Comcast: Worst UI Design Ever?

Just as working as a reporter ruined reading less-than perfect prose, so too has working as a User Interface designer for a few months thrashed my everyday interaction with almost all screen-based devices. If you ever find yourself behind a man or a woman at an ATM, a Self-Checkout line or a movie ticket kiosk who is methodically pushing the touch screen buttons very slowly, checking the "down" state and then muttering about "action on the release," you know you've found a UI designer.

I've really started to notice just how terrible Comcast's user experience is for its on-screen guides.  Contrasted with TIVO it looks clunky, and contrasted with Wii and Apple menus it looks prehistoric. This formatting has not changed much since the TV guide channel first appeared on my parent's TCI back in the '90s. To boot, the Comcast-issued HD DVR displays nice, big Ads on the on screen guide (funny, because I wanted the DVR to AVOID ads) and has totally crippled input ports for nearly every medium and format save coaxial.

I have some big questions for those honchos sucking down dollars in return for a relatively crappy experience:

Blue, purple, yellow, and green - really? First graders know how to match colors better than this.
If Comcast purports to be *the* HD source how is it that their guide won't expand out into widescreen?
Why does Comcast make us rent/buy expensive and nice DVR boxes if they're going to cripple them and make them less responsive?
Who thought it was a good idea to place ads on an already cluttered guide screen (fire that idiot)?

A really nice trick for you widescreen viewers: change your color scheme to "Onyx." It may not fill the whole screen, but the black background will certainly improve the effect. 




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Northern Radio Exposure

For those in the know, I'm a big public radio junkie (although I've recently eschewed Frequency Modulation for podcasts) but my tastes have generally been circling the NPR format. I'll confess to a penchant for some PRI and APM series ("The Splendid Table" or "This American Life," anyone?) and yet my preferences have always stayed decidedly American. The BBC, while informative has never really done it for me, and Wisconsin and Minnesota, though seemingly foreign, are definitively under the stars and bars.

So it was a pleasant surprise to stumble onto the CBC's "As It Happens." Yes, I inevitably run the risk of sounding like an American schmuck by saying how surprised I was by our Canadian neighbor's "All Things Considered"-esque news show. Aside from the evening runtime and radio medium it bears very little in common with its south-of-the-border cousin.

First off, it sounds like experimental college radio. The news summary at the op of the show has some psychedelic groovy tuneage. The Hosts have a *unique* delivery style. Carol Off is somewhat conventional but Barbara Budd, see left, has an inflection and wacky delivery style that would make Susan Stamberg blush (Swastika is pronounced Shwah-steek-ahhhh?). Then there's also the wacky news content ... Continued

Last week AIH featured a nice little piece on the Canadian duck-calling champion. OK, I'm on board so far. Quirk is cool right now and I'm buying the story, but then Susan Off asks the guy to play his winning routine (keep in mind I'm wearing headphones) and he goes blasting off. This is not some short routine. It's two full minutes of piercing duck shrieks interspersed with the briefest of moments filled by more pleasing and normal soft quacks. This show is begging for an SNL parody.


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