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Expect more from Sears

We bought a DVD recorder a few days ago. Before this, we had already attempted to buy one three times, but each time we had decided not to keep it because the machine was unsatisfactory. Of course it is new technology and all, but still. With the digital Personal Video Recorder, I am not entirely sure why we would also need a DVD recorder (bits is just bits), but my wife seemed to have set her mind to it. I am such a bad male, since I am not even interested in gadgets or widgets or any other technology per se. Perhaps I should start getting some steroids or testosterone injections.

At least in retrospect, the most humorous of these three DVD recorders was our second attempt to buy one. It was some cheap machine manufactured in some backwards factory in China that Sears had just slapped their name on, apparently trying to save money. Asians usually manufacture good electronics, but this machine must have been some not-meant-for-export local knockoff of a knockoff. First of all, after setting the machine up, we tried to unsuccessfully turn it on. We kept flicking the mechanical switch and testing that the cords were properly plugged, but nothing happened. Finally, my wife noticed that there is another mechanical on/off switch at the back of the machine, and both switches must be turned on for the machine to operate. I am sure that there is some reason in the internal design of the machine that necessitates this idiocy that I have never seen anywhere else in my life.

The instruction sheet and the display texts were of course absolutely horrible English. For a while, I thought of scanning a few pages for other people to laugh at, but I am sure you can already imagine them. And in the end, this didn't really matter, since even though I was able to mentally translate these to proper English and decipher the intention behind each sentence, the instructions still didn't make any sense. The internal logic of the machine was arcane. Trying to set it up to even record something required digging up and changing all kinds of hidden settings that had no apparent logical connection to each other. These people certainly never heard of the design maxim of Apple that the user must never be forced to do and remember things that the machine can do and remember, especially when those things are totally meaningless for the user but necessary for the internal workings of the machine.

Of course, the software in the machine was buggy and slow and sometimes the whole machine would completely froze, not reacting to any kind of user input, and had to be turned off and on again. I guess that some buffer overflows weren't fully debugged or something. Even worse, this sometimes happened during recording, making that disk unusable and of course losing that show. And oh yes, if you later tried to record something else to the same disk, your earlier recordings just might disappear, even there was still supposedly plenty of room on that disk.

Needless to say, we took the machine back to Sears as soon as we could. We later got another machine, a Panasonic, which felt like a summer breeze after that previous ordeal. Everything in that machine was so easy and effortless so that we would have kept it except for one weakness: the machine had the ability to remember only one show to record so that you couldn't set it to tape one show at 8 and then another at 10 while you were away that night. I know, unbelievable: I guess the designers of this machine suddenly thought that it is still the year 1980. These days with the Personal Video Recorder, this point would be moot, but it certainly broke the deal at that time.

I enthusiastically agree with Tog's argument that usability testing should be a compulsory subject in every engineering school, and so that it includes observing real users (instead of fellow engineering students) trying to use some system. Speaking of which, Tog has come back after a break and has a new usability essay "The Scott Adams Meltdown: Anatomy of a Disaster". (No, it's not about what you think it is.) And I hope that everyone has read his "Bughouse", a list of idiotic software bugs that persist after years.

I actually have one bug of my own to add to this list. For some reason, most Blogger templates use the date of the post as a permalink to that post. This is abolutely idiotic and makes no sense, and I have to wonder about the person who first came up with the idea of date being a permalink to a post, instead of a link to a page containing the posts of that day or something logical. I remember how in the beginning of my Finnish blogging career, it took me three months to realize that the date link is the permalink to that post, while I wondered all this time why it often seems to be so difficult to find permalinks in other blogs. For this reason, I edited the standard template used in this blog so that the post title works as its permalink. This is how it should be, BlogSpot.

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