Things that annoy you beyond reason...(Vol 5)

[Shakermaker]

ESOG said:

Here is one that annoys the hell out of me and it seems like everyone says it wrong EVEN DOCTORS FFS!!

The pronunciation of the word 'Alzheimer's '.

Everyone pronounces it like altimers, or even oldtimers I've heard a few times. How hard is it to pronounce it correctly, really?!? Exactly as it is spelled; al-ZHEIMERS!!! 'Z'!!! It is a 'Z' for hells sake!!!

I've never heard it pronounced like that. Always "Altz-heimers" or "alt-zeimers"

[Shakermaker]

A new annoyance for me:

HSBC Cash machines. Or at least, the HSBC cash machine in Horsham, which I had cause to use yesterday.

We all know the drill with the cash machine by now, surely? Card goes in, type your PIN and press enter (for most, Natwest don't need me to do this)

A list of options comes up on screen, and the options are listed next to a button for you to press to decide what value of cash you want to withdraw. Alongside the button on many cash machines is a little line which points to the on screen option

But, in what I can only imagine is someone having a moment of "Let's make cash machines look nicer" but failing, the buttons for the HSBC machine are not now directly next to the amount shown on screen! If you look more closely, which I did not, there are actually little lines which curve away from the amount to a button lower down

As such, I went to press the button for £50, which I needed, but managed instead to only hit the button for the £10. At first I thought I'd made the mistake of hitting the £10 button next to the £10, so I went again to go for £50 (instead of going for the £20 option twice...) but no, I got another £10. Only then did I look more closely and realise what a complete pile of crap this new design forced upon us was actually doing. By now I still only had £20, and so a further go around of putting in my card, waiting for it to process and then having to carefully hit the "other amount" button to get £30 to come out - nearly hitting the "£250" button by mistake of course

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

[MartG]

Shakermaker said:

A new annoyance for me:

HSBC Cash machines. Or at least, the HSBC cash machine in Horsham, which I had cause to use yesterday.

We all know the drill with the cash machine by now, surely? Card goes in, type your PIN and press enter (for most, Natwest don't need me to do this)

A list of options comes up on screen, and the options are listed next to a button for you to press to decide what value of cash you want to withdraw. Alongside the button on many cash machines is a little line which points to the on screen option

But, in what I can only imagine is someone having a moment of "Let's make cash machines look nicer" but failing, the buttons for the HSBC machine are not now directly next to the amount shown on screen! If you look more closely, which I did not, there are actually little lines which curve away from the amount to a button lower down

As such, I went to press the button for £50, which I needed, but managed instead to only hit the button for the £10. At first I thought I'd made the mistake of hitting the £10 button next to the £10, so I went again to go for £50 (instead of going for the £20 option twice...) but no, I got another £10. Only then did I look more closely and realise what a complete pile of crap this new design forced upon us was actually doing. By now I still only had £20, and so a further go around of putting in my card, waiting for it to process and then having to carefully hit the "other amount" button to get £30 to come out - nearly hitting the "£250" button by mistake of course

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

[Shakermaker]

MartG said:

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

Sounds about right. I wonder how many people have indeed hit the £250 button thinking they were going for the "other amount" button?

[captain_cynic]

Shakermaker said:

A new annoyance for me:

HSBC Cash machines. Or at least, the HSBC cash machine in Horsham, which I had cause to use yesterday.

We all know the drill with the cash machine by now, surely? Card goes in, type your PIN and press enter (for most, Natwest don't need me to do this)

A list of options comes up on screen, and the options are listed next to a button for you to press to decide what value of cash you want to withdraw. Alongside the button on many cash machines is a little line which points to the on screen option

But, in what I can only imagine is someone having a moment of "Let's make cash machines look nicer" but failing, the buttons for the HSBC machine are not now directly next to the amount shown on screen! If you look more closely, which I did not, there are actually little lines which curve away from the amount to a button lower down

As such, I went to press the button for £50, which I needed, but managed instead to only hit the button for the £10. At first I thought I'd made the mistake of hitting the £10 button next to the £10, so I went again to go for £50 (instead of going for the £20 option twice...) but no, I got another £10. Only then did I look more closely and realise what a complete pile of crap this new design forced upon us was actually doing. By now I still only had £20, and so a further go around of putting in my card, waiting for it to process and then having to carefully hit the "other amount" button to get £30 to come out - nearly hitting the "£250" button by mistake of course

Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

UX designers...

UX is a bks field made up by people (mostly Apple) who flunked their HMI classes (Human/Machine Interface) to give some semblance of credibility to their terrible ideas of how an interface should work.

