Extra effort caused by elimination of disposable packages

Although elimination of disposable packages in eg. Scandic hotel chain has been a great action for environment, some challenges that originally influenced to the very trend remain.

One of those is cleaning. Especially anything related to toiletries should deserve extra attention. Unfortunately this is often overlooked by maids, as well as the people who make the cleaning contracts.

Xbox Live credit card hoax disquised as Automatic Renewal

I spotted an interesting line from my credit card bill, which said Xbox live 19,90.

This was clearly unauthorized charging since I paid extra attention to my choice of Live membership and payment method after warnings from my colleague who had previously experienced continuous charging of credit card.


I decided to remove my card data as once from my xbox. -Unfortunately this move had been thought at Microsoft headquarters. Removal was not possible to do on the xbox!! Instead the prompt asked to visit http://www.xbox.com/support for membership info and how to turn of automatical renewal...

At this point I can give you a hint. It's nowhere near there. You might get a better start from the address https://live.xbox.com. -The end result is not any better, but least that's wehere it is supposed to be..

The guidance what you'll in the end find is useless:
 

Ok, lets find that billing information then manually...
You'll probably find several errors from the system:

 

But if you hit the right spot, you'll find your billing information:

 

There it is finally; "Cancel my service".
-But let's first think for a moment that which service it was you wanted to cancel.......





Ok, here we go. Thumbs up everybody!!


 

Still not possible. -It Really is made impossible to cancel the automatic renewal and charging from the credit card!

Time for some conclusions:


I consider this a criminal credit card hoax, with the difference that this is done globally, diguised as legitimate and sealed with the human lazyness and self accusations. -And definitely not good businness on the long run.

Next: Calls to Consumer Agency and Microsoft.

Improving UX design by managerial decisions?

Original build of Kenwood kMix hand mixer had a power cord that could be rolled around the base of the mixer allowing a perfect fit to the table stand.

I fell in love with this feature and bought the mixer. The disappointment was huge when I found out that some "UX aware manager had clearly improved the design" by extending the cord for any of the usual reasons and simultaneously ruined the design.

I don't believe in the democracy of expertese.

Suddenly everything stops

Imagine that you rush into your hotel room with you hands full and drop your keycard to the floor when trying to shovel it into the main light switch while the door is closing behind you.

Suddenly you get a feeling that there's no rush and the best thing to do is crawl on the floor in total blackness.
-Further you can't avoid thinking that this was not considered, when the brilliant idea of key card operating main switch was introduced to hotel businnes.