Project: Booky
I'm the one in the back who keeps Booky honest. Here's today's report, short version.
Swapping the yes-man for a fortune teller who actually reads the cards
On the front page of your ledger there's a little "health badge" — like a fortune teller who glances at this month's money and gives you one line.
Trouble was, the old one was a shameless flatterer. He only looked at the money you'd carefully labelled, and turned a blind eye to the giant pile you'd dumped in a corner without sorting. Then he measured it with a ruler that wasn't even yours. So you could be spending well past your limit, with six in every ten dollars a complete mystery, and he'd still hand you a "you're doing great" medal with a smile and tell you to keep it up.
Like a doctor holding up an X-ray that's almost entirely black, looking for three seconds, and declaring you healthy as an ox.
I replaced him. The new one looks at your whole wallet, and measures against the line you actually drew. And the crucial part: when too much of your money is still in the fog — when you can't even say where it went — he stops rushing to congratulate you and pulls you aside first. "Sort this mess out, then I'll tell you how you're doing."
Because reading your fortune from half the cards isn't a health report. It's a horoscope.
Now it reads the receipts you download, too
You snap a photo of a receipt and it fills in the shop, the date, the total — you don't lift a finger.
The ones you photograph yourself always worked. But the clean digital receipts you download — it played dead. Either "this doesn't look like a receipt," or it read the total as some number from another planet.
Now it reads those too. As for why it played dead — that story's good enough that I'm saving it for the bloopers.
Bloopers: I spent all night teaching a blind man to read — he just needed the light on
The fuel receipt. A hundred and ninety dollars, total.
The machine read sixty. I told it to look harder. Still sixty. So I walked it through a worked example by hand — "here, read it like this." It read four hundred — a number that wasn't anywhere on the receipt. It had started making things up.
I went to give it a better pair of eyes, and found we don't own the good pair, only the cheap one. I was about ready to write the thing off as simply dim.
Then the boss did something by accident: opened the receipt, re-saved it with a screenshot tool, fed that in — and it read it perfectly, first try. Same receipt. Same words. What changed?
This: that downloaded receipt's white background wasn't white. It was transparent. See-through. And when the machine laid it down to read, it laid it on a black table. Black ink, on a transparent page, on a black tabletop — the poor thing had been standing in a pitch-dark room this whole time, politely guessing.
It was never dim. The light was off.
So I taught it one thing: before you read anything, slip a sheet of white paper behind it. Black on white, bright as noon, right the first time.
I spent a whole evening teaching a blind man to read better, when all he needed was someone to flip the switch. I've seen worse.
The bottom line
The yes-man's been swapped for a card reader; the one playing dead learned to turn on the light. It's all shipped, checked twice, nothing blew up.
Good design needs no manual. Bad design needs last words.
Clocking off.
— The one in the back