[droopsnoot]

Shakermaker said:

But, in what I can only imagine is someone having a moment of "Let's make cash machines look nicer" but failing, the buttons for the HSBC machine are not now directly next to the amount shown on screen! If you look more closely, which I did not, there are actually little lines which curve away from the amount to a button lower down

Same on the Barclays machine I use regularly. I can only assume that the people who did the user interface coding didn't have the same specs as the people who made the actual machine, until a few days before launch, and then just went "no time to sort it properly, we'll just stick some lines to the buttons". It's not as if there's anything to stop the buttons running all the way up each side of the screen instead of just the lower 2/3 of it.

[Moonhawk]

MartG said:

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

I hate it when you have to wait for the machine/software to finish doing what it's doing before it'll let you interact with it - just because somebody thought "wouldn't it be nice to leave this message displayed on screen for 5-10 seconds".

Couple of examples:

1. My volvo

If you change the volume on the stereo, it displays a nice little graph showing what the volume is.......only problem, after you have finished changing the volume, the graph stays displayed for a few seconds - and while it's displayed, none of the other buttons on the stereo work (e.e. you cannot change radio stations). Why can't the stereo just detect that another button has been pressed and immediately cancel the volume display?

2. Cash machines

After the person in front has finished and taken their cash - it displays a thank you message on the screen. It won't accept another card in the slot until this message has cleared? Again why? Why can't it just detect than another car is being inserted, cancel the message and allow the transaction to proceed?

I really hate this. One of the biggest issues/frustrations in human machine interfaces and UIs is not providing immediate user feedback. Unless the machine/computer is doing something that cannot or should not be interrupted, responding to human interaction should be the absolute top priority.

[LivingTheDream]

Shakermaker said:

MartG said:

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

Sounds about right. I wonder how many people have indeed hit the £250 button thinking they were going for the "other amount" button?

Surely being PH, everyone on here hits £250 every time anyway. I mean who needs less than that?

anyway, you've just reminded me I need to go and get cash - and the nearest machine is, I think, an HSBC so I will go and see whats annoying you

[captain_cynic]

Moonhawk said:

I hate it when you have to wait for the machine/software to finish doing what it's doing before it'll let you interact with it - just because somebody thought "wouldn't it be nice to leave this message displayed on screen for 5-10 seconds".

Couple of examples:

1. My volvo

If you change the volume on the stereo, it displays a nice little graph showing what the volume is.......only problem, after you have finished changing the volume, the graph stays displayed for a few seconds - and while it's displayed, none of the other buttons on the stereo work (e.e. you cannot change radio stations). Why can't the stereo just detect that another button has been pressed and immediately cancel the volume display?

2. Cash machines

After the person in front has finished and taken their cash - it displays a thank you message on the screen. It won't accept another card in the slot until this message has cleared? Again why? Why can't it just detect than another car is being inserted, cancel the message and allow the transaction to proceed?

I really hate this. One of the biggest issues/frustrations in human machine interfaces and UIs is not providing immediate user feedback. Unless the machine/computer is doing something that cannot or should not be interrupted, responding to human interaction should be the absolute top priority.

With your Volvo... yep if there's no option to turn that off it's bad design.

The delay in cash machines however is there for a purpose, several in fact.
If someone accidentally leaves their cash of card in the machine, the machine will suck it back in after a short period of time to prevent it from being stolen.
Due to various data protection acts protecting, an ATM or any other point of sale device has to do a reset to zero as it were, thoroughly scrubbing any info collected that is expressly forbidden whilst retaining that which isn't.

Also, many cashpoints are windows running on crap hardware. So they're bound to be slow.

[Shakermaker]

LivingTheDream said:

Shakermaker said:

MartG said:

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

Sounds about right. I wonder how many people have indeed hit the £250 button thinking they were going for the "other amount" button?

Surely being PH, everyone on here hits £250 every time anyway. I mean who needs less than that?

anyway, you've just reminded me I need to go and get cash - and the nearest machine is, I think, an HSBC so I will go and see whats annoying you

I don't know if it is all HSBC machines of course, and I don't remember it being like this last time I used that particular machine

Oh and another one... the new cash machine at another bank in town, Nationwide I think, is fully touch screen now except for the keypad.

But you can't use it after about 4pm because the sun shines directly on to it and you can't read the screen!

