Least of All Evils, All the Time

It's unfortunate that life these days is seemingly constantly choosing from the least of all evils.  Let's just start with something fairly popular, then ease into something more esoteric.

I believe there are quite a few people who do not particularly like Donald Trump; I really am one of them.  He is often well-meaning, but the presentation is very unpolished and quite rough.  Still, it's tough to argue with the results.  I generally liked the course of the USA from early 2017 to early 2021.  I learned my lesson from 1992 though.  I really thought the best thing for our country was H. Ross Perot, so I voted for him.  My second choice would have been George H. W. Bush, and my last choice was Bill Clinton.  Effectively, I believe Perot drained away far more Bush votes than Clinton votes, ergo Clinton won.  As I believe CGP Grey amply demonstrated though, first-past-the-post voting, as we have in the vast majority of the US, ultimately and unchangingly devolves into two (and realistically, no more than two) party voting.  So despite the voting system supposing to be affirmative, there are quite a few people who cast their votes "against" someone, in my case against Joe Biden.  Trump is just the lesser of two evils, not the best person for the job.  In my opinion, Vivek Ramaswamy would be that, with Ron DeSantis an extremely close second.  However, voting for anyone other than the Republican nominee to me would be counterproductive, as was the case in 1992.

To delve now into the more esoteric, I'm finding the same ultra-depressing issue with UI/UX design these days.  The most frequent offenders are Web sites.  As a stellar example, the Web is almost exclusively the place where you will find menus which will pop strictly because one places one's pointer over the top level item.  I can't think of a single desktop program (which is not based on a Web framework, like Electron for example) which does not require a click to activate a menu.  To me, that is the only sane way to roll, because I'm tired of randomly moving my pointer/cursor around a Web page, only to have the content I'm ATTEMPTING to view being obscured by a popup.  I also loathe having to navigate these monstrosities, because the slightest deviation from the exact path needed for the next level very often causes the menu to un-pop.  How people with even worse motor control than me are supposed to navigate these sites is way beyond me.

Another fairly common "sin" is obscuration of content until :hover, which is actually the trigger causing me to start writing this post.  Once again, some Web designers seem to think it's a useful thing to obscure content which has to be randomly divined by the happenstance of placing my pointer within these objects.  Even if I randomly discover one of these "hidden gems" on the page, I'm supposed to somehow infer that there are other elements somewhere on the page which serve the same purpose, but are likewise hidden until I move my pointer.  It's not as if this space were used for some other purpose that these elements are hidden until "hovered;" no, the Web designer figures I'll just magically "figure it out."  For these people, I refer you to cognitive workload, which, had you not done this, would be less.

Another somewhat surprising UI/UX blunder is constantly "shouting" at people that they are wrong.  You would think people would not take too kindly to constant correction, yet it is getting disturbingly common for form designers to shout at you nearly continuously with often red error messages until form fields are filled in with "correct" text.  And I put "correct" in quotes because a fairly common mistake is email address validation; you can be putting in a totally correct, perfectly working email address such as john.q.public+homedepot@gmail.com yet their parser will claim all day long that the LHS cannot possibly have a "+". If it were a person sitting next the user constantly saying "wrong!" on every keypress, I doubt such a person would be tolerated by most for very long at all.

With me, those three are probably the most egregious of the UI/UX mistakes, but there are plenty more.  Don't even get me started on almost all animations, which are more "look, Mom, see what I can do?" than anything else; they add nothing for me except annoyance and waste my time.  Carousels are another stupidity; they frustrate all but a narrow few who read near the pace of the designer; for those who read (and comprehend) quickly, they're too slow, and for those like myself who read more slowly than average, the slide is changing before I can even read all of it.

For all that is holy and sacred, can you PLEASE not make the title of your sign-in page "login?"  Do you not know there are several password managers which can select an entry based on the window title?  So if your site shows just 'login," how is that supposed to be distinguished from the 50 other sites which were similarly not at all creative?

Today, I simply wanted to find a site which will sell me some eyeglasses, preferrably at an affordable price.  But one by one, as I'm going through Google's results, each site has one or more of these stupidities.  To a certain extent, I can use browser extensions like uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, or Stylus to modify how these pages look or behave, but there comes a point on each where I find myself saying to myself, this isn't worth the effort, let's move on to some other site; there HAS to be a sane one somewhere. But alas, surely as COVID-19 spread around the entire world, UI/UX stupidities are infecting nearly every Web site.

Some so far are immune.  Discover Card for example is actually fairly well thought out, for example requiring clicks to pop menus.  I shudder at the thought that one day this will be taken over by Capital One and be ruined.

