Yup, I had 3 (THREE!!!) XBox 360′s die on me!  This is what happened…After I was told by Microsoft that my console was too old to repair (almost 2 years after warranty) I went and bought myself a new Xbox 360 Elite from the nice chaps at Gamestation in Milton Keynes. Since I got the old 360 as a present I didn’t really mind paying for my console, and the deal I got was ace anyway.

So I went and set the console up and migrated my save files and everything over to the new console, and everything was fine and dandy…

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I can’t let you play that, Jim.

Oh how wrong! I put in my Fable 2 disc and wanted to continue my quest of “fame and buying all properties in the world” when – after 5-6 minutes – the console froze again. The new 360 Elite (having a Falcon chipset) froze.

I was shocked to see a console I bought just a few days ago dying on me. So I kept my usual calm (meaning I screamed all kinds of words, throwing my hands in the air) and restarted the console, this time using a different game (Gears 2). And guess what, the console ran just fine for over an hour. Suspicious of that I switched the old console on. More suspiciously the old console played Gears 2 as well now!!

After keeping my calm again and waking the girlfriend (making her wonder why I was cursing so much) I phoned a friend to ask him to bring his 360 over. His is a 360 Arcade (Falcon). And the results are in:

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Using a save game (in my case after finishing the main quest):

• The old 360 Premium (Zephyr) freezes
• The new 360 Elite (Falcon) freezes
• A relatively new 360 Arcade (Falcon) freezes

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Without save game:

• The old 360 Premium (Zephyr) freezes
• The new 360 Elite (Falcon) freezes
• A relatively new 360 Arcade (Falcon) freezes

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Without a save game, without HD-DVD connected, without wireless USB connected:

• The old 360 Premium (Zephyr) freezes
• The new 360 Elite (Falcon) freezes
• A relatively new 360 Arcade (Falcon) freezes

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Does Lionhead acknowledge the problem? Too little, too late?

Well, looking at the vast number of players who had the game freezing on them (including my reply) we can gather that Lionhead has (once again) released a rather buggy game, with seemingly no intention to fix it any time soon, looking at their development blog. Good thing I finished the game, it is off to eBay or trade-in.

Did you have any issues with Fable 2? Please share them!

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[Update] – seems that the new DLC Knothole Island has still not fixed this bug. Sad day for Fable 2 players indeed…

I decide to put Fable 2 on, I know there is a quick quest I wanted to do, so I put in the disc and begin to play. Interesting quest, finding out what lies in a cave near the graveyard. Well, just a few minutes into the game and this happens:

Just kidding, it did not explode, but it froze mid-game, the sound was still playing, but the screen froze and had tearing, gamepad did not work, it would not eject the disc; nothing else I could do but to restart the console forcefully…So I do the usual, trying the game again, making sure the console is lying down evenly, no dust anywhere, all cables are connected properly, the PSU has enough clearance for air to get to it, etc. I live in a smoke-free home, and I do take great care of all my consoles (of which there are a lot, hey, you’re not a fanboy if you own every one of them, right?!?). Still nothing.

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The first call to Microsoft

So I pick up the phone to Microsoft’s UK tech support (contact number can be found here). After a dreadful (through terrible American accent) automated support queue I am finally being routed to a support agent. Very friendly guy, knows his stuff. We try a lot of things from the book, taking all the other equipment off (such as wireless adaptor, HD-DVD drive, hard drive) and testing the game. As it should be, the console works when trying to reproduce the problem, so just before I thank him for his help he suggests clearing the cache of the hard drive just in case.

Lo and behold – the game seems to work fine! So I finish the quest, just in time before the guests arrive. So I think “everything is fine, it was just the cache, happy days!”

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The second call to Microsoft

Wrong! The next morning I get up early, leave the girlfriend to sleep and try the console again. This time Gears 2 – multiplayer tutorials, as I don’t have the achievement yet. About 5 minutes into the game the same thing happens again: the screen freezes, once again nothing I could do but force-shutting-down the console and trying again. I go through the cache-clearing procedure again, but it must have been a fluke yesterday, because it did sod-all.