[eybic]

Traffic Dawdlers - Sitting in a line of traffic which starts moving, for some reason they don't see fit to move with the traffic for a good few seconds, sometimes they even stop with about 3 car gaps in front of them rather than bunching up. This causes issues if the line of traffic extends a fair distance including other roads. There was a guy doing this yesterday and he refused to move at the same time as the traffic in front of him which resulted in us missing a phase of traffic lights (very much a 1st world problem I accept)

[captain_cynic]

eybic said:

Traffic Dawdlers - Sitting in a line of traffic which starts moving, for some reason they don't see fit to move with the traffic for a good few seconds, sometimes they even stop with about 3 car gaps in front of them rather than bunching up. This causes issues if the line of traffic extends a fair distance including other roads. There was a guy doing this yesterday and he refused to move at the same time as the traffic in front of him which resulted in us missing a phase of traffic lights (very much a 1st world problem I accept)

Probably the same kind of people who inch forward at 0.0003 mph because they don't want to put their foot on the brake.

I especially hate people who do this at red lights as modern lights are often programmed not to change until they detect a car. Especially if one road is more heavily trafficked than the other.

[LivingTheDream]

Shakermaker said:

LivingTheDream said:

Shakermaker said:

MartG said:

Sometimes known as 'creeping elegance' - adding features or functionality which add things no-one wanted or will ever use, to the detriment of the item's primary function

Sounds about right. I wonder how many people have indeed hit the £250 button thinking they were going for the "other amount" button?

Surely being PH, everyone on here hits £250 every time anyway. I mean who needs less than that?

anyway, you've just reminded me I need to go and get cash - and the nearest machine is, I think, an HSBC so I will go and see whats annoying you

I don't know if it is all HSBC machines of course, and I don't remember it being like this last time I used that particular machine

Oh and another one... the new cash machine at another bank in town, Nationwide I think, is fully touch screen now except for the keypad.

But you can't use it after about 4pm because the sun shines directly on to it and you can't read the screen!

Well, it was out of order anyway!

So i had to walk 10 mins to find another one, at Tescos, which is an RBS one so no update I'm afraid.

[matchmaker]

eybic said:

Traffic Dawdlers - Sitting in a line of traffic which starts moving, for some reason they don't see fit to move with the traffic for a good few seconds, sometimes they even stop with about 3 car gaps in front of them rather than bunching up. This causes issues if the line of traffic extends a fair distance including other roads. There was a guy doing this yesterday and he refused to move at the same time as the traffic in front of him which resulted in us missing a phase of traffic lights (very much a 1st world problem I accept)

That really boils my piss, as do the ones who stop several car lengths back, creep forward a couple of feet, stop, creep forward a couple of feet, stop, etc,etc. Just stop behind the last car, you fking cretin!

[Krikkit]

captain_cynic said:

Also, many cashpoints are windows running on crap hardware. So they're bound to be slow.

There's no excuse for a crap UI when it's got nothing else to do mind - old Windows XP machines are more than capable of whizzing flat graphics around at tremendous speed.

It's just underinvestment in a decent UI designer.

[captain_cynic]

Krikkit said:

There's no excuse for a crap UI when it's got nothing else to do mind - old Windows XP machines are more than capable of whizzing flat graphics around at tremendous speed.

Not when they're on slow hardware. XP really chugs if the hardware is not up to snuff.

I was answering the question as to why cashpoints are slow, no no argument about having no excuse for a crap (as in intuitive) UI.

Krikkit said:

It's just underinvestment in a decent UI designer.

Most bad UI's come from over-investment in designers and under-investment in engineers. Designers tell you what they'd like to be possible, engineers tell you what is possible.

[MartG]

The impossibility of finding a facebook post made more than a day ago

[Pothole]

People who call me and say "can I give you a reference number?" I wonder what would happen if I said "no". but I need the job, sadly.

Edited by Pothole on Thursday 21st June 17:19

[Samcat]

I am trying to sell an old (but still good spec) mountain bike on Facebook market place.

The amount of chancers that have been in touch offering half the money, or to swap for a Playstation without even seeing the bike just boils my p

I know my first mistake was to use Facebook, but I've had a reasonable amount of success with selling on Market place in the past.

[DannyScene]

eybic said:

Traffic Dawdlers - Sitting in a line of traffic which starts moving, for some reason they don't see fit to move with the traffic for a good few seconds, sometimes they even stop with about 3 car gaps in front of them rather than bunching up. This causes issues if the line of traffic extends a fair distance including other roads. There was a guy doing this yesterday and he refused to move at the same time as the traffic in front of him which resulted in us missing a phase of traffic lights (very much a 1st world problem I accept)

If there is time and space to safely do so I often overtake these people into the gap they've left in front of them, you'll find they start closing gaps up a lot more efficiently afterwards