Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: "You need to listen to your users more" - Offsite Experts

"Experts". Riiiight.

Maybe it was the experts.

That's all a bit non-violent for the BOFH.

Re: "You need to listen to your users more"

Almost!

Re: No fenestration?

I didn't see that one coming. "Internal relationship manager" had the ring of underlying cause on a death certificate.

Re: Nothing changes

GIGO

Re: "Just be like me"

"For printing A3 photographs?"

Can you thing of a different use case than yours?

Re: UX Designer?

Worse that Ariel?

Re: UX Designer?

On reflection, given their fondness for putting huge chunks of white space in their page design it seems even stranger that they can't deal with it in data.

Re: Just stop there. That gets carried over to the UK. …

"in a US address really represents a US post office"

In the UK "city" has a very specific legal meaning in that it denotes somewhere with a royal charter. It doesn't even have to be a very big place.

In Royal Mail parlance - or at least in terms of the field name in PAF - the equivalent term would be "Post town". I don't expect the US to actually use UK terminology but they could at least think that their S/W might be used where their norms don't apply and try for a neutral term.

But it's worse than that. I've seen it used in genealogical S/W where the historical context could well pre-date the US postal service so even for a US location it would be an anachronism. It's not adherence to some standard, it's just lack of thought.

As to street numbers "preferred" doesn't mean anything. S/W needs to be able to accept the actual format of the real data without preferences or assumptions. If you can't do that you run into trouble. I had major problem getting a parcel delivered from the German vendor whose site didn't accept non-numeric addresses, not helped by DPD insisting that my address is at some single location at the geographic centre of the post code and I get the impression that their drivers aren't even allowed to deviate from that even if it's wrong.

In fact it's just the sort of thing where calling them out on social media might be effective. It's almost - but not quite - worth getting an account.

Re: Nooooo, it's always the software.

It was and they were interviewing candidates to find out how to do the tuning.

Re: "What are you trying to achieve by this ?"

This.

It may well be that the product doesn't do what the user's trying to do or it does it in a different way*. The first step in problem solving is to work out what the problem is. (The zeroth step is to identify that you have a problem.)

*Example - although I eventually discovered the answer without askingt: The recent addition of mail to Vivaldi clearly shows custom folders on the UI but no obvious way to set them up. It turns out that something which is a click away on TBird can't be done at all in Vivaldi. The "custom folders" just reflect those, if any, which are set up on the server.

Re: "Just be like me"

Judging by the complaints about inkjet printers there are an awful lot of people with a use case which is better suited to a laser than an inkjet. Which is the better response: keep on with the inkjet or switch to laser?

Re: UX Designer?

Dark grey on black is also a favoured choice.

Re: UX Designer?

You describe a broken process leading to a broken result. Cut out all those middlemen and just pay a decent salary for a few intelligent developers. You might even break the iron triangle and deliver something quicker, better and cheaper.

Re: So, obvious answers aside, …

"recipient; delivery address; city..."

Just stop there. That gets carried over to the UK. A lot of UK citizens may live in a city but many don't.

Then there's an assumption that every house has a number. I've run into that trying to order stuff online where with a site refusing to accept an address without one.

Re: UX Designer?

"unable to parse the spaces out of a credit card number"

Add to that - surprise, surprise - DVLA. The V11 has a 16 digit number in groups of 4. The web application accepts a maximum of 16 characters. It doesn't matter whether they can parse spaces or not, there isn't room for them.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

It can be frustrating to try to report it to the S/W's bug reporting site and find it gets marked as a duplicate of bug xxxxxxx which has been confirmed, then discovered that there are numerous other duplicates and either/or it hasn't been been assigned to a dev/someone has diagnosed the problem,written an tested a patch and it's still not been incorporated.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

They're also hymenoptera but as some of them are nasty to others I thought they might get a bit aerated about them.

Re: Quite contrary!

Unfortunately none of the other comments included the words SK-hynix SSD site to make it easier to be found when someone Googles SK-hynix SSD site or eve DDG's SK-hynix SSD site or Bings SK-hynix SSD site.

Re: Social media

A lot of companies now employ social media staff. They're probably graduates in media studies (probably be now there are social media studies) and thus enjoy higher status amongst manglement that those unspeakable techie types on user support and development. Unwittingly they've created a mechanism to make them have to actually respond to the customers they've ignored for so long.

Re: It's not always the developers fault

"Rogue Software" just dumping on the product and its vendor would be fine. It doesn't matter whether the fault was the developer or the manglement. It all looks the same to the punter and being shamed might force some vendors to sort themselves out.

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

Questions Written To Fit Answers Which Were Really Points Marketing Wished To Make

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

"Many requests have clearly made no effort to determine if the same issue has been reported before"

This is not necessarily as straightforward as you might think. The words which user Z uses to describe the problem are not necessarily the same as those used by users A to Y so all those questions are missed. User Y had much the same problem, as did user X...

And FAQs are apt to be, in reality, QWFPETA

Questions We Found Particularly Easy To Answer. or even QWTFAWWRPMWTM

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

How about a hornet?

Re: '...own web-hosted user community forums...'

This doesn't happen on Linux forums.

Re: UX Designer?

"The UX designer couldn't come in-house to talk with the devs"

Was that couldn't as in couldn't be arsed to or couldn't as in not allowed to? Just trying to fix the blame.

Re: UX Designer?

UX *please kill me* "Please yourself. Here's my invoice."

Re: UX Designer?

"making everything the same colour, having no consistency between different parts of the app, and my personal favourite the pop-under window."

Throw in maximum white space as well. If you only have a few controls on the page it should be possible to see all of them without going full screen and scrolling.

Re: colour me sceptical

A long time ago, when round pin sockets were still lingering in older UK houses I had a unversal plug. There was a slider adjacent to the flex entry point which would uncover different sets of holes in the plug face to let different sets of pins fall through - I think the selected pins could be rotated to lock them into place.

It was very clever except for one detail. It didn't have a conventional cable clamp, maybe it would have got in the way of the slider. It had plastic fitting which just clamped round the cable with a self tapper so that pulling the cable would have jammed the fitting up against the side of the plug and held it firm that way. The self tapper was so positioned that it could easily bridge the line and neutral....

Re: Fun with RJ-45!

"And you sit there wondering what possible technical reason could lead people to actually choose token ring."

Technical reasons vs the market power of IBM at the time.

Re: colour me sceptical

"they are not compatible"

That was more or less the point.

I used one as my sole terminal for several months. Ever since I've tended to be quite happy with xterm & the like displayed at about that screen size.

Maybe the effort of lugging the luggable* had drained all the blood from his brain.

*Those who experienced the era of the luggables aren't going to complain about even the heaviest laptop.

Ask TfL about New Johnston.

Re: Is there a single printer vendor...

"a Peterbilt of printing"

I think that needs explaining for those of us on this side of the pond although I suppose the sentiment can be grasped.

For the wider point I haven't seen any such problems with my Brother printer. It accepts 3rd party cartridges without complaint.