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Pop quiz, hotshot. How do you navigate to the previous screen in a BCA ATM?

If you’re like me and most people, you press “Cancel”, reinsert your card, punch in your PIN again, and navigate to the screen that you want. Try repeating that while finding a menu item and a few people line up behind you and you keep reinserting the card back as soon as the machine pops it out.

I saw there were at least two buttons on the keypad that were unassigned and could have been programmed as a generic back button. Even if implementing a generic “back” button is too much effort, the “back” function could have been easily assigned to one of the side screen buttons.

And if you want to pay for a ticket, do you go to “Pembayaran” or “Pembelian” first?

klikbca is not any better. They seem to enjoy torturing their user. OK, rather than just complaining, I’ll straight away give one possible improvement to their balance checking interface. Merge the “Informasi Saldo” and “Mutasi” as one menu item called “Informasi Saldo”. Then, show the balance at the top and all the transactions for the past 31 days below it by default while still allowing the user to filter the transactions by date. Don’t ask the user to manually count (today – 31 days), just show it. If the range I put is more than 31 days, then just show what you have up to 31 days, don’t ask me to correct the starting date if you can easily fix it for me. If the info is too much and I don’t want to see that much info, then I’ll filter it later. If it’s too much info to show in one page, split it up into multiple pages. This is common sense. Why force the user to jump extra hoops every time?

The default should be sensible, and the default should be chosen because most people use it that way, NOT because it’s easier to program it that way. In order to understand the user’s pains, a designer must see from the user’s perspective and use the things they’re designing themselves. My girlfriend pointed out to me that most of these usability idiocy is because the people who designed/created it don’t use it themselves very often, and I agree with her.

All these big companies providing services to the public must hire at least a usability expert rather than wasting their money on paying half-assed so-called “designers” (that is if they even hire designers, they probably just let the programmers do the design). I mean just look at their websites. If any of you is an Indosat M2 subscriber, you would know how terrible their website is when you check your internet usage, it looks like it’s designed and written by a high-school kid who just learned PHP. Who the hell in this Web 2.0 age uses pop ups to notify the user that the login was successful?! Yes, successful, not unsuccessful.

“Secara” artinya adalah “dengan cara”. Jangan pernah menggunakan kata secara jika yang anda maksud adalah soalnya atau karena atau sebab. Secara anda akan kedengaran seperti orang goblok jika menggunakan secara tidak pada tempatnya. See what I mean?

Emang cuma mereka doang yang bisa bikin overly sensational headlines?

Teksnya demikian:

Gudang Ekstasi di Apartemen Taman Anggrek Digerebek Polisi – Indra Subagja – detikcom

Jakarta – Diam-diam penghuni Apartemen Taman Anggrek, Tanjung Duren, Jakarta Barat, menggunakan kamar 19 tower 5 sebagai gudang ekstasi. Setahun beroperasi, polisi sukses
menggerebek.

Well, detikcom belum actually dituntut sih. Tapi ya siap-siap aja.

BTW, reporter mereka itu proses seleksi waktu hiringnya gimana sih? Kayaknya kebanyakan kok kemampuan berbahasa Indonesianya aja meragukan banget. Boro-boro kemampuan jurnalistiknya. Yang bagus cuma kemampuan misleading pembaca lewat headlines yg sengaja dibuat sensasional dan/atau isi tulisan yang tidak netral dan dijejali pendapat pribadi penulisnya yang cenderung menghasut.

Buat anda yang bilang “Ya udah, lu ngapain baca detikcom kalo udah tau begitu?” maka jawabannya adalah karena saya tidak tinggal di Indonesia dan saya mau tau apa yang terjadi di Indonesia lewat internet, dan karena belum ada alternatif lain situs berita yang lebih cepat dan lebih baik. Jadi saya baca detikcom cuma baca inti dari kejadiannya aja tanpa pay attention ke apa yg benar2 ditulis karena kebanyakan crap dan cuma bikin saya annoyed.

Oh, satu lagi kehebatan detikcom: pinter bikin pembacanya annoyed. Iklan yg jumlahnya seabreg-abreg, beranimasi pula, gak ada RSS/Atom feed, sok mau disable right click, tampilan layout yang bikin mata sakit, a complete web design disaster.

Kalo anda tau alternatif situs berita Indonesia yang secepat detikcom saya akan sangat menghargai kalo anda memberitahukan lewat komentar.

Beberapa hari belakangan ini lagi rame soal orang carmuk dan orang iseng yang jadi korbannya.

Saya tadinya gak ingin ikut-ikut di masalah ini, soalnya saya gak mau encourage yang carmuk dengan memberikan publikasi gratis. Tapi yah cuek dah, biar kebobrokan terungkap dan istilah “pakar multimedia” atau “pakar telematika” itu dikubur aja dalem-dalem. Mau muntah tiap kali denger itu.

Sudah berapa hari panas dibicarakan masalah ini di mana-mana, sampe akhirnya Enda bilang mau nanya ke SBY sendiri. Dan sekarang jelas sudah kenyataan yang sebenarnya.

Tenang aja, saya gak mau nulis lagi panjang lebar soal itu. Saya mau ngomongin soal sisi lainnya dari itu.

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Now everyone can be a digital dalang at home and direct a digital wayang kulit show. A researcher from the Korea National University of Arts created a digital version of the wayang kulit show by allowing the dalang (the puppeteer) to easily control silhouette characters on the screen using their hands without the actual wayang kulit itself. The dalang wears prepared color chips and move their hands inside a small box with curtains just like the stage.

It’s an interesting achievement, but watching a digital show is probably not as good as watching the real thing, in my opinion. I remember having had to wait until way past midnight to watch a wayang show on TV when I was a kid. I may not be the biggest fan of wayang, but I think wayang shows should be shown on TV more often and in better timeslots, replacing all the reality TV shows and all those other crap on Indonesian TV these days.

(via we make money not art)