A Usability Disaster

July 11, 2007 | Written by

Last night a friend left my apartment to bike home to his nearby neighborhood in Brooklyn. Earlier in the day we had been discussing the movie Airplane – his favorite movie, one of the few DVDs he owns, and one which I’ve somehow avoided seeing despite its daily appearance on Comedy Central in the 90s (my childhood). As he was leaving, a very clear and what I thought practical idea came to mind: "Great! I’ll stay right here and finally be able to watch Airplane as soon as he gets home — home where he keeps his Airplane DVD."

In this instance, my mind made a bad connection: His physical closeness to the DVD would somehow facilitate my ability to watch it. I was not thinking in digital paramaters (no .mov files were involved in this thought) but, rather, I just rationalized something like: "I can see that film because he’ll be able to instantly send it to me."

I do this all the time as of late. I walk to the deli, thirsty for some sort of soda, and find a few long rows of mixed up bottles. My urge is to command them sorted! Deli: show me…just the diet ones. Now, keep Diet but also limit to just brand name sodas. What I really want is to Google search for "Diet Gingerale." Or better, Google map it within the store.

At the start of this posting I linked ‘Airplane’ to it’s IMDB page (which you probably thought was a wierd move) but I did it because I was told that blogs are supposed to link to other sites online – keep things interactive, integrated into the rest of what’s happening on the web. What I also wanted to do, but couldn’t, was link your body into the deli where I was analyzing soda the other day.

I bet we all do this. We forget that the physical world doesn’t function as does the digital world and, after realizing our mistake, get totally disappointed with the disgusting usibility standards of this physical world! And how slow! How slow it all is!

Its true that every day the two worlds come closer and closer to unification. But in the meantime, there’s going to be a lot of impatient people like me wishing physical objects could be attached to Gmail messages and that Pizza and Diet Gingerale could just be printed out during lunchtime.

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