Yesterday the "low tire pressure" light on my car came on. (I've never had a "low tire pressure" light before.) The tire gauge didn't show anything to be concerned about and the light went off again after a couple miles, so I'm not sure what that was about. (It was not the coldest recent day, at least at the time it happened.) But there was a fundamental flaw in the UI: it didn't tell me which tire it suspected, so I had to check all of them. Given that they've obviously got sensors in each tire, how much harder would it have been to transmit that information and add four little dots or something to the light, lighting the ones(s) where problems were detected? (Hey Honda, if you do this, position them intelligently -- don't follow the bad design of the burner knobs on many stoves.)

On my previous car, you move the lever up to turn on the wipers and down for a single pass. On my current car it's the reverse. That's taking some getting used to. Neither is obviously better; I wish the industry would just choose one.

Another in the "it's not just about you, mister designer" class: every microwave oven I've ever used has a numeric keypad, with "start" and "stop" buttons to either side of the "0". On the microwave at home, "start" is on the right. At work, it's on the left. As a result I get this wrong about one time in five. (It's not as if I -- or most users, I suspect -- actually read the button; we use positional memory, which works for numbers and fails for start/stop.) People change microwaves more often than they change cars, I suspect, so it would be nice if the industry would settle on a standard. Either one would be fine if it were predictable.

Yet another reason that I would leave (or decline) a job that requires substantial Word usage: accessibility.

In my experience, MS Office utterly fails when it comes to accessibility issues. (Or if it doesn't and there are work-arounds, I sure can't find them in the documentation -- which is a different type of failure.) Today's problem: highlighting. When you use the highlighter in Word, it hard-wires whatever color you chose into the document (bright yellow, by default). That's illegible to someone using reverse-video, and there's no way to globally change it in a document. The correct way to do this sort of thing is to have semantic concepts like "highligher color" (1, 2, 3...), and embed that into the Word doc. Then, on the client end, you define your color map. Voila -- everything works. It'd be like system colors, except they'd work. You get your yellow; I get dark blue. For extra points, use the system settings directly for as much as possible; "selection color" probably works fine for highlighting, for instance.

It's not just highlighting in Word; Outlook pays attention to your system colors for some things but not others, so there are things in the UI I just can't see. (I'm told there's supposed to be a status line that tells me about my server connection; could've fooled me.) I frequently get Office documents where some accident changed "automatic color" to black, and I have to select everything and change it back.

This problem is not unique to Office; Microsoft's IM client does the same thing with text color. Your outgoing messages have a hard-wired text color, which might or might not work for the recipient. I have to highlight most coworkers' messaages to read them (they come in as black on my dark background), and they have to do the same for mine (which are white so I can see them as I type). Text color should be set for a user, not for outgoing messages. I want to see everything in white; you want to see everything in black. Half of our conversation shouldn't be wrong for each of us.

These products, like many web sites, tend to specify half of the foreground/background-color pair. If you're going to hard-wire yellow highlighting, you'd better also hard-wire black text. If you're going to hard-wire black IM text, you'd better also hard-wire a light background. But you shouldn't hard-wire either most of the time; you should ask the OS.

MS offers accessibility options in Windows, but it's a sham -- try to use them and you'll bump into stuff like this all the time. Theirs aren't the only products with these problems, but they are the ones who have no excuse for getting this wrong.

I don't really think of myself as a Phillistine (culturally speaking), but I think my views on art and function are more conservative than those of some of the people around me.

When they redesigned US paper money a few years back, a lot of people thought the results were much prettier than before. But usability for me went way down, because I found the font they used for the numbers on the front to be illegible, and I could no longer tell whether I was holding a 10 or a 20 without looking at the back. This is a nuisance when digging through a wallet. And I can't believe that it wasn't at least a little harder even for people with good vision. So to me the new peach 20s are a major improvement, at least for now. We'll see what happens when they do the 10s.

I've heard some people critique the new peach bills in various ways, liking the treatment of the background or disliking some aspect of the portrait or the like. And I'm sure the government spent an amount several times my annual income on the artistic aspects of the bill (as opposed to the anti-counterfeiting aspects). But c'mon, it's just money! I'd rather have pretty money than ugly money all other things being equal, but I really don't care. Its job is to live in my wallet until I want to exchange it for goods or services. And as soon as the art gets in the way of that function, I get annoyed.

Take, for example, the new quarters. There are now 51 different versions of the quarter. If I pull a quarter out of my pocket and I'm looking at the back, I can't tell what coin I'm holding. It's probably a US quarter, but for all I know it's an SBA or a Canadian coin or something else wonky that showed up in the change from the store. I have to flip it over and look at the front to know -- all in the name of art, because having one design instead of 51 was boring or something. I want the old quarters back because the new ones introduced a bug without a corresponding feature. Some think the new art is a feature, of course, but my vision isn't good enough to appreciate that -- and even if it were, it still interferes with function.

So now they're redesinging the nickel. Fortunately there will only be two or three versions in circulation, rather than 51, but I still have to ask why. Was the old one broken? I haven't heard anyone make that argument. The old one wasn't even ugly! (At least the nickel starts out less ambiguous than the quarter does.)

Lots of software chooses art over usability, whether it's graphics, fonts, weird command sequences, inconsistent behavior, or the like. (You also see this in a lot of web sites, of course.) I've pretty much given up there; the software world seems to prefer the notion that art is allowed to prevent function. But I'm frustrated when I see that approach migrate into my world at large.

Again, I'm all for art -- in appropriate venues. But basic functionality has to come first. If I'm standing at the parking meter and can't tell effortlessly what coin I'm holding, I don't give a damn if it's pretty.