I was a very early adopter of programmable thermostats (we didn't call them "smart" back then). We installed a Honeywell Chronotherm III in our condo c.1989. We did not live there long, but I was very happy with the functionality of the Chronotherm.

Since then, I have owned 3-4 programmable thermostats. None of them have had as satisfying a UX as that old Chronotherm. Why? The Chronoterm had 1 key function:

Skip Next Period

Very common use case. You are home sick for the day, and don't want the temperature to go down, like it is programmed for when the house is unoccupied during the workday. Or you have houseguests, and don't want to inflict your penny-pinching overnight setting on them.

Change To Last Period

Also very common. The Skip Next Period use cases above apply, except if you aren't on the ball and forget to choose SKIP in advance. Or you get home from work early. Or have insomnia and wake up early.

Too Many Blue Credit Cards

Maybe it's just me, but our 3 go-to always-carry credit cards are all the same shade of dark blue. Easy to mix them up, especially if there are rules about when each one should be used.

It would be nice if you could order custom colors, including half-and-half combinations. If the card sponsor absolutely had to have their brand color (e.g., Target), that could be confined to the left half (or even 2/3), with consumer's choice for the right portion.

Grocery Store Shopping - Mass List

 Paste in a list of all my items and search them in bulk. Target is the worst for excess clicks.

Some E-Commerce Apps Should Be More Careful About Default Stores

Over the years, I have had a few cases where online apps wind up placing my order at the wrong location. I can't universally rule out user error on my part, but I have some clear-cut cases where the app messed up. In one case (can't remember now which app), when I identified my use case as In-Store Pickup, and an item was not available in my default store, but was available in a nearby store, it auto-switched my order to the nearby store. 

Recently with Panera, the app had a flat-out bug.

Either way, I wonder if more thoughtful preference configuration could help. What jumps to mind is asking the customer to identify which use case best describes their needs:

1. I almost always order for the same location. If an order is ever different than my default location, please ask me to confirm.

1. I order for many different locations. Do not ask me to confirm when the location changes or is new.

For extra-credit, AI could probably be brought to bear, to refine the options, or to default them.

Feature Ideas for Spoiler Prevention

The world does not appreciate the anti-spoiler mindset. It is most crucial in sports. I'm only a modest sports watcher, but ever since it became possible not to suffer through timeouts, halftimes, replay holdup, I have been all-in on tape-delayed viewing. I know I am still in the minority in this regard, which itself is a subject for bafflement.

Better spoiler protection for sports is WAY overdue. I would like to see all social media apps include anti-spoiler-walls in their editors. E.g., "click REVEAL to reveal spoiler text". Same goes for professional publications--newspaper websites are often the worst offenders. 

Some of the Youtube.tv ux is just daft. It should be thoughtful enough to consider, if I have set something to record, I don't want to see the score in the thumbnail.

Spoiler prevention is by no means limited to sports. Plot giveaways are the worst. I will say there is more sensitivity there. But my advanced anti-spoilerism extends even beyond that. If you know how many episodes are left in a series, or how much time is left in a show, that has spoiler-ish implications. I would love options to suppress even that info.

Shift-F2 Zoom: Great Feature that Nobody Bothered to Copy

Shift-F2 zoom was present in the earliest versions of MS-Access, and is still there to this day. Editing a cell or field with a long text string becomes difficult, tedious and error-prone if you can only see a few lines at a time. This is an issue in long database fields, in spreadsheets, in web forms. The terrific solution that MS-Access implemented was Shift-F2, in order to zoom the field into a much bigger editing box. I use it all the time in Access.

20 years later, and nobody seems to have copied this feature. I frequently fill in forms and edit cells that don't have enough real estate to view the entirety of a paragraph or two of text. 

Android Multi-Tasking Button is Over-Rated...

...On tablets, especially, I find it just as easy to press Home-App versus multi-tasking, possibly scroll, then App. On phones it is slightly more useful--because there is a lower chance that the first home screen has the app you need--but only slightly. So is the functionality at all useful? Sure, but I think the legacy implementation of long-press Home button was fine.

I don't want to buy ANYTHING by sending a text

"Android Malware Creeps Into Cellphone Bill". The root cause of this one is easy to diagnose: it's a terrible idea to spend money simply by sending a text.

"No One Uses Smart TV Internet Because It Sucks"

Got to agree with this article, but I would go further. The useability, even for the primary purpose of TV-and DVR-watching, of Comcast and DirecTV software is wretched. This is another industry that is ripe for disruption by Google or, more likely, Apple.

GMaps Usability: Secondary Streets, and Label Type Size

I'm a big fan of Google Maps, on all devices. But I have two long-standing complaints. One--the secondary streets are white against a light tan background. It makes them almost invisible. This is true on the PC and even worse on tablets in daylight or printouts.

Two--the labels on street names are too small. This even after invoking the Labs option to make them bigger. This is just another example of the larger, long-standing theme that smartphones need to be more farsighted-friendly.

Flaw in Smartphone Keyboard Auto-Correct (Don't Fix If It Ain't Broken)

Auto-complete and auto-correct can be very nice. Swiftkey for Android, in particular, can feel like it is reading your mind. However, I would propose that auto-correct should never change a word that is already a valid dictionary word. At best it gets in the way, at worst, it creates weird and occasionally embarrassing results.

