There are a few things, however, I do not like about it. The rampant racism of its readers, for example. That is easily avoided, however, and it’s occasionally fun to dip in for some sport.

I’ve typed about the bad use of language before, but that’s not as bad as today’s example. Today we have an excellent example of laziness or incompetence.

This article reports, through its headline, that

Three rescued after suffering injuries on Snowdon

It goes on to say

Three people have been airlifted to safety by an RAF helicopter in two separate rescues in Snowdonia.

So far so good. Snowdon is definitely in Snowdonia; the clue’s in the name. However, we read a little further and discover that the accidents actually happened on Y Garn (about 3.5 miles away, peak-to-peak as the crow flies) and Tryfan (just over 4.5 miles away).

It’s just so damn shoddy.

Currently, my housemate’s XBox is in the custody of Microsoft after suffering the Red Ring Of Death, and as he plays more than I/has the 120gb HDD to my 20, we’ve had his HDD plugged into my XBox. Fail #1 of the story, I guess; if Microsoft could invent a console that didn’t habitually fail to work, there would have been less faffing in the first place.

As part of my watching such files each week, I get the joy of the XBox failing to decode them. I have no idea why, but each week the XBox delightfully informs me that it needs a media update to play the files. This, of course, despite me having installed it the previous week. This also involves logging into XBox live. Fail #2.

Unfortunately, said housemate transferred his gamertag to another XBox over the weekend. Grr. Ok, so fine, I’ll transfer mine over. So after (twice, I had to take 2 stabs to remember the info) typing in all my email and password details (fail #3 – god it’s painful typing on the onscreen keyboard. I don’t know the solution, but it can’t be this), I get told that new Live accounts can’t be created. Which is annoying for the following reasons.

• The obvious; the service is down
• It spits you back to the main menu, which if you want to try again means you have to type everything in again on the awful on-screen keyboard (see above)
• I’m not even trying to create an account

But ok, fair enough, I’ll just plug in the other HDD. Except no. Fail #who knows, I’ve lost count. My gamertag, though not added to the new HDD, is now ported away from the old one. It’s in limbo. And of course, I can’t pull it back to the old HDD, ’cause the service is down (I know, I tried).

ARG!

I’m not loving Microsoft tonight.

On Sunday, I experienced the joys of Virgin Media’s website. Today, at work, I sat through a presentation of the results of a usability study on the product I work on. What surprised me were not the results of the study, but that our bad documentation and lack of usability seem to come as a shock to so many. Hopefully it will spur some improvement.

Finally, this evening Symantec Client Firewall popped up this handy dialogue

Symantec Usability Fail

The path is very often a field which proves useful; it tells you where the file resides. “setup.exe” is a bit non-specific, and that information would have helped me arrive at a decision. No scrollbars, and no resize conspire to make this a thoroughly useless window.

Virgin have an online add-to-your package facility. First you enter your postcode, and then choose your number from a list. Pretty simple from a usability perspective, you’d think?

Virgin Media usability fail

That took me far too long to find my number. I missed it on the first 2 scans through the list.