Over the weekend Sue (my wife) undertook the monumental feat of walking 26.2 miles around the streets of London. As you might imagine she took lots of photographs of this adventure and she wanted them printing out so that it was easier to show people.

Printing – simple concept.

Last night was the first chance I had to go and get the prints. I anticipated that this would be a couple of short interruptions to my evening. It’s a 5 minute drive to the local supermarket (Asda) and I know that I would have to go drop of the files and pick them up later.

As you can probably guess by the title of this post things didn’t work out that way:

• Put required photos on USB memory stick. Everyone supports USB, right?
• Drive to Asda
• Walk to photo booth.
• Look for USB slot, but no slot to be found .
• Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered .
• There is no USB slot. Even though there has to be USB within the machine, there is no USB slot. I’ll need to come back with the files on a different format.
• Walk to car.
• Drive home.
• Put pictures onto Compact Flash card. That should be fine. Consider putting them on CD as well to be sure but know that the machine has a CF slot so should be fine.
• Drive back to Asda.
• Walk to photo booth.
• Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
• Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
• Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…11…stops… but there are 62 pictures on this card .
• Start again.
• Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
• Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
• Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…8…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
• Remove card.
• Go to second machine.
• Follow instructions on screen and insert Compact Flash card.
• Screen tells me that it is reading the card.
• Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…12…stops… but there are still 62 pictures on this card .
• Ask lady behind counter if she can help. Shouldn’t have bothered . “We see lots of problems with those type of card, sorry”. Decide that I am not going to be beaten by some poxy machine.
• Walk to car.
• Drive home.
• Put pictures onto CD.
• Drive back to Asda.
• Walk to photo booth.
• Follow instructions on screen and insert CD.
• Screen tells me that it is reading the CD.
• Screen counts through the photos it has found 1,2,3…62…result.
• Follow the rest of the instructions for size and quality, etc. Just about to finish and then get a prompt from the system for authorisation of the order showing a screen requiring a PIN.
• Ask lady behind counter for help (different lady by now). Get the wonderfully helpful response “Oh, I’m just standing in while she’s on her break, I don’t know.” . She asks the supervisor, shouldn’t have bothered. She asks another colleague, shouldn’t have bothered. Eventually phones through to the canteen and interrupts the other ladies break. Turns out that the PIN is the default “1234″ . I have no idea what the purpose of the PIN was, she didn’t check anything, she just put the number in.
• Pay for pictures
• Walk to car.
• Drive home.
• Stop, relax, unwind for 40 mins.
• Drive back to Asda.
• Walk to photo booth.
• Original lady has now returned.
• I hand over my slip.
• She spends 10 mins finding the pictures. There still on the machine
• Walk to car.
• Drive home.

I’m a technologist and I struggled – how does anyone else get anything printed. Why is this so complicated?

Sometimes I hate the way that technology has been implemented.

Today KC Lemson has an interesting story about the changes they are making to meeting rooms at Microsoft Campus.

In these new conference rooms we got fancy new projectors (no more screwing around with the darned output to some random TV![1]), new tables, and they changed the wall covering. Where many individual conf rooms used to have 3 walls of whiteboards on it (soooooo handy), now they have one whiteboard, one blank wall (for projection) and one brown fabric-covered wall.

When the rooms were finished and I attended various meetings in the new rooms, the conversation would invariably start out with some wonderment about what was the point of the brown fabric wall. The best scenario anyone came up with was that it was to be used for pinning up notes, hardly a common use case. So we thought about occam’s razor and realized that ah-ha, the problem is just that the facilities people are dumb and they didn’t realize we liked having so many white boards! Satisfied with the knowledge that we were on the top of the evolutionary heap, we went about our way.

Then, an enterprising coworker decided to actually investigate instead of assume, and eventually made his way to the right person in facilities who informed him that actually the reason for removing the multiple whiteboards was for acoustics – we are an increasingly global workforce and many meeting attendees aren’t located in Redmond, so LiveMeeting conferences are becoming increasingly common.

I have spent much of my working life on the flip side of this situation – being the person making the change. I am sure that myself and my team have been regarded as “dumb” on more than one occasion .

The problem with making changes to things that have multiple purposes like meeting rooms and PC’s is that the solution is always a compromise. It is normal to have two requirements that conflict; whether that’s the need for good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space or the need to control the configuration of a PC and the need to make it as flexible as possible.

The greatest challenge is communicating the motivation behind the compromise that’s been made to the people who have to work with it. Because it’s difficult to communicate it’s much easier to not bother trying. I’ve been on the receiving end of that situation too.

If you don’t communicate, though, people will surely find a way of working around your compromise. Remember User Innovation is a very powerful force. If you are going to make it work for you, you need to decide how you are going to harness it rather than try and work against it. I’m sure there must be a way of having good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space, perhaps they should have harnessed User Innovation to come up with an answer to that problem.

The wonderful Helvetica font it 50 according to the BBC.

For a font to survive that long and still be in such wide use shows that it is a good font. They also say that “imitation is the sincerest of flattery”, and this font has been imitated more than most.

As people seem to want to abuse our eyes every day with the worst of fonts I thought I to would pay tribute to one of the best of fonts.

Perhaps it’s time that we started building “bad design” indicators into modern publishing and office productivity tools so people could learn the errors of their ways.