Need Better Hyphenation

Reading is one of my major uses of a smartphone. Obviously, screen real-estate is at a premium. There is no room for waste. Thus, as noted, one feature that is crucial, but often lacking, is full-screen mode. Here's another: better hyphenation. Especially in portrait mode, a huge amount of screen real-estate is lost to whitespace, because words don't get divided.

Hate Facebook Email

Third, Google+ conspicuously lacks its own person-to-person message system. It uses its members’ existing email accounts, which don’t need to be on Google’s Gmail system. So if you join Google+, you won’t be saddled with yet another inbox that you need to monitor, and you can reply to messages without having to go to Google+ to do so.

That is a Very Good Thing. Google is doing it this way for obvious reasons which play to their advantage, just as Facebook wanted to bypass normal email accounts, for their own advantage. However, what is good for Google, in this case, is much preferable for me. For multiple reasons, including convenience and control, I detest messaging via Facebook.

(Note: LinkedIn at least makes it easy for its messages to travel via email. If someone sends you a message via LinkedIn, and you have it configured to notify you via email, the notification email is a real email--it contains the full contents of the message, as well as your connections valid email address. So you can immediately take the conversation out of LinkedIn, into email.)

Serif Fonts Acceptable on Smartphones

Serif fonts, like the Times family, look great in print, but not so great on computer monitors. That is because even very good monitors pixel density falls far short of the minimum print standard of 300 dpi. I have noticed, though, that Times looks just fine on my Vibrant smartphone, whose pixel density very closely approaches 300 dpi. I imagine the same is true of the iPad, though in a much larger form factor. I think that, almost as much as the form factor, helps explain why the iPad has been such a successful reading platform. Same for Kindle, sans color.

Newspaper Usability

Daily newspapers are struggling, perhaps even dying. There are a lot of reasons for that, related to the internet and various broadcast media alternatives. I have one more to offer, however: usability. The plain fact is that newspapers are physically inconvenient to "use". The big problems:

1. Form factor. The "broadsheet" form is just incredibly inconvenient for today's on-the-go lifestyle. My gold standard for readably form factor is the thin, staple-bound magazine, where all page-manipulation actions can be managed one-handed. But even the "tabloid" form would be an improvement.
2. Article continuation. Having to flip to another page within the section--and even worse, sometimes in another, physically separate section--is horrible. Of course it horribleness is severely compounded by the Form Factor problem.

The sad part? These are self-inflicted wounds. The newspapers don't have to be this way, they do it by design. In my book, that's bad karma.. Making your product deliberately worse, because it seems to serve your business interests and you think you can lead your customers around with a ring-in-their-nose. Sooner or later, it will blow up in your face.

Vanguard Scared Me

I got this email from Vanguard, in reference to Beth's IRA. Keeping in mind that we have executed ZERO TRANSACTIONS in months, look at what this email says:

1. Confirming your recent transactions.
2. Updated account profile

I was more confident than not that there would be an innocuous explanation, but I couldn't come up with a candidate hypothesis, so the thought of cybertheft did cross my mind. Then I logged into Vanguard's site, and my fears were quickly put to rest. They had simply converted the regular shares to "Admiral" shares. That is slightly beneficial. but essentially it is "inside baseball" within Vanguard. In the meantime, a good little scare.

In hindsight, I think they might have sent us a paper statement a month ago saying they would do this, but I certainly didn't recall it in the moment.

Office 2007 UI - Capricious Changes

I have used MS-Word for Windows since the pre-Win 3.0 days, going back to 1989. For all that time, the icon to "reveal formatting" has been the paragraph marker. I could find it in my sleep. A couple of months ago, my daughter was having formattting problems with Office 2007. I told her to turn on formatting marks. She responded "Huh?" I told her "Click the Paragraph Marker". "I don't see one". I came over, searched high and low and didn't find it. I finally gave up, and went to the dialog box to accomplish my purpose, of turning on the formatting marks.

Just now, I stumbled.across the "new and improved" icon. To me, it doesn't at all suggest what the function is, if anything, it looks like a font-size or color picker. Argh!

Grabber/Dragger Functionality

Canonical example is the "hand" cursor in PDF fiiles. Why isn't this universal in apps where you use more than the full screen? And why aren't there more ways to change w/o accessing the menu? e.g., CTRL-Click, ALT-Click.

Readability Bookmarklet

I just installed the Readability Bookmarklet. Quick review--I like it. Now how about an Android version? :)

Stack Overflow Is A Marvel of Useability

I have been aware of Stack Overflow for some months, and have looked briefly at it once or twice. But this week I had the first occasion to post my own question, so I spent more time and much more focused time than ever before. The core concepts for Stack Overflow are terrific. But the many terrific useability touches just seal the deal. This is the best useability experience I have had in a long, long time. Some things that stand out, in no particular order:

• The insta-preview is perfect.
• Smart parsing of my offline-edited, pasted-in question was very impressive (converted *word* into italics, converted"-" into bullet).
• Everything is BIG and easy-to-read (Atwood must be following his own advice about Fitt's Law)
• The suggest-answers-before-submit was: 1) Painless, unlike the typical step-by-step, HTML-round-trip approach; 2) Pretty accurate (though ultimately did not answer or change my question).
• The auto-complete for tags is very well-done.

So I would say that Jeff Atwood is doing a good job eating his own dogfood when he says "relentlessly polishing and improving every little part of it -- no matter how trivial -- you're not executing".