Now I do my banking with RBC, and have signed up to use their online banking. I don’t want to make this a Canada vs. America thing (though it is all too easy given that the country names are right there as part of the bank), but I can only conclude that this is yet another reason why America is better than Canada (USA! USA! USA!). The other two are Amazon and pizza.

It’s about the time of the month when I have a batch of bills that come due, and I always dread logging in and trying to navigate the wonky interface to accomplish this really simple task.

I think that the opening page is a pretty good indication of the experience you’re in for when you try to use this service:

So far so good, right? Awesome. A reasonable person would expect that the kind of things that belong in this menu are actions, things you’d want to do, things that the helpful RBC internet elves could assist you with, maybe signing in to banking, getting in touch with a representative, finding a branch.

Or, apparently, this is Canadian – English for “What Country is Your Account In?”

While you can do quite a lot within the service, it seems less like a designed system and more like a mish-mosh of different functionalities and modules held together with spit and duct tape. There’s a lot of jumping around and between different interfaces and areas of online banking and never any clear sign of where you are (or how you’ve got there and how you can get back). This is an especially scary thing for an online banking site. With no clear path back, I use the browser back button (which is somewhat of a no-no in web apps) and inevitably end up getting asked if I want to send the form again. Until I check my balance, I’m never quite sure if I’ve ended up sending Fido (my mobile carrier) twice what I owe them. And even sending them once what I owe them pains me because that’s already more than it’s worth.

A game that I like to play is called “Nest the Tabs” I click around for a while and see how many nested tab navigation menus I can rack up. My record in this game is four:

Pretty good, huh?

Perhaps the biggest flaw with the service is its flakiness. Most sessions end not with my logging out but with an error message like this:

… which is so frustrating! It’s not temporary if it happens over and over again, and there’s no information on this page that tells me why the error happened or what I can do to resolve it or better yet, avoid running into it again.

It’s bad enough to receive this kind of error and lose your work flow if you’re checking email or uploading photos … but when your finances are at stake, it can be truly terrifying! What if this happened in the middle of a funds transfer? Not only are the effects of this acute, but it also contributes to a general mistrust of the system, and thus the company as a whole.

Surprisingly, my anger wasn’t directed at the network for being slow or at Parallels for taking entirely too long to boot up or shut down. It wasn’t because I lost work, because my computer inexplicably froze up on me or forced me to restart because it had some updates to install.It was at a piece of software I explicitly elected to use, though there were other options available. And, perhaps most surprising of all, this piece of software is from Apple, who’s products I generally find enjoyable to use.

I am fucking pissed at iMovie ‘09.

I needed to do some editing of a video I shot for a tutorial. A colleague of mine suggested using a product called Ultra Video Splitter from company called Aone; my e-mail esponse to him was this:

Thanks, Xxxx – I’m probably going to take a shot at it using iMovie – as it’s software I’ve been meaning to learn how to use for quite a while and this would be the perfect opportunity! I’ll let you know what I come up with ……

Dan

It’s true; I’d never used iMovie before, mostly because I never had a reason to have to use it. And here was the perfect opportunity. I’ve had good experience with Apple products in the past, and I didn’t mind investing time in learning a tool that could potentially come in handy in the future. Besides, Apple sh*t is cool, right? Way cooler than some Windows shareware app.

The good part, is that within about half an hour of clicking around, after hovering over buttons to bring up tooltips and countless Apple-Zs, I knew my way around the interface and had a good mental model of how all the parts fit together. Apple tends to be very good at designing simple, learnable interfaces with plenty of scaffolding to enable first-time users like myself to find their way around.

My goal was very simple. To comb through about 45 minutes of video, splice out ~20 interesting clips, and make a separate video file out of each. I went through the video, Favorite-ing about twenty sections and made ‘clips’ out of them to add to my movie. All without looking at a single sentence of an instruction manual. Bravo to me for being so smart, and kudos to Apple for building an application which requires zero instruction for a newbie to get up and running.

But from here, things went downhill. Fast.

First off, I realized that I couldn’t only export one clip at a time.  You’re only able to export the whole movie (i.e. the sum of all the clips plus whatever transitions are in between them). This was kind of confounding, and I spent a bit of time Googling around before resigning myself to a wonky workaround: duplicating my twenty-clip project twenty times, and then deleting all but one clip in each of the projects, so that when I export, I got just one clip in the movie. *Sigh*.

My test case then was to just create one duplicate project with one clip, and to see how the resultant video came out. To my dismay, I found that the video I was exporting was of significantly lower quality than the source. Back to the Google. Without knowing too much about video editing and codecs, from what I read, In concluded that this is is just apparently the way iMovie works, nothing I can do about it.  But I would be taking these video clips and using them in a Camtasia presentation, which would compress them even more, so starting with degraded-quality clips was not an option. Time to check out the other application recommended by my colleague. *Sigh*.

One issue though – I’d spent about three hours going through the video and hand-selecting the bits that I needed, and I didn’t want to have to go through the video again in another program and repeat this laborious process. Surely there must be some way to export the chapters I’ve created or information about the Favorites I’d earmarked? File -> Export? Hello? Share? Where are you, menu item?!? I tried ‘Export to Final Cut XML’ or something and the xml  file which was produced didn’t seem to have units or tags that I could make any sense of. Fair enough – that one was kind of a stretch. But still …. *sigh*.

