I purchased a Barnes & Noble Nook on Tuesday evening and so far my user experience of the device and the website has been thoroughly underwhelming to say the least.

Where do I start? Okay, let’s begin with the device itself. It feels cheap and plastic and even though the screen is a smidgeon larger than the one on my SONY PRS-505 e-book reader it actually appears smaller due to the design of the bezel.

Currently I have Oscar Wilde’s drug addled, half-lidded caricature staring back at me from the screen whilst it sits in standby mode. This is most certainly a feature I hope I can switch off – I remember seeing a related option under the configuration menu so I will be investigating that very soon.

Update: No way to switch off the feature completely, I can have “nature” or “authors” or “city scapes” but not actually just blank the screen. A minor annoyance but frankly I’d really like the option to switch off the background completely.

The packaging was utterly dreadful. It seems that Barnes & Noble went for a “unique user experience” but when I describe it as worse than the Windows Vista packaging you will hopefully understand what I mean. I have never in my life ever purchased a product that gave me pause for thought to actually consider using Google to locate instructions on how to get the stupid fucking device out of the box it came in. I cannot imagine an elderly Grandmother ever figuring out how to extract the e-book reader from the box. I swear I came close to snapping the device in half trying to remove the plastic backing mount from it.

God forbid that you should buy one of these devices for a journey, only to open the device up at the airport ready for some hot reading action to realise you need a computer, with internet connection, to actually be able to use it for what it was meant for, i.e. reading books. Why Barnes & Noble couldn’t have let you register for a B&N account directly on the device, without the need for a computer leaves me scratching my head.

As far as the Barnes & Noble website goes, I never thought I would encounter a more poorly implemented bookstore web application than the one that SONY has for their devices but Barnes & Nobles, I congratulate on utterly failing to be better than Borders/SONY bookstore.

Barnes & Noble’s website experience is sloooowww. I mean, really slow. Like, 56K modem slow. I’ve tried using it on a number of different computers, including my utter beast of a workstation, and various high-speed internet connections in different cities at different times and it just crawls. This isn’t a case of the website undergoing maintenance, this is just a slow, slow, slow website that needs some serious infrastructure work.

The user interface experience on the website is dreadful, requiring so many clicks to actually browse for and purchase a book that your impulse purchases will have utterly evaporated long before you ever click “download.”

The B&N bookstore website doesn’t work correctly in Firefox, many features are broken due to poor coding of CSS, including the search box. I suspect that it is geeks that are primarily buying the Nook and if that is the case, then they are most likely running Firefox or Safari, surely you should ensure your website actually works for the people who are buying your product?

Your personal book library on the website is managed through a Flash application which is rather poorly implemented. It frequently crashes, runs sluggishly slow, animates various pop-ups for no particular reason, forces you to navigate your library in a single small window – God forbid you should actually have, you know, a few hundred e-books – fails to remember options you have set such as zoom level, sort order, or many other settings. Again, because the website is so slow, the Flash application responds with appropriate sluggishness.

I’ve spent only a few hours with the device, and I am currently considering returning it to the bookstore where I purchased it and asking for a refund. It really is a sad little device with a poor end-user experience. I really was hoping for a better user experience than my SONY PRS-505 but unfortunately, this isn’t it.

I really wanted to like this device. I really wanted to replace my PRS-505, but I am really disappointed in the whole end-to-end user experience, from the packaging, to the device, to the website. Because of these problems it really colours my thoughts and final judgement of what the device is for: reading books. Yes, it lets me do that just fine, but the rest of the experience is just so poor that I would rather stick with the devil I know than use a new device that has questionable longevity and an even more questionable user-experience.

Maybe in a few years I will take another look at the Barnes & Noble Nook, but I will be returning the device to the store just a few days after purchase because it is plainly and simply a dreadful thing to inflict on anyone who loves reading books.

For now I will be sticking with the SONY PRS-505 and Calibre software until either the SONY Daily Edition or the Kindle DX prove themselves viable alternatives.

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After having ordered and paid for a simple two-year web hosting plan from MidPhase.com for this website back in October of 2009 I finally have gotten around to actually moving the code and database across. For the past five years this website has been hosted with PHPWebHosting.com who have done an amazing job of keeping my collection of websites up and running.

The requirements of some of my other websites have grown and that means that they have been moved off to MidPhase.com that provide different features, such as Windows and dedicated servers and virtual servers, that I felt it was time to move the last remaining website, my personal one, over to MidPhase.com too.

If you are in the market for a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web hosting company, I would certainly recommend PHPWebHosting now and in the future. It would be the obvious choice. Five years. Never had a significant problem with the web hosting, the server or the company.

I’ve been hosting other websites with MidPhase for the past year and so far have been very happy with the service I’ve received. I’ve only had to contact tech support once, and the issue was resolved in under 20 minutes.

The problem, if you are curious, was to do with the fact I was trying to sign up a new hosting account with user information I had already used on a pre-existing account. This somehow confused the account setup application that would indicate that the account was ready to go, but wouldn’t let me login. Tech support were incredibly helpful, via the in-browser chat interface, and the matter was easily resolved once the tech had looked in to it.

Again, if you are looking for two reliable, and really decently priced web hosting companies, PHPWebHosting.com and MidPhase.com. I cannot recommend them enough.

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What happens when your message isn’t congruent with your actions?

I just got around to installing Windows 7 (an absolutely terrible operating system if you do anything more than email and web browsing) on one of the workstations at the office and I needed to read through a PDF document but didn’t yet have Adobe Reader installed. I know Adobe Reader is a slow piece of bloated, bug-ridden nonsense and thought it might be time to look for alternatives. Googling around I find out about Foxit and have heard good things from a few people so thought I would give it a quick whirl.

And I got slimed.

Installing the software just feels like a nasty, slimy experience as you click through all of the “No, I don’t want a new toolbar. No, I don’t need you to re-write my homepage bookmark. No, I don’t need eBay stuck on my browser either.” By the time I hit the “would you like us to stick bookmarks to trusted websites you already have in your browser?” I was done and it was time to stop the install process.

The wording of each option is very forked tongue. I had flashbacks to the 1990’s with the beginnings of the Internet and my first encounters with “behind your back, let me fuck your machine up” software installations. AOL strangely comes to mind. The phrasing of each option is done in such a way that you either aren’t sure if you need the toolbar for the software to work, whether you’re turning it off, turning it on, or are just asking to be bent over and taken without any kind of lube.

Okay, let’s stop this installation. Yeah, but there’s no “Cancel” button, no “Back” button. Another incongruity. ”We’re so convinced you’ll love our software and all of the bloat that we bundle with it that we don’t need to provide you with the option to cancel.” I quickly decide to bring up Task Manager and just kill the install process before this goes any further.

Here’s someone else who had the same issues with the software installer I did. http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/05/why-i-flushed-foxit.html

The marketing message states one thing, the actions of the software, and the company behind the software, are clearly something else.

So what other products does the company behind Foxit produce and sell?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

I will never find out because through a single experience of dealing with a slimy piece of software that left a bad taste, I won’t ever consider using any of their software in the future.

This is what happens when you have an incongruent message, you switch off your potential customers. You destroy a future relationship.

How much money are you making by bundling distasteful practices in to your free software, to make a quick buck? You louse up potential future sales because the user is no longer interested enough to look at what other products you create.

At least with Adobe Reader I know how to turn off what I don’t want and the registry patches you need to apply are clearly documented on various websites.

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