This morning I just made the observation that, as far as I can tell, every coffee station here at the office seems to have a pair of scissors — since the coffee packets are so difficult to open!

Somebody better tell Peet’s that coffee packets have users too! I’m sure if it was a financially viable option, and if they made a commercial-grade machine, companies might just switch to Keurig over it.

Every time I log into one of my online banking systems, I get a message like the following:

This is just intrusive and rude behavior (as Alan Cooper might say). First of all, the message first off tells me when the last unsuccessful attempt was made to access the account… HUH??? Then it tries to be helpful and tell me when the last successful attempt was made.

It just makes no sense at all to me why this message exists at all. Why would I ever care about these particular statistics, and even if I did care about them, is it really necessary to pop up a message box every time I log in???

I vote no.

Fine. If you want to have that information accessible, provide a log of all accesses tucked away in my account settings or somewhere I can get to if I think I have a security concern. Don’t show this message to me, please. What this message boils down to is a debug-ish message in the clothing of security (I could be wrong, but that’s what it smells like to me).

Interestingly, as a side note, I happen to know that this system is from a company that is now owned by Intuit (my former stomping ground), and in the two or more years since that acquisition, this message box has surprisingly still not disappeared.

Is it just me or is that a ludicrous choice? Why not a space (my preference – a la delicious) or a comma?

In addition, there is no example visible to show you what the legal delimiter is! You have to miraculously divine what it wants, or let it show you what it wants, as I chose to do.

To find out what the delimiter is, I had to do the following:

1. Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
2. Select two (short) tags. (I notice lots of other folks thought that a space would be a logical delimiter too…!)
3. Close the dialog.
4. Oops. Closing the dialog didn’t populate the text box with my selections. Awesome.
5. Trying again… Open the “Select Tags…” dialog.
6. Select two (short) tags, this time at the end of the list where I notice OK and Cancel buttons (yes – you heard that right. The buttons are embedded in the list itself… and at the bottom of the list, no less! They’re not on the dialog “window.”)
7. Click OK.
8. Observe that text box has the new selections delimited by semicolons.

The auto-populating text box is another usability nightmare deserving of its own article, but I’ll let someone else write that one up. ;)