Looks like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Here was my plan: I was going to take out a piece of paper (there must be some around here somewhere) and some kind of writing instrument, and record onto the paper with the writing instrument, the time, in seconds, that each one of these clips starts and ends. Then, with this presumably inferior recommended software open, I would then take aforementioned piece of paper, read back the numbers, and create a parallel set of clips within the new software, then export these to seperate videos. Simple, right? A pain in the ass, sure, and a waste of time, sure, but what could go wrong?

As it turns out, it’s not that easy to figure out where in the movie each of my twenty clips started and stopped. iMovie does not tell you the location in minutes and seconds of the playhead. Let me repeat that, this time in bold , red letters:

Nowhere in iMovie ‘09 is there any indicator of time. Everything is relative to everything else, but it’s not possible to determine where anything is in absolute terms.

What is the implication of this? The implication of this is that any work done in iMovie ‘09 is essentially locked in iMovie and, other than exporting a video, there is no way to get this information (even in an ‘analog’ fashion), to any other application.  How so … very … Apple!

(if anyone who reads this knows a way to either export marker information or to see an absolute timeline in iMovie ‘09, please tell me and I’ll gladly whimper away with my tail between my legs).

why? Why? WHY? Who thought this was a good idea? Who would object or be inconvenienced by having this information appear in the “Playhead Information” that follows the scrubber? I just don’t get it. It really frustrates me.

But the deeper question is, why do I still really really want to use iMovie as opposed to the other software (which, after a really contrived process, I was able to utilize)? Why do I want so badly to want to like this software, and to want to use it?

So my revelation out of this long, tedious retelling of this event is that Apple is kind of like a selfish, flaky friend. You know the kind I’m talking about – the kind of friend that’s great to be with when you’re actually hanging out with them, but the second you ask for a favor, or suggest an activity that they’re not too keen on, you get shot down, because … c’mon … who’s really in charge here? We all know that Apple is wearing the pants in this relationship.

And I’ll put up with it (I suspect other people will too), with all the abuse, with the selfishness, just for the chance to use the software — even on its own terms. Doesn’t matter if Apple shows up late, or forgets about my birthday, I’ll take what I can get, because, when things are good, they’re really good! And when things don’t go so well, I’m willing to cut him some slack, because man, he is cool … I’m surprised he even wants to hang out with me at all. And when other people try to tell me how he’s kind of a douche, and that I’ve got lots of other good, reliable (albeit less cool) people I could be spending my time with, I’ll defend him, but I won’t be able to explain why. You could call it “Cupertino Syndrome.”

On the one hand, this experience was incredibly infuriating, and on the other, it’s completely unsurprising. This is what Apple does, over and over again. Mac. iPod. iPhone. iMovie. You name it. When you buy into something Apple, you’re not only buying into that thing – you’re buying into a whole ecosystem of (sometimes really expensive) stuff to support it and to work well with it. And for most of the people, most of the time, it does work well, very well, in fact. And for many people — myself included — on the average, it’s worth it. By excluding so many features from their software, those features that are included are all the more easier to use. As an interaction designer (and a human), I appreciate this simplicity.

Now that I know the limitations of iMovie ‘09, I probably won’t use it again for doing any kind of substantial video editing. But I will always look back fondly on the good times we shared together, and appreciate him for all of the good qualities, such as learnability, a snazzy user interface and some cool visual effects.

And I thought I read somewhere  that they had a ‘Timeline’ feature back in iMovie ‘06 ….

A price checking station in the Macy's department store.

In the Macy’s department store in New York City, stationed throughout the store are these little stations where you can either scan a gift card to see the remaning balance, or scan the bar code on an item to see how much it costs (most department stores probably have something similar).

Great idea. It’s always nice to be able to scan an item to see what the final price is; with so many overlapping sales going on, it’s impossible to predict what the final price of an item would be.

I didn’t actually use the scanner, so I can’t comment on the usability of the device itself. But I found it quite humorous that, taking a couple steps back and looking at the area around the price check scanner, there was a mountain of discarded clothes!

Mountain of discarded (and presumably expensive!) clothes

Retrospectively, it actually makes a lot of sense, and is indeed not at all surprising. You grab an item off the shelf, bring it over to the price scanner to see how much it costs. When the price registers as a couple orders of magnitude more than you were willing to spend, crestfallen, you resignedly throw it on a pile. Surely you’re not in any mood to put that overprices piece of crap back on the shelf from where you found it!

The presence of a simple clothing rack located next to the price scanner would have been a sufficient hint hint to customers, and helped to avoid the clothespile shown above.

But I think that you could get even more creative with it. From a retailers perspective, one of the great things about online shopping is that clickstreams are an excellent indicator of how people arrive at a certain purchase (sometimes, the ‘why’ can also be extracted). To Macy’s, this discarded pile of clothes should actually represent a feedback loop that communicates these clothes are too expensive. Granted, there are quite a lot of factors that go into pricing of clothes, but if certain items are consistently scanned and then discarded, then this should be interpreted as a sign that a hot item is priced too high.

Taking this even further, and actually integrating some of the ’social’ aspect of online shopping, wouldn’t it be neat if the clothing rack had sections on it like “Almost There,” “A Little Pricey,” and “You’re Joking, Right?!?” This not only would give useful feedback to the store, but is also a way for customers in a brick & mortar store to communicate with one another about what is reasonably priced and what is way out of line. Additionally, the clothes that make it all the way to the price scanner can be considered to be ‘vetted’ ; while veryone has different tastes, and everyone has a different notion of pricey, this rack can present another opportunity for a customer to grab something off the rack which they otherwise might not have!