So I ring Microsoft again, this time another nice chap, but unfortunately we told me this:

• The console has a fault, and it is not the equipment nor the hard drive
• My warranty ran out in February, and since it is not the dreaded Red Ring of Death Microsoft’s warranty extension will not cover it
• To get it repaired it would cost me about £60
• The repairs will take around 3 weeks

Okay, so I am thinking “You know, 3 weeks is not too bad, you have a Wii and a PS3 still….but then again, it will be Christmas soon, and you won’t see your 360 for a long time….and all the games you still haven’t played will fetch hardly anything soon on eBay or Trade-in.” I thank the support agent and consider my options.

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Fly, Falcon, fly – or shine, Jasper, shine…

My 360 is dead, it is literally the first console I owned that has died on me. Sad day. I am now looking at an Elite, ideally using the Jasper chipset (identifyable through this handy guide), or if worse comes to worst, the Falcon one.

If anyone has spotted a Jasper here in the UK, please give me a shout, either here or on Twitter.

Thanks in advance!

I can but wonder what went through the mind of a design studio at that time…maybe it was like this:

Designer A: “Hey you know what, let’s make loads of money by adding the prices right there on the site! They will come in flocks!”
Designer B: “You sure?”
Designer A: “Of course I am, everyone does it these days!”

As a matter of fact I am trying to find anyone in the top 100 or top 200 web design studios in Europe which showed a price for their work. And here is why you shouldn’t…

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A lesson in history

Let’s go back a bit more in time, when the first pricing tables appeared on web design / development based websites – the hosting companies. Here a pricing table is what sets you apart from the competition, if you can offer a decent hosting service with extras to a competitive price then users will come to you. Here it makes sense, because users tend to shop around before they commit to a hosting provider. But web design studios?

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Pricing pages reduce conversion

I really do not know why design studios do this. Real life example: In my role as a consultant to a company in East Anglia I was trying to find an upcoming design studio that might be interested in doing some work for an established UK brand. I was looking for a studio with an interesting portfolio, interesting creative ideas and direction, and most of all being able to be flexible and – if required – bend over backwards or be strong with the client.

Sadly, whenever I went and looked around for designers and studios in the area with a somewhat decent portfolio I noticed a pricing page, or a “Special deal, 50% off our logo design prices!” type button. My next step was simple. Close the tab, look at someone else. Why?

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(In)Flexibility and greed

It is simple psychology and marketing advice: having a pricing page indicates that the designer or design studio tend not to be flexible or tend to be after money rather than providing a decent service. In a day and age where the competition is literally a click away this can mean that this potential high-profile contract just slipped by your nose.

Casing point:

I was contracted to improve conversions with the help of SEO and redesign. Looking at their analytics stats I noticed that 65% of their visitors went to the pricing page and left. My first question was: “Did you think about reducing the prices?” They did. Four times in fact. Still no conversions. So I suggested removing the pricing page and bumping up their contact call to actions. No SEO, no redesign other than fixing the nav. Within 6 weeks their online conversion tripled.

Please, for the sake of a web design generation: you are a designer / design studio, get rid of the pricing page!

Well I had had the chance to play around with it today, and I must say I am not overly impressed. Aside from the high server load and time-outs I managed to find either one of the two things:

• Nothing, or
• Anything but what I was after

Please read on to read more about my thoughts and usability concerns about Cuil…

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2.1 million : 0 – what are the odds

Casing point, I am after references to “information architecture and Flash development blogs” (you guessed it, I am looking for yours truly) I am greeted with no results. Nada. Google: 2.1 million results. MS Live: 3.6 million results. Shame really, but hey, let’s not give up just yet. “Web design with Yahoo maps” – 3 results, all from the same domain.

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Relevancy vs popularity – mixed blessing

Looking back a few months when Google announced that you could now also bid on brand names for Adwords I was one of many many users who were a bit sceptical. Are we now going to be swamped by a number of irrelevant ads when entering a company’s brand name? Well, in some cases we were. Now with Cuil the same thing is happening. In fact, thanks to the relevancy of keywords we are being greeted by a number of websites with similar phrases as what we were looking for, but displaying anything but relevant information. Go ahead, enter “Information Architecture and Web Design“. You will notice that you are greeted by a number of results (1,775 results at the time of writing), which doesn’t sound too bad. But now go to pages 2-10, and you will notice a very familiar number or results with the exact same text, but different URLs. Here they are, your spam sites. And this is just the tip of the ice berg (feel free to enter any query and you will probably notice the same problems).

