(Continuing the old rant OT: Stupid User Interfaces)

How hard can it be to open a door?

This week, I had to travel in a regional train, a quite modern Stadler KISS train operated by DB Regio (Deutsche Bahn). Very unsurprisingly, it has electrical door openers to enter and leave the train. A big round button surrounded by red and green LEDs. Wait until the green LEDs are on, press the button, and the door will open. Easily done even by a three year old kid. I'm old enough to remember trains where you had to push the door open, requiring quite a lot of force.

These modern doors (and that's not limited to the KISS) tend to fail quite often, so DB Regio uses large yellow stickers on the door windows telling you that the door is unfortunately broken and that you should use one of the other doors. Well, that's annoying. You would expect that a door that is used daily by literally thousands of people in the not too extreme weather of Germany to be designed to withstand that use for more than a few months. But that's not the point. The yellow sticker tells you that the door won't open, period.

The KISS train has doors between the segments, designed as a kind of "leaky airlock", with a sealed electric sliding door opened by a small illuminated button on the one side and an unsealed glass swing door on the other side. A very strange design, causing a lot of noise and draught near the glass door, the glass door needs a lot of room in a small area to swing open, and it needs some force to open. Two sliding doors, as in much older trains, would have been the smarter solution.

Now imagine that ugly yellow sticker of shame on the electric sliding door, telling you to use one of the other doors, and the "open" button not being lit. Are they expecting me to climb out of the train at 100 km/h, and enter the next car through one of the outside doors? Probably not. There is a yellow sticker of shame on the door, so it won't open, period.

Or will it? After abour half an hour, someone entered the car through the door. So my thought was "poor guy, now you are trapped in this car, too". I was expecting that only the open button on my side of the door was broken. And he went back to his car, through the door with the yellow sticker. So, yes, the door could not be opened electrically. But it still has handles, and can be opened with a little bit of force. D'oh! I could have travelled in a car with way less people if I had actually tried the handles.

How hard can it be to open a door, again?

Remember that big round buttons with the LEDs, that can open the door when the green LEDs are on? Three of the four cars in a KISS train are equipped with a large lavatory, usable even if you need a wheelchair. One of the big round buttons with the red and green LEDs is mounted next to the door of the lavatory, with the green LEDs permanently on. Guess what happens if you press that button.

If you are unlucky, a voice recording tells you that the lavatory is out of order. Or it tells you that the lavatory is currently in use. In both cases, the door won't open. But, if the lavatory is unused, and you press the button, the voice recoding will tell you exactly that. The door won't move a bit.

This button is not a door opener. It is a method of identifying frequent travelers. If you know the KISS trains, you completely ignore the button and look at the traditional red "WC" light. If it is off, you can enter the lavatory by pulling hard on the door handle. If you don't know the KISS trains, that button will make you look like a fool who does not know the red light.

The official purpose of the button a replacement for the red light for blind and visually impaired persons.

Too bad noboby really thought about the lavatory door. It is huge, to allow entering the lavatory in a wheel chair. Good. But it requires a lot of force to open and close. Little kids can't open the door, and even some adults have problems opening and closing it. So, where is the electrical door opener wired to the infrequent traveler identifier button?

How hard can it be to track working time?

German law forces us to track working time, and that's a good thing. We don't need to track anything more than "working" or "not working". A time stamp clock at the entrance would be sufficient. Except that we sometimes work from the home office, or spend an entire day at a client. Legally, we could even get away with hand-written notes. The law just requires that the working time is recorded, not how.

We work for different clients, sometimes with a fixed price, sometimes we are being paid by the hour, sometimes both at once even in the same project (don't ask). So we recently decided to use a cloud-based time tracking app, which can run in a web broswer, in a desktop application (which is just a browser without an address bar), or in an Android or iOS app (which propably also is just a browser without an address bar).

• You can not change your password. Period.
• Logout button is hidden behind two menu layers.
• There is a permanent reminder (in the browser) to install the desktop application, that you need to click away every single time you log in.
• The desktop application refuses to start after installation ("This is not a Windows application")
• The Android app is simply unusable. It has the same visual interface as the website, but requires completely different handling than all other Android apps (drag instead of tap for a new record, no way to edit records, and so on).
• You can track time only in a calender view:
  • Short jobs are so tiny in the default zoom level that you can not see them
  • Long jobs require zooming out and/or scrolling.
  • You need to open a popup to fix start and stop times, or use zoom and drag-and-drop to adjust start and end times
  • Zoom requires you to use a special control on the page, you can not use Ctrl + mouse wheel or keyboard shortcuts
• You are not allowed to track times of one minute or less. (Not a company policy, the software prohibits that.)
• There is no list view of tracked time, period.
• About half of the screen width is reserved for unused features, while at the same time project names are cut of due to width restrictions.
• The default for the "paid by the hour" switch can be set by the admins for each project. In mixed-payment projects, you may need to change that switch. Which causes more trouble:
  • Admins can't change switch in tracked time, so lists need to be written and users have to toggle that switches for an entire a month.
  • Resuming a job resets the switch to the default value instead of keeping the switch as is

And that's only the interface for the "worker bees". I did not even bother to look at the admin stuff, or the reporting that is completely useless unless you are working self-employed.

All we really need is a simple, five-column table:

• Start time
• End time
• Project (from a lookup table)
• paid by the hour (checkbox)
• Short description for the invoice

Invisible to the user, a sixth column should track the user ID, so working times can be properly summed up, and users see only their own time records.

Alexander