Not sure that any UX designer nowadays even knows how to make a function UX - most of them seem to be heading towards making everything the same colour, having no consistency between different parts of the app, and my personal favourite the pop-under window. They mostly look shit as well.

I think the problem also might be that the management often thinks that Full Stack also means UX. So they make things as they go along. "If it's easy for me to use, then anyone should be able to use it."

Then the software turns into a mess and they decide to hire a dedicated UX - which has quite an impossible job:

UX: "Here is the new optimised flow, that would improve usability with the least possible amount of changes"

Devs: "Oh we can't do that, we would have to rewrite that part of application."

Manager: "Can we at least change colours?"

UX *please kill me*

I've been on the other side of this, as the developer of a large system when a UX designer was called in.

The UX designer couldn't come in-house to talk with the devs, and the scope he was given by senior management only ever grew.

By the time he was finished, he had produced a design for a new section of the website that would need a Google-sized team to pull off. Can't blame him - it looked good and it was what he was asked to design. But there was no way in hell I'd ever have the time or resource to build it.

"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.

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

Sometimes it's the simplest things that they get wrong: for an example, a timesheet data entry page which requires the start and end times to be in hh:mm format, but which not only does not automatically calculate and populate an hours worked field, requires it - without comment or cue - to be filled in in decimal hours.

Which reminds me, I haven't submitted myself to it this week yet.

That's similar to the brain dead "developers" who are so incompetent that they are unable to parse the spaces out of a credit card number. This is the number that on almost every card is presented as four sets of four digits with spaces between for ease of human use must be entered without spaces.

Phone numbers that don't go (xxx) xxx-xxxx (Talkin' to you Ticketmaster Canada) and postal codes that don't go XXXXX......

Addresses are the worse. In the US I assume that everyone has address that's street, town, state, zip, but the UK needs way more lines. Clients I deal with have Office Name, Building Name/No, Industrial Estate Name, Street, Town. Postcode. That's four items to fit in the single field for "Street".

Actually its worse in North America

Company name, unit\suite\office number(s) building number avenue\street number, city, postcode, province\state & country.

"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.

Like the firefox "ou, we have a problem with the certificate", require you to SCROLL even on a 4k screen with scaling set to 100%?

Don't forget 8-point grey text on a slightly lighter grey background.

"I want to speak with your manager!"

"I'm cancelling my subscription to Private Eye!"

It's all about the drama. Just find a workaround and move on.

Extreme updating, on the other hand, should be a new competitive sport.

The Evernote forums are full of hissy-fitters like this. Rather than ask for help, they type furious posts about how terrible Evernote has become and that they are leaving for Notepad or some other shite.

I try to respond with "Thanks for letting us know" every time but I can't catch them all.

I had QUITE a few cases where the contact via social meida made things finally work!

Last case, where I am waiting for them to fix it: [1]SK-hynix SSD site . Starts loading, and then error 404. We will se how long. (wait, isn't that a BORK BORK BORK? Maybe being prominently on El Reg News-Site will FINALLY get their asses up to fix this!)

[1] https://ssd.skhynix.com/

Funny, you may be running another program on your computer, the site loads fine for me :D

Just tried again with Firefox and Edge on a German Windows 11: Nope, still bugged. Starts loading and then BOOM 404.

W8... [1]video uploaded now.

[1] https://youtu.be/ovGbgpCwUY4

Worked for me too...

It'll be your P(r)oxy Server maybe ;)

It also breaks for me...

You're not in the UK or US, are you? Or Japan or Korea... More to the point, your computer's locale isn't English, Japanese, or Korean. (Mine, for example, is Romanian.)

The fault lies in this awesome piece of code, called in an onLoad event, which is redirecting you (us!) to 'unknown/':

function languageRedirect() {

const languageOverride = localStorage.getItem('lang');

const language = languageOverride ? languageOverride : navigator.language.toLocaleLowerCase().slice(0,2);

const langPath = {

'en': '/',

'ja': '/jp',

'ko': '/kr',

}[language];

const path = window.location.pathname;

if (!path.includes(langPath)) {

window.location.replace(langPath+path);

}

}

That's... a spectacular bit of typically incompetent code. The type of code that "works for the developer" because they are American but spectacularly fails for a vast amount of the rest of the world. Just don't get me started on the fact that most American developers are so incompetent they don't know that the Operating System is capable of outputting the date in a format useful for the use and not in North American format only.

To be honest, I'm not sure what astonishes me more - the terrible code, or the fact that someone, somewhere must really be actively ignoring the massive red flags being flown by their server logs and/or analytics.

