1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
It is vastly preferable to "find a parking meter, sort out rules, find a way to pay" which was the previous experience, I'm a bit concerned they look like a sort of monopoly but I'll take that over every city having their own system.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
It was a solved problem long before smart phones.
Technology is supposed to improve the experience not make it worse.
The design choices added more friction than walking past a "pay and display" machine.
The design choices added more friction than displaying a monthly/anual pass that you purchase for regular parking at places like universities.
The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
> The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
The one instance of this I have seen used an app to connect your licence plate to your payment method.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
Yes it’s easy…if you’re technical. But most people who drive are not good with technology.
(If it's a browser that you haven't used before, perhaps be a little more paranoid.)
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.
In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.
It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
1. Log in to OKTA and choose my specific account (we have 2 accounts for some reason, and only one of them is used for development) 2. Log into AWS with that account 3. Select another sub-account in AWS 4. Navigate to my developer EC2 5. Start the instance 6. In VS Code, open a terminal and log in with “aws login —profile myName” 7. Wait for redirect to AWS in the browser window 8. Click ok and close the tab 9. Back in VS Code, open remote explorer and click on a preset that does an ssh tunnel to my workspace on the EC2 10. Wait for VS Code to spawn a new window 11. Now I can go through all of my other development setup tasks (another 6-10 steps depending on what I need to do)
Every day. And our instances force auto-shutdown at 9pm, so if you need to work late, better save your work, log off preemptively, and go through the same process.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
It doesn't just have to be at school. Screens after school affect learning in school.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...
Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.
So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.
[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”
Is it just grading and parental access?
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Back in my day we double clicked a ppt on a flash drive, and we liked it!
It was really nice until ~2015 when they threw out that rulebook and went cheap.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
The example in this story is to do with other cruft that schools have installed.
To get to a dashboard, I have to jump through four or five websites for different parts of the auth and security checks (and sometimes provide a biometric check too).
At least in my case my browser mostly jumps through the hoops for me (although I usually have to click at least twice and present my finger).
16 is insane, though.
1. touch screen to see controls
2. touch lower-right -><-
3. touch screen to see \/ in upper left
4. touch \/
5. touch X
If the video play to the end (1) and (2) are replaced with touch X, for a total of 4.
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
Google Docs/Slides/Sheets masquerading as EdTech
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:
> [...]
> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...
Most of what people do with it is muscle memory. Everyone would be instantly broken. They are if anyone changes or moves anything already.
It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
But I suppose education is a business and they need to keep inventing new "methods".
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
I ended up emailing HR to get an answer, and I’m reasonably certain my employer pays workday 500k+ per year for me to not be able to use the damn thing.
Great, now I know the bake sale starts at 6:30.
Long term result, I no longer read emails from my kids' school.
I dunno how much of this comes out of being based in the Bay Area where it is normalized that you’ll stay in your conference hotel and never leave the arcology because otherwise you’ll get harassed. I wonder if people realize that you could go to like Ohio or something and it doesn’t have to be that way.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
1. Open canvas on laptop
2. Open canvas quiz
3. Write answers on paper
4. Scan paper with office lens
5. Export document from office lens
6. Upload document to google drive
7. Open google drive on laptop
8. Download document from google drive
9. Upload document to canvas
10. Realize you forgot to write your student id on page 2, write and go back to step 4
Also, Tailscale silently starts failing to connect during the day, invariably in the middle of debugging something, so I have to debug Tailscale instead.
Everything is stupid and broken and I'm counting the days until I retire, buy a goat, and walk until my phone loses signal.
There you go.
It’s like, they are right in the middle of the tech gadget spectrum, and they want to be a bit of everything but are not really good at anything.
PCs, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches all have the right form factor for what their use is. Tablets? Meh.