Jay Paroline

If you are not already familiar with SOAP, this note will mean very little to you, and I don’t feel like explaining it so please feel free to ignore.

We are in the middle of adding a new payment processor to GS, and this particular payment processor, who shall remain unnamed, decided to implement their API in SOAP. I am not a huge fan of SOAP, but it certainly does have some level of usefulness: the entire backend API for GSLite is written in SOAP, after all. Anyway, their implementation of SOAP is the silliest I have seen so far. Every method takes a single parameter. It’s a string named ixml.

Can you guess yet what they are doing?

Yes, every parameter is a piece of xml. The actual structure of the xml message is not defined in the WSDL. In other words, the Web Service Description Language does not describe the web service. Good job, guys.

Bad design is everywhere, and it doesn’t have to be that way. I suppose that’s why I make such a fuss when one of our products or features seems to be poorly designed. I want to do better!

Here’s an example of bad design that isn’t our fault:
Everyone in the office has trouble using the coffee pot at one time or another. People get grounds in the water reservoir, overflow the basket, or get burned by steam when they open the lid. I have witnessed people do all of these things, and I have studied the design of the coffee pot. I understand how it works, but I still managed to overflow the basket myself, creating a horrible mess and (worse) delaying my caffeine intake. Why is this coffee pot so hard to use? My cheap coffee pot at home works just fine. I had no difficulties with the coffee pot at my previous job.

It’s the design. The basket and water reservoir are in the same “compartment”, covered by the same lid, and the component that stops the flow of coffee if the carafe has been removed (so you can pour a cup before it’s finished) is a mechanism that is half in the basket (spring loaded stopper) and half in the lid of the carafe (the shape of the lid pushes up the spring, allowing water to flow).

Every element of the design of this coffee pot is directly related to the ways that people manage to mess up their coffee:
If they are not careful about adding coffee to the basket, they will get grounds in the reservoir. The proper way to avoid that problem is to remove the basket, add the coffee and put it back in. The basket does not sit evenly on the counter because of the spring loaded mechanism on the bottom, so it discourages people from adding grounds this way.
Having one lid that covers the reservoir and the basket causes steam to be trapped in the coffee maker, so if people open the lid during the brewing process (say, because something else is messing up) or shortly afterwards (say, to clean up), they will have their fingers burned.
The spring loaded stopper does not stop the brewing process, only the dripping into the carafe process. If the stopper remains closed, water and grounds will eventually overflow the basket into the reservoir, into the carafe, and all over the place. The stopper remains closed whenever it is not in contact with the lid, so if someone accidentally leaves the lid off, or leaves the lid open “to make sure nothing gets in the way” (as one of our interns did), it’s an instant mess complete with ruined coffee.

Compare this to my coffee maker at home, the water reservoir is completely separate from the basket, which swings out on a hinge so that any spilled coffee grounds end up on the counter, not in the water. The mechanism that stops the drip process when the carafe is removed is a small lever that is depressed when the carafe is placed in the coffee maker. It stops the flow of hot water into the basket, thereby halting the brewing process whenever the carafe is removed.

This is an ideal design in every way, especially the lever to stop the brewing process. The only component required to let the water flow is the carafe, which catches the brew. If the carafe is not present, no coffee is brewed and no disaster ensues. Use of a lid is entirely optional.

So why is our coffee pot so horribly designed? It’s not like coffee pots are a new technology, and it’s not like they’ve just been this lousy all along, my coffee pot is older! They could have just copied the design if they couldn’t think of their own. I don’t see how the manufacture of my coffee pot style would be any more expensive than the one we have at Grooveshark. Mine was under $10, after all.

The only thing I can think of is that manufacturers just plain and simply do not care about usability for these essentially disposable appliances. Customers do not pay attention to these details until it’s too late, or they blame themselves for their inability to use them, so good design just does not matter.

But design does matter if your company is not satisfied with mediocrity. One need not look any further than Apple to see the result of putting a heavy emphasis on design and usability. The success of the iPod and iPhone are the direct result of that emphasis. If the iPod worked like a Sansa and the iPhone worked like my old Motorola phone, where would Apple be right now?

This is just a quick plug for an chat client I’ve just recently discovered: Digsby.

Digsby is a chat client that works with every network they can get their grubby little hands on. AIM, ICQ, Y!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, even Facebook chat. But there’s more, they also support email and Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Twitter has always seemed well, rather useless and annoying to me, but having it integrated into a desktop client and on my phone means I might actually use it.

I know what you’re thinking: Trillian does a lot of that. Well, yes, but digsby seems well designed, less clunky and annoying, and ironically more stable, even though it’s far newer and does more.

Another bonus with Digsby is that you create a profile on their site, so when you sign in on another computer, you don’t have to set up all of your accounts again.