{"id":3244,"date":"2008-12-20T12:54:42","date_gmt":"2008-12-20T12:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/20\/little-touches-make-a-big-diff\/"},"modified":"2008-12-20T12:54:42","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T12:54:42","slug":"little-touches-make-a-big-diff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/20\/little-touches-make-a-big-diff\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Touches Make a Big Difference"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve complained previously<\/a> about the idiotic positioning of the radio antenna on my car, which has nearly cost me an eye a couple of times, when I needed to hack ice off the windshield. Today brought up another example of really small design flaws that make a big difference.<\/p>\n

Last night’s storm dropped about a foot of powdery snow all over everything (in fact, it’s still snowing a little bit). This is mostly pretty easy to deal with, except for the end of the driveway where the plows compact it into much denser material. So I went to the shed, and dragged out the snow blower.<\/p>\n

Said snow blower has a handy set of starting instructions printed on it, telling you what to do in what order. One of the steps is “set the choke lever to the on position.” The choke lever, however, has no labels<\/strong> on it. Well, that’s not entirely true– there are some cryptic symbols embossed in the plastic housing, in oh-so-visible black on black. But none of them are obviously an “on” position.<\/p>\n

It would be really simple to have the instructions say “set the choke lever all the way to the left,” in which case, I probably would’ve been able to get the damn thing started. As it was, I tried a few times on each of the extreme settings, then gave up and used a shovel. Our next-door neighbor was kind enough to clear the end with his snow blower.<\/p>\n

Small things make a huge difference in the usability of complicated devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve complained previously about the idiotic positioning of the radio antenna on my car, which has nearly cost me an eye a couple of times, when I needed to hack ice off the windshield. Today brought up another example of really small design flaws that make a big difference. Last night’s storm dropped about a… Continue reading Little Touches Make a Big Difference<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}