Makes me feel fairly confident that if I wore a black hat it wouldn't take me very long to find some unpatched vulnerabilities on those servers (they do appear to be using Wordpress, after all...)

Thank you! MAYBE I could have found that too, MAYBE, if I would have been willing to... But when you get a certain age you stop fixing a lot of other peoples mistakes :D.

EDIT: This is one of the reasons why I read more and more TheReg, the commentards are better.

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.

Thanks for helping out with our beta testing. (and code review, and alpha testing, and ...)

Quite funny, with header `Accept-Language: de-DE,de;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.5,en;q=0.3` I get the 404, with header `Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.5` it works...

This kind of approach to software updates seems to have inspired OnePlus. Over the last month, they have issued something like six OTA updates which are supposed to upgrade various mobiles to their incredibly delayed version of Android 12. The bugs have been many and serious - like not being able to end a call, disconnecting any Bluetooth device after 10 minutes and needing to jump through hoops to get it working again, plus many more entertaining problems.

All clear signs of an approach to testing which consists of "push it out and see how many complaints there are". Thankfully for me in the EU, they have been exclusively inflicting these random builds on the Indian market, which they appear to have unilaterally adopted as their unwilling alpha testers.

Meanwhile, although EU users are not being assaulted with bug ridden builds, they seem to have run out of developers to integrate and push Android security updates to keep our phones safe from exploits targetting the latest known Android security holes.

So to anyone contemplating buying a OnePlus phone, I'd recommend a quick visit to their community forums before you part with your hard earned cash. I sure wish I had done that first!

Recently aimlessly scrolled through Freeview listings in search of SOMETHING worth watching, and tried Yaas! and it’s sister channel Ketchup Kids. Both channels loaded a Home Screen and then crashed my Sony Android TV (TL;DR - just don’t buy one) and forced a reboot. On to the web chat with Freeview, who said it must be my TV and would I contact Sony. Except Sony last updated this TV 3 years ago. I gently suggested they refer the matter to tech support, perhaps Android 2019 is not over the hill yet.

Freeview are useless - any conversation with them always starts with a 15 minute argument about what transmitter I'm on because their postcode records are wrong for half of West Sussex. Then even if anything turns up purporting to be a fix, it arrives two days after the problem has either sorted itself or been sorted by random button pushing/change in weather conditions/god only knows what it's done

Weather conditions in west Sussex?

I have a hose, I've been watering a garden, I even spilled a little on myself. It's a warm garden today but it's very moist. I could send you a video of me hosing the garden.

I trolled my sister in London with a hosepipe video yesterday. End of the Edinburgh Festival we are searching all English and Welsh visitors for stolen water. West Sussex, northern Sahara.

"searching all English and Welsh visitors for stolen water"

People are usually 60% water, make sure you stop any that are above that.

>>TL;DR - just don’t buy one

The name Sony Android was not enough warning NOT to buy it?

It could be called KickYouInTheBalls SpikeYourDrinkWithDrano and still not be such an obvious red flag

The attitude I see a lot in software and design can be summed up like this: "I like it and it works for me, therefore you will like it and it will work for you". I call it myopia. The people who make the stuff are special -- just look at their trophy! -- and they know their ideas are great and wonderful. If you don't like it, then the flaw is with you, never them. If it doesn't work for you, then you need to be like them.

Take for example websites. You complain about a website not working. "What browser are you using?" I respond Firefox. Their response: "Just use Google Chrome." In other words, because they use Chrome and they like Chrome they expect you to be just like them. Testing on other browsers. Nah. Just be like me. They use Google Chrome, they have powerful computers, they have ultra-fast internet; ergo, you do too. "Just be like me" is the way they think.

Another example, Windows 7 and earlier would ask you which timezone you live in. Now, everyone lives in the Pacific timezone because Microsoft's home is in the Pacific timezone. Never you mind that the majority of Americans don't even live in the Pacific timezone. "Just be like me" is the way Microsoft thinks. And since they are special -- just look at their two trophies! -- they will suffer no criticism, no matter how legitimate. They cannot understand why you would not like to surrender your personal information to use their product, why you are complaining about drivers installing without your permission, or why you are frustrated that years of muscle memory is being thrown away for a new start menu.

"Just be like me. I have been told all my life that I am special, so it must be true. If there is a flaw, it must be you." I call it myopia. And it is very frustrating.

> "I like it and it works for me, therefore you will like it and it will work for you".

You perfectly described the Windows 8/11 UI makers.

