#ui gaffe

Spotify uses a little speaker-indicator to show which track is currently being played. You can see it at the left side of the image below. 

Unfortunately, that indicator is placed in the exact piece of real estate that otherwise shows you whether the track is "starred". 

Therefore, with the track currently being played, you have no way of knowing whether it is starred or not until you hover over the speaker icon with your mouse cursor, which hides the speaker/playing icon to reveal whether the track is starred.  

(Starring tracks is a pretty important action to me, as I often use the "Starred" collection as a playlist.)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the times that I have wanted to know whether a particular track was starred have been while the track is playing.

This makes sense, right? "Hey, I like this track. Have I already added it to my favorites? I can't tell by glancing at it, because the speaker icon thing is in the way, so I'll push my mouse cursor to hover over this tiny icon ... ah, I see now that I'd already starred the track. Never mind." 

Zipcar was having some trouble when I was trying to modify my reservation today.

After clicking on a “change reservation” link, I first saw an animated activity indicator—

and after a minute or so, the site apparently gave up, serving up this page with this message:

“Hang on while we refuel. We’ll get you zipping again in no time.”

As an error message, this is worse than useless. If the site instead had served up, say, a generic error page with a status code, I would at least be aware that something went wrong. But with this message, I could only be sure that an an error had occurred because the word “error” was in the URL.

This message sacrifices clarity for cuteness. Why?

It doesn’t clearly indicate that an error occurred

It doesn’t explain why it happened

The user’s recommended next step is ambiguous

“Hang on while we refuel / We'll get you zipping again in no time" could be interpreted as an instruction to do nothing and wait for something to happen

How about something like this:

Sorry, but an error occurred. Our website is too busy to complete your request. Please try again later. If you require assistance now, call 1-866-4ZIPCAR.

An error page should explain what happened in non-technical terms and guide the user to a solution. 

Sometimes when I'm using Yahoo Fantasy Baseball, I'll apparently be logged in normally, able to browse around and view my team and league info:  

  But when I try to take some action like changing my lineup, this browser alert box pops up, telling me, "Your login cookie has expired":   

     When I hit "OK," I get kicked out to a generic Yahoo page (featuring an enormous ad) that makes me type in my password to continue:

UI gaffe: QuarkUpdater

When you install QuarkXPress for the Mac, its installer sets up an updating utility to automatically run at a set interval.

If QuarkUpdater finds that you have the most recent version of QuarkXPress, it pops up a modal dialog box informing you of the fact. 

So I am sometimes greeted by this unasked-for dialog, and QuarkUpdater's bouncing dock icon, when I arrive at work.

I assume it behaves this way to keep the user informed when he or she manually initiates a check for updates. But it doesn't make sense to show this dialog box when the updater is run automatically. The auto-updater should unobtrusively check for software updates without bothering the user when there is nothing new to report.

If you're wondering, you can disable automatic updating of QuarkXPress in System Preferences, in the Quark Update preference pane.