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Usability issues, when lives depend
I tried to give blood today. Although I'm a registered donor I haven't been for quite some time, not since they turned me away for being anemic. Times have changed since then, you no longer get a free tub of Ben and Jerry's ice-cream, and it isn't against campus equal opportunities law to advertise the time and place to give blood. You can also book online now.
Naturally, for a large and important system, the online booking form isn't great. Just looking at the main issues (I'm sure there are a ton more): You search for your postcode to find the nearest donation center, in smaller areas it is probably not so much of a problem but there are three donation centers in Brighton, each identified only with 'BRIGHTON' and the distance. There is also an unexplained number of 'days'; what that means is pretty much anyone's guess. It could be the days in a week the donation bank is open, except the first result is '16 day(s)', last I checked there weren't 16 days in a week.
Clicking on a venue took me through to the page for that place, it was then that I realised there are '16 sessions at this venue' - what did that have to do with days!? Is that 16 sessions per day? Perhaps, though probably not.
A list of available sessions is shown. The little clock bullet point is cute, until you realise it is the only clickable area to get through to book a session on that day, and the next / previous buttons just take you through to more sessions - I spent ages trying to find how to book a session from this page!
Clicking the little clock brings up a popup window for your personal details, blocked by my popup blocker, nuff said. The options don't include the ability to change the date but do let you select a time that wasn't previously listed as available for that date, totally infuriating if you have clicked the wrong date, also how do you remember which times were OK?
I submitted my details to give blood that afternoon, then I notice in teeny tiny writing ...
If you want to book an appointment for the next day, you must book it Monday-Friday between 9am - 5pm. Unfortunately we cannot take appointments on a weekend for Mondays. We are also unable to accept appointments made for today, unless otherwise stated.
Now I understand that someone for some reason may need to check the details and respond personally but it does seem odd that you can't book for, say, the afternoon. Perhaps some routine behind the scenes where they only check the website once a day to correlate the books? To me this smells of bad practices underlying bad software implementation.
My theory was further confirmed when I received the following email from someone at the National Blood Service:
EBLOOD - Donor - Details don't match
Thank you for using the website to make an appointment. Unfortunately, our system will not let me do this and we need to speak to you to resolve this...
Despite giving them my phone details in the compulsory field that they made me fill in, I received no calls (they said they tried to call and failed). I called the booking helpline to sort things out, and apparently the "system doesn't work well when people change addresses". The problem was that they had two records for me and couldn't combine the details easily, so the lady had to send a form off to get 'them' to update my address on one of the records and delete the other one. I couldn't even go down to give blood and sort things out there because "they wouldn't know which record to use". Unbelievable.
I gave the lady my phone number (again) and am currently waiting for someone to call me to confirm things have been straightened out and I can finally donate blood to someone who needs it.
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A quote from Premasagar
Carbon offsetting is surely just a scam - "no need to feel guilty... carry on consuming and someone else will plant a few trees for you"...
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Snipplr redesign
It is always the way, ideas are 10 a penny. If you don't actually get round to implementing it someone else eventually will. Quite often though it's the case that I don't mind not having implemented it, just so long as it exists.
A fine example of this is Snipplr. Ever since I first got into web development I intended to build something like this, I am sure I am not alone here, it is something that was desperately needed. Snipplr do a good job and I am very glad something like this exists now.
A very handy little app, Snipplr lets you store code snippets against a particular language for easy future access. Naturally—like all good web apps—you can tag and comment too.
To the best of my knowledge the Ruby on Rails based 'BigBold' (now Dzone) by Peter Cooper, was the first big snippet app. Released shortly after was Snipplr and then CAB, the engine behind Django Snippets.
The winning feature as far as I am concerned is Snipplr's simplicity, BigBold I think tried to do too much in requiring code type syntax to mark up the snippet, lending itself more toward mini tutorials than reusable code. Snipplr's recent redesign is nice too, very striking and low on imagery it uses nice and bold typography to bring out the code samples and tags.
Snipplr also has a textmate bundle which is awesome. You can configure key combinations to post or insert snippets directly to what you are working on. There is also an API, browser bookmarklets, Gedit plugin and a Wordpress plugin.
There are a few things that are still a bit shaky, such as pagination or private snippets amongst groups (it only lets you do public or totally private snippets). But all in all an attractive solution if you want to share or store bits of code.
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A quote from Mike Stenhouse
@Natbat: Glad to be of service! GReader sharing has replaced quite a lot of my delicious activity...
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