A sad counterexample is Western Division Credit Union, or more accurately, their subcontractor itsme247.  One of the reasons I became and have remained there was the simplicity of the site, no animations, no menus popped for just hovering over the lead, nice, clean, sane design.  But alas, someone somewhere within the company must have gotten infected, and the UI/UX went downhill very quickly.  The cognitive load went up considerably (let's see...was Bill Pay under "move money" or "member services"?).  Menus now pop just for putting the pointer over them.  Heaven help you if your hand (or thumb on a trackball) wanders too far so that your pointer is not on the popup, it will un-pop.  Worse still, there are SOME menus which DO pop only when clicked, such as the accounts list, where it asks what you want to do with that account.

So...after describing all this, what do I have to do?  I am just worn down, sick of trying to compensate for the escapees of the mental asyla who design these pages.  Instead of choosing one I can enjoy, I have to choose one which offends me the least.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

There was "RIF"; Now I Tell You "WIF"

While growing up, I heard many ads for RIF, the organization Reading Is Fundamental.  Darned right it is!  I thought just about everybody in the U.S. could read, simply because of my experience.  I never knew anybody who was illiterate until into my late fourties when I helped present an Alpha course.

However, more and more these days, I realize writing should be fundamental as well, or...well..."WIF".  Maryvale (in Cheektowaga, NY, US) has taught me well, as I think most of the public education institutions in my era have.  Unfortunately, I think that standards have slipped dramatically.  It seems fewer and fewer people are able to identify parts of speech properly, and realize for what each is supposed to be used.  A huge example is the blurring of the use of adjectives and adverbs.  So many want to press adjectives into an adverbial role.

For a starting example, let's take an organization which should know better: Apple.  "Think different", so they say.  No!  It's supposed to be "think differently."  You're commanding me (imperative tense) to modify how I'm doing something (thinking), which requires an adverb.  Adjectives are not supposed to fill that role, but apparently people are getting mentally lazy (or, I don't know, maybe they were just poorly educated).

The same applies so many times to how the word "slow" is used by many.  "This line is moving so slow."  Ummmm, no, it is moving slowly.  Again, to me, there is no doubt about it, the words being modified are "is moving", which demands an adverb.

Look...I'm not against language evolution.  Years ago, "googol" was only a noun.  When what is now Alphabet decided to morph that into their product name, "Google," that was still just a noun.  Eventually, "googling," a verb, came to mean the same thing as using a World Wide Web search engine, roughly speaking probably using Google, but could be another such as Yahoo!, Bing, Duck Duck Go, or others.  That's a perfectly understandable evolution of language, but the principal difference is that it really doesn't break any syntax or grammar rules.

Before you say something like "you know what I mean (or meant)", or "you're just being pedantic," please check my ".sig" block.  To me, the more closely we follow the well-established rules, the less we will have ambiguity of expression to one another, and hopefully the least misunderstandings.  It might be an extreme example, but what if we did talk to our kids badly, like in Steve Martin's little comedy bit?  When we just make it up as we go along, not bothering to follow the rules, we will be misunderstanding each other more and more, thereby causing more tensions, mistrust, and so much more, which would be unnecessary had we only been more careful.

I will cite another example from the elections which were held a few months ago, where the Republican challenger sent out a mailing to me which was in "randomcaps" as I like to call it.  It must have been the author just thought "it looked good" to have almost every word capitalized.  "You know what he meant;" yes, I really did.  There are a few places words should be capitalized: titles, proper nouns, the pronoun "I" and so on.  Your instances were not places where any rule applied.  If you're unwilling to supervise your promotional staff properly so that you send out English instead of quasi-English mail, what else am I going to see from you that is written poorly?  I would rather abstain from the election than vote for you.

As it turns out, my vote would not have mattered in the least; he got trounced by the incument Democrat.

That brings me to the mail piece I received today which caused me to start writing this post: the NY registration for the used vehicle I purchased recently.  (As an aside, I do not know why the NYS DMV sent it to West Herr instead of to me directly, thus West Herr needing to spend some of money on an envelope, postage, and somebody's time to stuff that envelope.  I know, it's not even a drop but only a few molecules in the bucket compared to the money I gave them for the car, but still...it's the principle.)  On the back of the window sticker portion of the registration, Erie County Clerk Michael P. Kearns put his own sticker on it, proclaiming "RENEW LOCAL."  Guess what, Mickey?  No, I won't.  I will be renewing directly with the State.  Why?  "RENEW LOCALLY", that's why.  Plus, why are you spending money on these stickers?

Why, o why, are we not more selective with our elected officials?  We should be holding them to the highest standards.  I'll just close by asking this question: If you sent out that mailing with (the right capitalization, the adverb), how many people do you think would be inclined to say it should have been sent out as you had sent it out, versus the number of people like me who see you not following the rules, and therefore refuse to do what you asked?  Since you would have been following the well-established rules, I'll bet the number of people refusing due to not knowing the rules would be far smaller.  So you might as well hire someone who knows what they're doing.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!