Wednesday, 1 August 2007

The emotional devastation of bad wording

Recently went to Morroco for a couple of weeks. Beautiful hotels, amazing scenery. And a friends wedding that was truly incredible, the groom came in on a horse carrying a gun, the bride had 5 costume changes.

The photos were really wonderful.

That was until the wife recorded a video, then wanted to delete it to make a bit more space, at which point she was faced with this choice.

The use of the word 'frames' rather than 'Photos' or 'Photos & Videos' started the confusion.
I mean who describes their photos as 'frames', you either frame a photo, or deal with frames of a film. Which, as she'd just recorded a small video, compounded the confusion.

Anyway, one irreversible slip later and 700+ photos of the holiday suddenly disappeared.

Katie felt awful, and was very nearly in tears, full of apologies.

Tears should NOT be caused by poorly worded interfaces not making a very major action extremely clear, that's just crap design. The choice is right, the wording of the choice is totally wrong.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may find this useful:

http://pcwin.com/Utilities/Restore_Memory_Card_Deleted_Files/index.htm


Good luck,

A. Coward

David Carruthers said...

tar.

£30 and a copy of winundelete later i managed to salvage 580 of 690 photos (or 'Frames' if you're an interface designer/translator for fuji).

http://www.winundelete.com/