I'm not an interface design expert (or in fact any kind of expert!) But at work I'm increasingly becoming the person at that gets to work on the new interfaces for our portals and web sites. And I think I'm fairly good a spotting bad interfaces.
And boy did I come across a bad one yesterday!
I was rearranging the computers and cables under my desk at home, this meant that somethings needed to be powered down (yes I know they should be powered down when I'm not using them). One of these was my nice shiny new 19 inch widescreen monitor. Everything when smoothly until I powered things back up.
The monitor didn't come back on. I tried rebooting, fiddling with the display properties on the other monitor, but nothing worked. Then I released that I'd lost my mouse pointer. A quick wiggle of the mouse proved to me that it had drifted over to the second monitor. Great news, my mac could at least see it!
The monitor showed it's normal yellow light, which I, wrongly assumed, showed no signal. I tried the standby switch on the monitor and low and behold, it sprang to life!
So that little light, which now showed green actually shows three states, with only two colours. How does it do this? Well it doesn't.
Yellow can mean it's in standby mode, which can't be changed by getting a video signal, also yellow means it's got no signal is is currently 'sleeping', a state that can't be changed by getting a video signal!
Maybe I'm just over reacting to this? I don't think so it took me a got 20 minutes to work this through. Something as simple as an indicator light should be very simple and, just work. This one clearly doesn't!
Okay geeky interface design rant over with, it's time for bed!