Wrong direction

In Milan, like in many other cities, public transport tickets have a magnetic strip on the side that is used to check their validity by means of electronic readers.

Even now, some years after the introduction of the new tickets, a lot of people still insert their tickets in the readers in the wrong direction, and can’t pass the turnstiles until they get it right. The technical reason for that is the magnetic strip placed on one side of each ticket so that it can be read by a machine, but it’s a poor design choice forcing people to pay attention to a puny detail such as this.

What is even more frustrating, is that there exists a trivial solution to this problem, and it is the one that has been adopted in Paris: tickets there are symmetrical, and the magnetic band is placed in the middle, so that it can be read in any direction.

A ticket for public transport in Paris: as a side benefit, it is also quite small if compared to the ones we have in Milan

They did a good job, because they left behind an old convention (having a magnetic band on the side, which probably makes sense with cards you have to swipe) and chose a less common placement, putting less constraints on the experience.

Better not to forget it: Nielsen on users

Here’s an insightful excerpt from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 21, 2009:

Users don’t care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don’t love sitting at their computers. They’d rather watch football, walk the dog — just about anything else. Using a computer probably rates above taking out the trash, though.

Are our passwords safe?

I can’t tell how many times I registered on a website since I started surfing the Internet, and I bet it’s the same for you. We’ve been through countless registration forms, and we had to choose a username/password pair for each of them.
But I, like the majority of you, tend to use the same credentials for more than one place, sometimes.

I know it’s a good practice to avoid using the same password for too many services but, hey, we’re human beings, and we’re not so good in remembering things. However, maybe I’d be more reluctant to use my favorite password (the one I use to register on countless websites) if I knew that it would end up in clear text on some database, where some malicious DBA can easily see it.

That’s why I think it would be better if registration forms included an indication (maybe just an icon) about whether the password you’ll supply will be encrypted before being stored on the website database.

Maybe times are not mature yet…

Back?

I’ve been a bit absent, lately and now I’m considering wether to resume blogging or not.

We’ll see…