Having recently inherited Elizabeth’s printer/scanner because it stopped being willing to play nice with her computer, I found that if anything, James Lileks is being over-charitable to scanner ergonomic design teams:
I just fear dealing with the Canon scanner interface, although it can’t be worse than HP. Yes, yes, I know, buy VueScan. But I had just gotten used to the HP interface on the new scanner. It was designed, as usual, by engineers with no taste who presume Great-gramma is trying to scan something so she can send it by the inter-mails to someone, and needs to be shown in the most obvious way possible that she is old and stupid and should not use computers. Hence it has two icons: one says DOCUMENTS, with a little badge that says “300,” and another says IMAGES, with a badge reading “200.” I assume that means dpi, but who knows? You can make custom profiles, but it never remembers them. There’s no button that actually says SCAN, which would be helpful. It’s as if the GUI team is a bunch of malicious bastiches who came up with the most non-intuitive interface ever, then said “Okay, now let’s add one more step between deciding to scan and actually achieving a scan. Johnson, you’re good at this. What would you recommend?”
“Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say have the default setting for saving put it into some proprietary image-collection program buried deep in the User’s library, so it can’t be found no matter how hard they look.”
“Excellent! Make it so.”
