Nutsmuggling

One thing I am good at is finding flares in things, and people for that matter. This makes me a bit of a scassamaroni, which can be roughly translated as “pain in the, ehm, neck”; but hey, that’s what criticism is about. As an experienced nagger, I introduce this new column, Usability Enemies, which could be paraphrased as “Were you drunk when you designed that?”. Our first guest is a bulky handheld device, the Guide Multimedia that you can rent when visiting the Louvre, Paris.

The Guide Multimedia can be rented for 6€, which is the average price of a pint in a not-so-central bar in Paris. My advice? Get a pint: it’s refreshing, and will not get you an headache; not a single pint at least.¹

The Guide Multimedia can be rented in the main hall of the Louvre, in the Pyramid, at the beginning of each of the three main wings, Denon, Richelieu and Sully.

The guide welcomes you with an introduction of all its features. Then you have, basically, two choices: either you use the guide to get information on single works, or follow a pre-cooked path. Lets start with the last option, as I did. “Hey, my arts history is rusty”, I thought, “let’s let this guide take me around the Louvre”. I choose the “Italian paintings” path, and was presented with a choice:

• Start from the Pyramid.
• Start from the first work.

Well, since I wasn’t in the pyramid, I decided to start from the first work, except, where’s the first work located?
No worry, this guide seems to have GPS! There’s a dot moving showing me where I am… or isn’t it? That a classical usability problem, you’ve got an object and don’t understand if it has or hasn’t a feature. This sort of GPS seemed to work at the beginning and then disappeared and there was no way to get it back.
Well, I thought, I’ll just follow this green line on the screen which supposedly is a path I should follow. Pity that, when I tried to click on a work-of-art spot, it worked half the times. I won’t mention the fact that to scroll you need to drag you plastic pen on the map, and again it works only 50% of the times.
At this point my brain talked to me: “Davide, for chrissake, you’re in the middle of the most amazing works of art ever conceived by humanity, do you really intend to spend you time hacking one of the worse works of technology ever conceived by humanity?”

The guide hang from my neck for most of the day, unused. Occasionally I tried to access the commentary on specific works, through a unique code. Unluckily the commented works are not that many. One could argue that you cannot possibly comment all 35000 works on the Louvre. I’m with you on that, but there must be middle way between all and a ridiculously small number. I might not be the typical user, but if I see a popular (and I mean popular) Tiziano or Giotto and want some infos, well, I’d like to have some. Also, the numerical codes are signalled through micro tags; I also guess that many tags were missing. I will not describe minutiously other features of the user interface, as the two buttons doing the same thing; suffices it to say it is a mess.

What else? Did I tell you already that for the same money you can get a pint?

Davide

Notes

1. One could argue that, say, if I were visiting the Louvre with five friends and I managed to convince them to leave the guide alone and get a pint, supposing that they don’t like beer, I might end up with five pints and consequently a headache; but this is beyond the scope of this post. [↩]