it must convey zero information. It’s, almost by definition, the exact opposite of music, which is meant to convey information (often through evoking emotions). For an artist’s creation to be picked as elevator or airplane music would seem to me to be an offense.

I have a separate issue with music that companies put on when they transfer you. Due to the quality of phone connections (since most people nowadays call from cell phones) te music is often barely audible, keeps cutting off, and makes it more difficult to figure out when the speaker actually comes back online (if ever). I wish there was an option to disable it; sometimes all we need in life is a little bit of an awkward silence.

This category is huge and so I’ll just talk about the tip of the iceberg today, singling out particularly bad UI. Overall, te issue is that one of the following always seems to be the case:

• No thought put in user interface, as if the device was to be operated with some command-line interface or magic;
• User experience as an afterthought;
• Programmers who clearly don’t understand how human interface design is supposed to work asked to work on user interface;
• No user ever consulted on the user interface design

Take the KLM in-flight entertainment system, for example. I’m sad to single it out, because normally I love KLM for their efficiency, customer service and quality of offering, but the UI leaves much to be desired. First of all, the delay between a keypress (he system uses a wired “controller”) and an action is unbearable- sometimes on the order of 5 seconds. Forunately, presses aren’t buffered but it makes for a frustrating browsing.

Lack of frequently used controls. I’m sure there is some UI theory that dictates the maximum number of keypresses needed to perform any action. Lack of the page-up/down keys means I have to press a key 20 times before I see more options. Combined with a keypress delay, here go minutes of my life

Fast-forwarding stomped me. First of all, there is the usual ff button and pressing it in succession changes the playback rate from 2x to 4x to 8x but surprisingly, 8x is more like 64x. The UI shows an icon with the fast-forward rate about once every three seconds (hiding it otherwise) but no other feedback is given (the movie doesn’t update at all). Even more strangely, pressing play stops the fast-forwarding only if the icon currently appears on screen. Otherwise, I apparently need to press play twice. And if I fast-forward too much, I’m screwed–have to start from the beginning.

When you expeiece these things, the second thought that goes through your head is: how did this come abot? It seems like a very complicated thing to actually implement. And how did it pass tests? Were the same programmers also testing their systems?

Ironically, you don’t need to be an expert in UI design to avoid some 95% of all UX caveats, yet software routinely lacks any UX love. Where is the common sense? Where are some simple use cases? Where is at least one sample customer (assuming that for some bizzare reason this never appeared in the requirements)?

Batteries are one technology that didn’t seem to get anywhere in the past decade. All other technologies got smaller, cheaper, smarter; batteries have not. It’s paricularly frustrating because every couple of weeks there seems to be some breakthrough in battery research yet nothing seems to come out of it. Batteries are limiting our gadgets, and hence they are limiting us.

Another problem I see with batteries is that gadget makers seem to have enforced upon us the unofficial rule of needin to plug your gadgets in to power each night. As gadgets become more sophisticated, their power efficieny is lowered, but they can do so much more and the batteries are often reduced in size. This is frustrating (and it’s not only because I have to make do with one charge on my iPhone for the duration of a 7-day trip with no outlets in sight) because often I wouldn’t mind carrying a slightly large hager if that meant that it can survive for more than 8 hours of continuous use. Stop making our electronic devices smaller, do real research on batteries that yields fruit, or–ideally–both!

Very often restaurants will bring the bill with the merchant copy at the bottom and customer copy at the top. I don’t understand this at all- so many times do I get tricked and start to fill out the tip field on the customer copy only to realize there’s no signature field. Is the case of “put the card back, put the receipt back, only the sign the copy” the common use case? Really?

Speaking of signing credit card receipts, I’m finding it both silly and unsafe that while the signature is required, nobody, and I mean nobody checks the signature (let alone it being so easy to see the signature on the reverse of the card). What’s the point?

Apparently credit card companies started not requiring signatures on small enough receipts – ithink the cutoff is $35?). Which brings me to the unsafe part- it’s so easy to commit fraud (and with small enough charges nobody bothers to investigate anymore) that small credit card theft could not be encouraged by it. And the worst thing is that it’s credit card companies that pay for all the fraud-rather, the merchants onto whom the charges are passed. (given that I’m also not surprised by why merchants don’t enforce the signatures- those people take advantage of the tragedy of the commons- since the cost is shared amongst all of them, they don’t care about enforcing the rule.

I think a pretty good rule of thumb is that gadgets don’t suck as long as they don’t have an operating system. Once they do (and trust me, it’s just a matter of time), they start hanging, freezing, and locking up; the number of bugs increases exponentially; they start taking forever to start and may end up in an inconsistent state if something innocuous like a dead battery occurs. There are benefits, to be sure, such as firmware updates which are frequently bundled with the gadget’s OS but do they really outweigh the costs? I’m not sure.

There is an information theory explanation of this: by the time a gadget acquires an operating system, the universe of inputs it receives and the universe of outputs it is expected to provide are so large that defects are only natural to occur in much increased quantities. Take the iPhone, for example. Everyone complains that it keeps hanging, becomes unresponsive, and is generally fairly buggy despite this being the third incarnation of the OS. But consider what the iPhone needs to keep track of (the carrier inputs, wifi, Bluetooth, and the multi touch pad (which provides an order of magnitude more input bandwidth than a regular touhpad, let alone a keypad). All this, plus the many sensors it has (a freaking compass!). It has to talk back to the carrier, wifi, Bluetooth, play music, and display relevant information.

Still, it’s just an excuse. The fact remains.