My Lego shelf is almost complete. I still have a select few Castle sets I'd like to pickup (the new stuff, with the orcs and dwarfs) but other than that it's nearly done. It's been a blast having a new house with enough space for this kind of stuff. The last 2 weeks I've spent quite a few evenings downstairs with Andy (our 2.5 year old) building and playing castle games with the sets. He's enjoying it immensely and I am too. Every day I get home from work and he says "Daddy! Want to go downstairs and play lego!". I have to try and contain his excitement while we eat supper, but then after we head down to the basement and bust out the lego. It's nice to have somebody to play with again :)

I've been doing a lot of reading about usability. It's made me think a lot about the user experience when I'm designing and developing. It's also made me think a lot about the user experience when I'm NOT doing anything computer related.

Lego.com Usability Failure

I recently went to the Lego website to try and get a catalog sent to my house. I remember reading through these catalogs as a kid and coming up with all sorts of creative things I would be able to do when/if I received a certain set. Heck, half the fun for me was just looking at what the Lego designers had come up with. So yesterday I wanted to order a catalog for Andy, my 2.5 year old son, as he's been really enjoying our Lego collection. When I got to the last screen in the slideshow and tried to go back to re-enter my correct age, it wouldn't let me! It cookied me and I had to clear my cache to be able to re-enter the form information. Grrr..

[Here's the catalog request form, so you don't have to hunt for it] :)

Petro Canada Usability Failure

I went to fill up my car the other day, and wanted to pay at the pump. There were 2 icons to display the "right" way to insert my debit card... which one was the right one?

(As an aside, I realize the irony in posting about usability failures when Posterous won't even let me select a single image to display underneath my headings. It wraps them all up into this slideshow. Hey Posterous, if you're listening, how about an interface that allows me to select and insert single images that were uploaded as part of a bundle?)