Simple Things: Making America More Productive, Part I
By Mark Devlin
October 15, 2009
Note to software, hardware, technology, web, and packaging developers, as well as marketers…
Updates Are Available
This has to be in the Top Three Most Ridiculous, Aggravating, and Time Wasting Elements of modern life. Updates are available. For everything. Download this, install that. New revisions. Bug fixes. Security updates. New, usable features? Doubtful in this lifetime. You can’t even fire-up a PlayStation to frag bad guys without an internet connection and OS update.
That’s another thing. Stop connecting everything to the internet. Internet connections used to be cool. Having a fridge with a built-in server was a neat idea. But, at some point, guess what? Your fridge’ll nag you to tears for a software update and everything in it will spoil after the software installation turns it into a big, warm, meaningless plastic box.
Personally, I don’t care if an update is available. Matter of fact, more of my gadgetry has become inoperable from ‘better’ updates than for any other reason. Even when you tell it not to update, software screams that you’ve turned off updating.
New motto: If it’s working, leave it alone. And if the user overrides updating to be left peacefully to accomplish his or her important tasks—instead of doing your work of fixing the bugs that shouldn’t have left your building to start with—then leave us alone.
Are You Sure?
Stop asking us if we’re sure. Yes, we’re sure. If we weren’t sure, we wouldn’t have hit the freakin’ button to begin with.
Password?
Yeah, there are several ways to store one’s passwords. I particularly like Vince Sorenson’s Passwords Max. (If you run into a problem, Vince himself will actually help you resolve it.) But, most of those ways aren’t all that convenient, as they require a PC. Would you like [insert name of browser of choice here] to remember your password for this site? No, thank you. Passwords on a cell phone? Yeah. There’s a good idea. Let’s put all of our passwords on our cell provider’s servers.
Tracking them isn’t so much the root of the problem, as it is that everything requires a password. STOP ASKING US FOR PASSWORDS ALL THE TIME. Is it really necessary to password-protect everything on the Internet? Is anyone else going to be trying to log into BestBuy.com as OldFartWithMustang?
You Do Not Need Our Email Address
Okay, you use it for ‘verification’ purposes. Yeah, right. In most cases, no, you use it to spam us with Special Offers and marketing BS that no one could possibly find of value.
You inundate us with “5 Dollars Off!” offers and, sometimes, we fall for it. Ultimately, though, we spend way more than 5 bucks worth of our time deleting the garbage you send us.
While we’re at it, stop requiring us to ‘verify’ our email address by typing it again and again and again. WE TYPED IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME.
Do Not Press ‘Back’
We’ve all experienced this one. You hit Purchase, the progress bar edges a little to the right—then stops. Then a 404. Then a call to the company to cancel two of the three orders you supposedly placed.
What’s worse? All these sites—some of them by enormously well-funded operations like PayPal and Walmart—require you to fill-out an onscreen form with about 347 fields. Press Submit. Oops. You missed one field or the syntax in one of them wasn’t right. Okay, it’d be easy to fix that, right? Except that the information in the other 346 fields has now disappeared.
We could all have an entire free week by the end of the year if developers would fix this simple and stupid site programming flaw.
Tune-In THURSDAY for Simple Things: Making America More Productive, Part II