Obviously, this is just day 1 of the search engine, and obviously the developers are going to do their best to improve upon their search engine and the way it finds results, but at the moment it can be a bit of a nightmare.

For more information on similar tests, please see Danny Sullivan’s article about Cuil’s relevancy – Pete Norrington

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Usability concerns

As with many new sites and designs, it is time for a bit of critique. Cuil uses a similar colour scheme to what we are used to: Blue main links, black text and green URLs are giving us that familiar search engine feel. What is new is the 2 or 3 column layout and that the pagination is embedded into the footer.Here are three usability issues I would think Cuil should address in the future:

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Column layout:

The column layout is a nice idea, as it allows you to display information in an orderly, screen-filling fashion. Add imagery and users can easily make a connection between these call to actions. This usually works pretty well for a numbered amount of slots showing distinguishable information (say for example a list of all inspirational holiday ideas, with an image you can associate the idea with and a short descritption of what you can expect). However, for seach results I am struggling to understand the logic.

Users are used to seeing a results page in a coupon-style approach, meaning a long panel of information, sometimes preceeded by an image, a title, a short description and a call to action to read more. Google is the exact same, bar the image. It allows scanning and since information can be sometimes long or sometimes short it doesn’t cause any problems with the layout. In a column / panel style you are far more restrictive.

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Pagination in the footer area:

Pagination is always welcome if you have a number of results. However pagination at the bottom of the page can lead to some unwanted results. From a usability point of view, users (especially of the older generation) are far more confident in using pagination if it is not entirely moved to the bottom of the page, as the risk of accidentally clicking outside the browser onto the task bar are far less, and you can easily distinguish between what is part of the site / browser and what isn’t.

Another important factor in a search engine is the ability to see what you searched for again (you will notice that all 3 major search engines – Google, MSN, Yahoo – have the search input fields pre-filled repeated at the bottom to show clearly what you searched for and how to amend the search without having to go back to the top.

With Cuil this is a different story: the pagination is at the bottom of the page, with links such as “About”, “Privacy” or “Add Cuil to FireFox” appearing before the pagination, thus alienating the pagination even more.

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Categories

I think this is a very neat feature: the ability to filter the relevance by category (such as author or related themes). However I am not sure if the location of the filter as well as the accordeon effect are really that useful. I would have suggested a “advanced search” style panel or button which would then expand the categories, and instead of hiding the items within each category in an accordeon I would have every shown the 5-10 most relevant, or I would have given each category an ‘expand’ button. In my opinion this would improve the look and feel of the results filter and also make it (at least for certain generations) easier to use.

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Conclusion

This was but a short outlook on Cuil, the new relevancy search engine. I am sure that most of the issues are going to be fixed soon, and I am guessing by the time I get home from work tomorrow most of the result difficulties will have been looked at or are going to be in the process of being fixed. I believe that Cuil will become a great tool for relevant information to subjects one is researching, but up until now my money is going to be on the “major 3″

But what gets me going of late is the inability of some websites to display their PDFs properly…

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The problem with PDF links

I was reviewing a website a few days ago using my usual set of browsers (IE 5.5 – IE7, FF2 FF3, Opera 8 – 9.5, Safari) then I was going through a product page and clicked on a link to read more about a link called “Course documents”. This was when my old test machine’s fans started spinning up and the task manager showed a significant increase of Memory and CPU usage. Acrobat was loading up while IE6 and IE5.5 came to a grinding halt. After about a minute of nothingness the browsers displayed a 3 page PDF with a 1 page full-size image and 2 pages of information about the course.

Now in that time I, the average user, could have been under the impression that the site is crashing my browser, so I would have tried to close the browser forcefully. Or I could have been saying “F*** this, I’ll go elsewhere”.

