This piece of paper stuck to a new refrigerator is really arrogant on the part of the manufacturer. The message I get from this is, “We used tape on your fridge that we know damages it. Now you have to spend extra time and money to fix our mistake. Guess what? We don’t care!”

Not only is that just plain rude, but it also makes me wonder what other shortcuts they knowingly took that I’ll be paying for. That’s a problem for me. The problem for the company is that my perception of the brand has been significantly degraded. Is that a really a worthwhile trade-off?

One of my dogs scratched her cornea yesterday when she bonked her head against the coffee table. An emergency trip to the vet yielded a tube of antibiotic ointment that I have to put in her eye twice a day for the next week.

This stuff is specifically for eyes—including the eyes of children and pets. So why is the applicator tip made of metal? Last I checked, eyeballs + metal = danger! Particularly in the case of small beings who are in pain (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t need this stuff in the first place), squirmy, and generally wary of things they don’t understand coming at their eyeballs.

It would be much better—and safer—if the applicator were soft and flexible, like a cannula.

So according to this department store sign, if I want to go to floor 1, I go… up?

This sign is effectively a map and should therefore be ordered to depict the physical space it represents instead of how we count. Put the bottom floor on the bottom, where it actually is.

Check out this gallery of the "Worst CAPTCHAs Of All Time on docstoc. Some are funny while others are so bad they could be jokes.

(CAPTCHAs are those pictures of distorted text that you sometimes have to re-type to prove you’re human instead of a spambot.)

Actual user comment:

autostart video, flash, or any noise making shit
fuckers who put that on their sites
should be faceraped by fucking bison with irritable bowel syndrome

I got an email from the AT&T this morning that started off well:

AT&T is now offering free AT&T Wi-Fi access to our iPhone™ customers. That means free AT&T Wi-Fi access at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks®. Hotspots are available in cafes, bookstores, airports, hotels and universities nationwide.

Fast net access at no additional charge? Nice. All you have to do is follow these simple instructions:

Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone.

Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks.

Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap "continue."

You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message.

Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot.

I do see their point. Automatically recognizing iPhones by MAC address and having it just work would deny people the satisfaction that only comes from really laboring for something—like MMS messages.

This just in: the bigger a target is, the easier it is to hit. Hats off to whoever designed this box for Trader Joe’s! I’m sure it speeds things up for both their cashiers and customers by providing a huge target for the price scanners. This is a perfect use of otherwise-wasted space.

I’m curious to see if they update the rest of their packaging in the future. The top box is a new product (at least at my local Trader Joe’s), while the maple pecan granola on the bottom has been around for a while.

The CAPTCHAs (those pictures of distorted text that you sometimes have to enter to confirm that you’re human) used on the account registration for Firefox Add-Ons page are human-proof:

← wtf!

The letterforms are ambiguous, the font is a distressed/grunge face that leaves orphaned blobs that might be part of letters, might be periods, and might just be random blobs. You can switch to an audio CAPTCHA, which is someone reading numbers that you type in instead of the picture of text. Great. Except that the weird background noise they put in to prevent automated speech recognition mangles the speech into unintelligibility.

After about four failed attempts with the audio and over twenty with the image, I give up.

To add insult to injury, the only reason I was creating an account in the first place is because I wanted to install an "experimental" add-on for Firefox, and you have to be registered to do that:

Why do I have to login to install an experimental add-on?

The add-on site requires that users login to install experimental add-ons as a reminder that you are about to undertake a risk step. [source]

1) Bullshit. You can give me a reminder without me being logged in if you want to. Really, I swear it’s true!

2) By a) making me register for no good reason and b) making the registration process difficult or impossible to complete, everybody loses:

I lose, because I can’t install the useful-looking software I wanted.

The plugin developer loses because I could be providing bug reports and feedback for the in-progress software, if I were able to install it.

The Mozilla Foundation loses because even though their "reason" for making me register is bogus and seems like an attempt to inflate their user numbers, I was willing to do it anyway. They lose a conversion, which they’re probably pretty desperate for given just how lame their justification is.

Conclusion: there’s no reason I should be frustrated at having my time wasted with a broken system (that I shouldn’t really have had to deal with in the first place), without the software, instead of using it—to everyone’s benefit.

Lessons from this experience:

• Test your application. If the goal is to make something understandable by humans and not by machines, make sure it’s understandable by humans.
• Don’t make people jump through unnecessary hoops, like registering for no good reason.
• If you’re going to anyway, make the hoop-jumping process as quick & painless as possible. For example, if you’re going to make someone register, collect the bare minimum of information that you need (not want). If you don’t piss them off, you’ll probably have other chances to get this info; if you do, you won’t get anything.

At first it seems like gratuitous "Web 2.0" lipstick, but software maker Panic’s home page is actually pretty clever. There’s an icon for each application they offer. If you click one, it takes you to the product info page, but if you drag and drop it onto the green arrow on the top left of the page, it immediately starts a download.

Two mints in one!

Jakob Nielsen’s current Alertbox column looks at how much users actually read on the web:

Summary:
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

We’ve known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don’t read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding.

The only thing we’ve been missing is a mathematical formula to quantify exactly how much (or how little) people read online. Now, thanks to new data, we have this as well.

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