The one thing I admire the most on the brand new Macbook Air is its trackpad. As you may know the Macbook Air comes with an extreme trackpad where you can perform a variety of finger gestures like those in iPhone. Obviously, such features not only bring trackpads to the next level but they raise the bar for competitors as well. Finger gestures are like shortcuts for a keyboard; they provide an advanced but yet efficient way for using an existing device.

However, from my point of view, the Macbook Air has a major design and aesthetic issue. I don’t like the click button… or should I say that I don’t need the click button? In fact, I don’t get it… If a trackpad is smart enough to perform all those magic gestures, what do I need a click button for? I just tap the trackpad and that’s it. I can do this even on the relatively lame trackpad my macbook has.

Steve Jobs has always supported that the second button is not necessary on both trackpads and mouses (that’s why Macbook and Macbook Pro comes with a single click button). Well, I think that the time has come and we can even abandon the remaining single click button. After all it’s more than useless on a Macbook Air and it takes space; we need more space for our magic finger gestures

In fact, some ATMs provide your money first and then your credit card which I find very wrong! Why? Let’s assume the following scenario: it’s night, I need urgently one hundred pounds — I drive to the nearest ATM, insert my credit card, then my pin number and eventually get my money. Since my mission (to get some money) is accomplished, I return back to my car fully satisfied that my wallet is full again. Meanwhile, ATM ejects my credit card making the day for the next customer. The chances are I will not notice that my credit card is missing until the next time I will need it. Too late, don’t you think?

Things are getting even worse when someone takes into consideration that until few weeks ago, ATMs were ejecting your credit card first. It goes without saying that the action of receiving the money has been associated as the last action of the transaction by many people, making the process even more error-prone.

I don’t know what led to these changes but my guess is a bad updating process. I expect that the corresponding support centers will accept a large number of incoming calls regarding missing cards. Hopefully, after a lot of complaints the original operational mechanism will be restored.

A great example of this phenomenon is something that I like to call “the paradox of the broken link”. I am sure that many of you came across this issue either as developers or as eventual users. It is really interesting how a broken link is differently perceived.

Firstly, let’s focus on the eventual users. They feel that the website hides something that is should be visible and accessible! In other words, they feel like something is out there but they can not reach it! A matter of great deal and importance. If you have trouble to place yourself in this situation, imagine that you are trying desperately to read a very important file from a semi-damaged CD… you know the feeling, right?

On the other hand, there is nothing more ordinary than a broken link for a web developer; especially during the development phase. A broken link can be easily fixed and therefore is not considered of great importance. A file is missing, a part of the website is still under development but that’s all!

The same principles stand for a non-functional button as well. I come across this phenomenon occasionally when I try to involve users during the process of the design and development. I always try to explain to the customers and users that what they are going to see is not a fully functional system and they should focus on a particular area. But every time I ended up with comments like “This link is not working” or “There is something wrong with this button” etc.

Lately I feel that this is my fault, that I use a wrong protocol and as a consequence I fail to give an appropriate definition of the problem and lead the users to a particular area. Maybe, it is time to do some relative reading and reconsider the protocol

At the time of writing, Norman is preparing another book titled “The design future things”. Fortunately, he has published a draft of the first chapter “Cautious Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens”. The following is the last paragraph which outlines the concept of the book:

We fool ourselves into thinking that we can solve these problems by adding even more intelligence to the devices, even more automation. We fool ourselves into thinking that it is only a matter of communication between the devices and people. I think the problems are much more fundamental, unlikely to be solved through these approaches. As a result I call for an entirely different approach. Augmentation, not automation. Facilitation, not intelligence. We need devices that have a natural interaction with people, not a machine interaction. Devices that do not pretend to communicate, that are based on the fact that they do not and cannot. It is time for the science of natural interaction between people and machines, an interaction very different than what we have today.

I am really looking forward to this. At the moment, I am reading the “Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing” by Adam Greenfield.

After saving all the photographs on her disk, she tried to delete all those emails. But unfortunately her intentions came to a halt, when she received this unfriendly message:

ERROR: Could not complete request.
Query: COPY 410 “Trash”
Reason Given: UID COPY failed: Message copy failed: Disk quota exceeded

She did not give attention to the error message and tried to delete one by one, but the message kept showing up. That is when we decided to have a look at the message, understand what went wrong and attempt to fix things. After ten minutes of fighting and digging into available options, we did it! We were heroes

But why did she skip the message in the first place? Why ten minutes were required by two students (with computer science background) to solve this problem? There are a lot of things going wrong with that message…

First of all, the given reason for the failure is placed at the bottom of the message! In such cases, users scan for useful and helpful information and it should be placed on the top; they do not care about the type of error or what query was attempted to be executed. Well, that kind of information might be helpful for developers, but definitely they have no meaning for the eventual users.

Secondly, the given reason states that the copy failed due to the fact that the disk quota exceeded. Wait a minute … she did not attempt to copy, but to delete those messages. Did she do something wrong? No, definitely no! The query indicates that a copy to the trash folder were attempted and failed. Hmm, here is the scenario: message is copied from inbox to trash, before gets deleted. Even in that case, messages in the trash should not count towards the quote limit!

To conclude, in order to find a workaround for this problem, you should firstly understand the developer model and later on use your fantasy to identify the right option. Obviously, that error message could be replaced by a more friendly and helpful one, like the following:

A copy of this message will not be kept in trash folder and it will be deleted permanently. Whould you like to proceed? Yes – No

Or at least something like that (this one reminds me of Windows error messages)

Deletion of message failed. Please uncheck the “Use trash” option and try again.