Tag Archives: bad usability

Human Proof Design

Posted on October 6, 2015 by John Hunter

Human proof design is design that prevents people from successful using the item. It is similar to mistake proofing except instead of prevent mistakes it prevents people from using it. When you see human proof design you will often see signs to tell people how to use the device that has been human proofed. Common instances of this are hotels that have shower designs so opaque they need instructions on how to use a device most people have no problem … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus | Tagged , , , , , ,

Management Blog Posts From June 2005

Posted on June 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Here are the blog posts from 3 years ago this month on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog: From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking – Targets Distorting the System – Dilbert and Deming. The Dilbert site has learned to take advantage of the web and allow embedding of the strips on blogs and web pages. Good for them, but you really would have thought they would have lead this trend not delayed so long. [Was displaying Dilbert strip from 21 … Continue reading →

Posted in Fun, Management | Tagged , , ,

No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota

Posted on June 23, 2007 by John Hunter

Toyota Boosts Executives’ Bonuses on Record Earnings (link broken by Bloomberg has been removed – why can’t companies with huge IT budgets follow even basic web usability rules like not breaking urls?): Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s biggest automaker by market value, will increase the total amount of executives’ bonuses by 33 percent for the year ended in March after the company posted record earnings. The automaker will pay a total of 970.5 million yen ($7.8 million) in bonuses to … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Psychology, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Information Technology and Management

Posted on May 4, 2007 by John Hunter

Dog Eat Dog [the broken link was removed, sadly even MIT can’t manage a website properly and they have broken the link] by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson The CVS experience is a microcosm of a pervasive trend toward using IT to replicate not only digital goods and services but also business processes. This trend encompasses core activities such as customer service and order management, as well as support activities such as accounting and human resources. Once a company embeds … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Management | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Change Your Name

Posted on December 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name [the broken link was removed]: Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you. Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then leave customer service agents to try and explain. And then this happens: When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name Now that is great 🙂 Charles Yu: “I said well, I think that … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Usability Failures

Posted on July 15, 2006 by John Hunter

‘Smart’ phones, stupid punters? A survey* of 15,000 “faulty” devices by mobile data provider WDSGlobal found 63 per cent of the one in seven new phones which are returned have nothing wrong with them. I believe one in seven is the model of phone. I guess if you operationally define “nothing wrong” as a failure to work as the manufacturer intended that would be true. But is that what really matters? What is the number of defects that should be … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Planet Kaizen

Posted on December 18, 2005 by John Hunter

Toyota has a section on their web site called Planet Kaizen [the broken link to www.toyota.com/planetkaizen was removed, this is a rare instance where they are doing us a favor by removing this poorly designed application from the internet]: “what happens when you dig a little deeper and peel back the sheet metal to discover what makes a Toyota a Toyota.” It requires Flash to view Planet Kaizen. I think it has amazingly bad visual controls (as do many flash … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Management, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

BetterProcess Podcasts and Blog

Posted on October 16, 2005 by John Hunter

Edited to correct links – people involved with web content really need to learn that pages must live forever. They broke them again, so I gave up trying to make up for their failure to follow good management processes. BetterProcess Podcast and Blog [I removed the broken link] I found a new source of podcasts [I removed the broken link] focused on manufacturing, charting, use of data and the like. Yesterday I wrote about the potential for webinars and last … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, webcast | Tagged