Day: March 7, 2006

Wil Wheaton: Don’t watch cable news with a fever

This is a few days old, but I enjoyed this post by Wil Wheaton so much, I just had to link to it.  I’ll go ahead and quote the part that particularly made me pay attention to the post:

This means that I’ve done a ton of reading today, and I’ve subjected myself to a few hours of CNN. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. No wonder so many Americans are misinformed, if they are getting their information from cable news. These douchebags do everything they can to create controversy where there is none, and they don’t even try to hide it.

Example: Wolf Blitzer, on The Situation Room (which is only watchable because of Jack Cafferty), just teased a segment on Jon Stewart thusly: “He says it will be the most controversial Academy Awards, ever . . .”

Read on for the reality of what Jon Stewart actually said.

[tags]Wil Wheaton, CNN[/tags]

Bad design frustrates users

(via Tingilinde)

I’ve link to Joel on design before because he has good things to say about bad design. I’ve got some hands on experience with a TVisto playback device that seems to have a bad user interface that I’ll write about later (I want to work more with it before I declare definitively that the interface is bad). Yesterday, news.com ran an article about the problems many people have using modern gadgets with poor design problems.

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a researcher said on Monday.

. . .

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working before giving up, the study found.

[tags]Product design, gadgets[/tags]