I was sat in a bar the other day when I noticed this comment card:
Now I’m not that anal that I go around looking at every piece of design in a critical way but this thing made me laugh. They’ve got the standard three ratings for a comment card of this type - “good”, “average” and “bad”. But it’s how they’ve executed it that’s the weird confusing thing. Instead of having the defacto standard “faces” (happy, no smile, sad) they’ve used a really confusing “tick”, “line”, “cross”. Now most people will argue that a tick is a positive thing while a cross is a negative thing, but when it comes to putting your mark in the boxes - what do you put? Do you use a tick under the tick rating? Or maybe you put a cross under the tick rating? But hang-on a cross means bad, but I was using it to signify good. Or you use combinations of all three - a sort of double affirmation - a cross under cross etc etc. Oh Christ my head hurts. They’ve tried to be clever but it aint worked. Sometimes the old simple ideas are the best!
DO you think maybe the person that “designed” it never even thought about this, that is half the problems, you have probably got some guy (or girl) sat at a desk surfing around cool designer websites and cool forum sites, looking in ore of all the cool work produced, gagging to get some interesting design work. Next thing this lands on his desk and he just replicates what he is given, with no thought or design consideration, so he can get back to looking at the cool stuff he has found or is working on to show his peers.
Tim / 29/01/2004