06 Feb 2004 | Caleb Jaffa said...

I've seen the same thing with the recent upgrade to Safari 1.2. I got so used to saving images and files to the desktop and the language used in the contextual menus. Now they have changed it to allow you to specify where to download to, and changed the contextual menus a little to better reflect what your options are. The new contextual menus better match other browsers, but since I had gotten so used to the old way of Safari doing it that I am now lost half the time when I right click to download something.

Even more closely related is that my grocery store and Best Buy use different ways of using the terminal, one you swipe first and then select debit or credit, the other you select first then swipe. Easier to remember at Best Buy since it is an electronic display thing, it only shows you the debit/credit buttons when they apply, where as the grocery store has those options all the time and you have to wait for the display to cycle through to see that you should select a payment type and then swipe.

06 Feb 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

I wish designers (of anything) would take more time to visualize their product in the context of its users' everyday lives. If you only have to learn how to use one new piece of equipment or software, no big deal. But think about all the things that a reasonably well-off professional in an industrialized country has to learn: how to use the digital camera, the MP3 player, the cell phone, the PDA, the automatic teller machine, the computer's operating system(s), the word processor, the spreadsheet, the Web browser, the instant-messaging software, the videocassette recorder or the TiVo, the DVD player, the microwave, etc., etc.

Learning to use any one of these things on its own, in total isolation, is no challenge. But together they add up, and eventually you reach a point where learning any one new thing becomes a burden, and people get angry and frustrated. And confused.

06 Feb 2004 | peterme said...

When AT&T owned the phone system, telephones were rugged and remarkably simple to use.

Now they don't, and they aren't.

(Granted, there are many many advantages to disbanding regulated monopolies. Consistency of user interface is not one of them.)

06 Feb 2004 | Mike said...

It all comes down to designing for the what the user is already accustomed to seeing.

If the vast majority of e-commerce sites put the shopping cart icon in the top part of a webpage, why would you put it in the middle? Nobody's going to be looking for it there.

And if you're targeting the people who are experts at using one particular type of payment terminal, why change the design around? You're trying to make it easy for them to switch to your company, not more difficult.

07 Feb 2004 | pb said...

When AT&T owned the phone system, telephones were rugged and remarkably simple to use.

And sucked.

Now we have touch-tones, portable and mobile. YOu don't have to be much of a free marketist to understand that progress brings change.

07 Feb 2004 | Hartvig said...

Actually the new card-terminals are made so they follow the keypad-design which (almost) the rest of the world uses (which I believe is now an international standard for keypad-layout on atms). The new terminals are also equipted with instruction-layouts which makes you learn how to type your pincode so it matches the new layout. So I actually think they did a good job, but maybe the layouts weren't at the terminal that you used.

So it might be very disturbing, but I do believe that it's positive that danish atms are following international standards now...

08 Feb 2004 | Bubber said...

International layout of keypads or not - it takes some time to get used to the new keypad layout, especially since the banks atms still uses the old layout - it will ofcourse change but when? So for the time being, we have to different keypad layouts! Get used to it.
At least we have to use pins and not just sign bills whics ensure less credit card fraud.

08 Feb 2004 | Scott said...

Are you talking about the difference between:
789 123
456 456
123 789

Because I really really hate the second layout. Screws me up every time.

09 Feb 2004 | JoeM said...

"tacit mental patterns" -- great phrase. Thanks too for reminding me of that word, tacit. Forgotten about that one . . .

09 Feb 2004 | One of several Steves said...

That's a perfect illustration of how sometimes the "right" approach isn't the right approach. Trying to establish - and then implement - objective best practices ignores one key factor: human behavior. And the fact that human behavior can become deeply ingrained and very difficult to change.

If a user base is accustomed to doing certain things in a certain way, no matter how daft that way seems to be to an outsider, it's really important to think twice (or 10 times) about a radical change. Because while the change may be the "right" way, the gain in efficiency is going to be lost in the time it takes to transition to the new way - if it even succeeds in getting past the user non-acceptance (or even outright hostility) phase.

09 Feb 2004 | dusoft said...

I just noticed this issue few months ago - just see your mobile phone (123 from top) in comparison to PC keyboard (789 from top)

Little bit misleading, specially when I have to key in numbers to make alarm go off - try it in the dark - where to start? where is 7 and where is 1?

...

09 Feb 2004 | Wesley said...

I actually work for one of the international megaprocessors, and I can testify not only to the confusions end users of these terminals feel, but to the multimillion dollar per year expense merchants pay out because of chargebacks caused by flip flopping between American and European key pads. Things are, however, looking up. Since releasing the Omni 3300, Verifone has standardized on the European layout, as will Hypercom, Lipman Nurit, and the Talento in the near future.

We're making great strides in the industry, phasing out modal numeric keys, enlarging buttons, etc., but we have a long way to go. What one terminal might label "return" or "refund" will be ambiguously named "credit" on another. Our help desk receives hundreds of calls per month from merchants asking about the difference between a "prior auth sale" and an "offline." Explaining the truth, that there is no difference, is harder than you would think.

09 Feb 2004 | One of several Steves said...

I just noticed this issue few months ago - just see your mobile phone (123 from top) in comparison to PC keyboard (789 from top)

At least in the States, it's been that way for 30-40 years. Touch-tone phones have always been top-down, and calculators and adding machines - which the PC's keypad layout is based on - have always been bottom-up. Mobile phones just follow the normal telephone number pattern already well-established and that people were used to.

Why the phone company did the keypad layout differently in the first place , I have no idea.

09 Feb 2004 | Hagbard Celine said...

Telecom legend has it that telephone keypads were purposely made different from adding machine keypads. Office workers were so proficient at ten-key that they were too fast for the original touchtone switching equipment, so the keypad was reversed to slow down dialing.

09 Feb 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

Why the phone company did the keypad layout differently in the first place , I have no idea.

Henry Petroski has an entire chapter on this in his book "Small Things Considered." The keypad layout on telephones was actually based on human factors research. Calculator keypad layout was based on the existing design of cash registers and adding machines, so it had a tradition to follow. But telephones didn't (the keypad was a departure from the earlier rotary system), so the phone companies did tests to determine the best layout for the keypad.

The "slowing down the dialing" theory actually applies to the traditional QWERTY typewriter layout that most of us use: it was designed that way to prevent people from typing so fast that the typewriter arms would get jammed together -- something that used to happen fairly frequently anyway. This intentional awkwarness of the QWERTY layout is sometimes blamed for repetitive strain injuries, and the Dvorjak layout is said to be easier on the hands.

09 Feb 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

This intentional awkwarness of the QWERTY layout is sometimes blamed for repetitive strain injuries

It's sometimes blamed for typos too, but I'll take the blame for that one.