I’ve been slammed being critical of designs for my day job, but today’s encounter with Logitech’s software was so awkward I had to post. Some might just consider this a flat-out bug instead of a design issue. Still, mechanisms like this need to account for fail cases.

For quite some time I’ve been dealing with buggy Logitech Unifying Software. Today, again, I checked for updates. The app showed it was up-to-date. But how could this be? It’s been a year+ since the last time it updated. Did they abandon it? Let’s walk through it.

First, I check for updates

Simple, right? It fires off this screen. It spins for a minute, then shows this

At this point you would think it the software has checked for updates and it discovered the latest version is installed. Right? Well, like me, you’d be wrong. Continue reading →

The payment processing company Square has spent the last few years revolutionizing payment processing. For many years I consulted with businesses of many sizes with ecommerce. I don’t know how many companies I walked through the process of getting a merchant account, and explaining to the customer all of the pain they were about to suffer. Many companies came along and offered very, very small improvement for a significant increase in cost. From my perspective, Square changed all that. Suddenly a friend who self funded and self published a children’s book could setup a table at another friend’s event and take payments with ease.

Square has set the bar pretty high. So when a couple months back I ran across a really, really irritating issue with them, I was quite surprised.

Often when we purchase from a vendor that uses Square, we probably don’t care about a receipt. It gets emailed to us, and that’s good enough. But what happens when we need to use that receipt in an expense report? I know that’s clearly not their primary use case, but it shouldn’t be an edge case that gets ignored. However, Square ignores it. Let’s take a look. Continue reading →

In this edition of The UX Critic, we’re going to talk about discoverability. Much of the time I’m on the web, I’m just a user. I’m pretty good at turning off my UX hat… otherwise I’d probably go insane… and just being a user.

Camping season is coming soon, so I’ve been exploring some parks and looking to make reservations. One park is run by the Washington State Parks system. I Googled for Washington State Parks Reservations and came across a result at the top titled “Reservations | Washington State Parks and Recreation”. Yeah, that sounds right.

The result is http://parks.state.wa.us/232/Making-Reservations

Take a look at this full screenshot and let me know where you would click to make a reservation.

Continue reading →