Not showing your users what link opens a PDF is one of the most annoying things you can do to your users! Not only that, it is a usability and accessibility issue!!!

So I wrote my report to the client, asking them to indicate their PDFs properly. This is what they came back with:

Well done, at least you have the word “Download” appearing within the link. Still not best practice, but at least something – if you are f***ing lazy. So I sat down with the client again and suggested a couple of ideas to his development team:

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Best practice for PDF links

1. Link location: think about moving PDF downloads either into another location entirely, or – if that is not possible or not wanted due to the design and layout – distance the PDF link from other links.
2. Show a file size: here in the EU we still have quite a number of users with dial-up or very slow connections, so it is best practice to show your users what they can expect and how long it may take them.
3. Display a PDF icon: the best visual reference that the link you will be clicking on will be a PDF

In the end the problem was finally solved:

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Conclusion

This was an interesting exercise with that client. And I really wished everyone would do this. Displaying PDF links properly isn’t difficult, it makes you look a lot more professional and you make your site a hell of a lot more usable and accessible. Come on, do your part!

Right, so I guess most of you know Neon Genesis Evangelion (if not, read the Wiki page). Basically, a very good friend of mine from the good old uni days warmly recommended me that anime. And in fairness, when it started I did quite enjoy it. The drawing style was very well executed, the overall feel of being in future Japan fighting against ‘Angels’ looked very well and the soundtrack was this nice mix of classic and electro-pop as many animes have it.

So why did you not like it, Alex?

Well for starters I do oppose work done by someone who half-way though thought it would be a great idea messing the whole story line up thanks to losing funding and allegedly turning insane. If you lose funding then stop working on a project until money frees up. State your case, seek funding elsewhere. This is how every project works. Even anime.

Half way through the season we all notice a shift in the quality of the episodes as well as the tone of the series. Not only does out main hero have personal father-son and ‘The world hates me’ issues, but also does one of the heroines begin to think about her dead mother half-way through a fight with one of the angels. Seriously, she could not have picked a better time, her mech (I know they are called Eva’s, but an Eva is something beautiful [Adam and Eve, or 'Eva' in German], and these mechs are far from that) refuses to work, she cries, our hero has self-existence issues. Hows that for a cool story line?

What else is there…oh yes, how about the fact that in episode 16 (I may be off here and it is ep 15 or 17, then again I don’t really care about too much to want to watch it again) one of the mechs has the idea of going berserk. Wow, I may be off here, but wasn’t this screened in afternoons for a younger audience? Great idea!!! What about the semi-sex scene a few episodes later?

Let’s have a look at the characters and the story line…sorry, I meant that thin thread the episodes try to connect each other in the second half of the series. We are greeted with a lot of personal story lines, but nothing does actually move the story forward. I remember the story being something along the lines of “Defend Earth from the Angels”, then again I might have misread it and it should have said “Let’s save Earth – no wait, let’s all have our own emo-problems and turn fucked up!” Oh come on, thanks for that!

Right then, let’s think about the episodes called ‘Death & Rebirth’ and the ‘End of Evangelion’: In a futile attempt to save something from the anime’s original story line (and to keep the fans not that pissed off with the studio) the studio thought it was a good idea to mess about a bit more. Great, now we see the hero jacking off to the heroine (who is in a coma – I am amazed that no institution of over-protective whiny parents or individuals wrote a long letter to their senator, major, whatever) and after some random fighting, crying, shouting, dying, razing, killing, maiming, making ones body explode….well after some time of that the hero tries to strangle the heroine and (obviously at this point) fails just to be greeted with the word “useless”.

At that point I felt really bad – mainly because I realised that the hours I put into that anime would never come back, that I have wasted precious time of my life on watching something with so much potential, just to see it get fucked over by the studio and its ever so slightly ‘socially misguided’ director.

Dear Mr Sadamoto, I am sure you had only the best in mind for this series, thank you for ruining it.

Lastly, I am sure that I offended 99% of all anime-fans, and this was my intention. Instead of crying like babies, think about what I wrote first, and then try and tell me you didn’t feel cheated.