I think it's worse than "it works OK for me". I don't believe that devs really use the software they create - I mean really, really use all the bells and whistles. No one who's ever had to create and manage documents in Word with corporate fonts, outlining, variable headers and footers, images, contents, footnotes and indexing can ever have had anything to do with developing the bloody programme unless their version of the use-case was to drive users to point of throwing the monitor out of the bloody window.

A major version or two ago, Microsoft intentionally threw out all the central management of styles and document templates instead forcing everything to be locally based or that new documents are instead created in SharePoint and not within the application itself. These were the shared templates and styles directories that got removed in favour of local template and styles only, then checks were added to ensure that creative system managers didn't redirect these local template and style locations to network locations.

In the early 00s I worked for a large company which had a "rebranding". Head office created a set of templates for Word and Powerpoint to make sure that the corporate styles were used properly - they had their own fonts, colours, logos, bullets, etc. all trademarked. This sounded like a great idea, until the templates were sent out. I'd expected proper Word/Powerpoint Template files. Instead, they were just example documents where someone had formatted the Normal text and added logos, bullets etc. to some styles. To create a new Word document you opened the locked sample document, then deleted a load of lorem ispum before starting. Problem was they'd only done the Normal style. So as soon as you created an outline level, header, ToC, or anything that wasn't just a paragraph it defaulted from the expensive company font to Arial. They'd also put the company logo in as a page background, not an image anchored to the page in a header, so it messed up when we went to A4 in the UK or wanted a landscape page. Powerpoint was just as bad.

Turns out they got a quote for creating a proper set of templates, thought it was too expensive so gave it to one of the head office admins to sort out. I bet that millions were spent across the company by people trying to sort it out on an individual basis.

I had this problem and was askedi if I could use Internet explorer - I said no - I'm on Linux.

"Hmm we only tested on IE"

I can't stop laughing...

I've recently been thinking just how ubiquitous this attitude has become.

Having inkjet printer problems? Don't use inkjets. Use laserjets like me. No, I don't need to print. Nor should you!

Trouble with IOS? Use Android. Trouble with Android? Use IOS.

Blah, blah.

I remember the old days was when we tried a bit to help others to achieve their goals. Not continually try to turn them into clones.

I try to tell stories about what works for me. Knowing I'm reasonably excentric. If my story isn't liked, make up your own. Experiments in living, and all of that (J. S. Mill).

Best wishes,

Bob

" Who were the beta testers for these two cloud-based software service providers? "

You

Sometime n the early 1990s I bought some accounting software. It was unable to reliably produce invoices numbered in consecutive order which is a basic expectation. Creating invoices and getting them paid is the core business function. Everything else is just there to assist this process.

Contacted the company to submit a bug report.

"You need to pay us to fix it, they said".

"I don't want it fixed 'cos I moved to software that actually works. But you might want to fix it for others"

"You still have to pay to submit a bug report".

I gracefully declined. The company was Intuit. Hopefully they have improved their (ex)-customer experience and software.

That reminds me doing assessment of a project. Client wanted to split monolith into microservices, because investors said it will look cool for the press release.

Okay.

First thing comes to mind... where are the tests?

"Oh that. Our users help us test the software. If something is wrong, we obviously fix it straight away."

A common practice known as User Test Driven Development.

It never ceases to amaze me that software devs can hold two conflicting ideas: "Well duh, ALL software has bugs, obvs." and "MY code is PERFECT, how DARE you suggest otherwise".

The latter leads them to instantly conclude that problems are caused by the user or whatever else. Support agents are told to stay with that line upon pain of never getting an answer again, so that's what we users get.

Usually, it's not a bug, it's an undocumented requirement...

But if you describe an "undocumented requirement" in social media then it's often seen as a complaint by the original creators and they will downgrade all conversations that you create to try and solve the problems. Another side of this is that often apps are updated in a way that "works" but illustrates that the new app doesn't understand how the old app was written to work.

As in 'when I use your software my laptop catches fire', where 'doesn't make laptop catch fire' is an undocumented requirement?

One man's undocumented requirement is another man's totally obvious thing.

Here, a user will write a post inviting suggestions to assist with a problem whereupon fellow users try to oblige.

I beg to differ.

The primary function of most forums is for a small group of people to take over and insult anyone who seeks help.

The closest they ever get to 'helping' is to state that the question has already been asked 'lots of times' (note: 'asked' - not necessarily answered), not provide any pointers to the supposed thread(s) (none of which came up when you initially searched), and then get back to hurling insults.

Nine times out of ten, they don't understand what you asked and refer to something else entirely.

"they don't understand what you asked and refer to something else entirely."

"You should install Linux instead" :-D