Consumers have to fight with bad design

I just bought a book. It is a nice book. It has an inside and an outside and plenty of paper pages. And a CD.

CDs frighten me.

Especially when they come with books or magazines.

In at least 90% of all cases the CD is designed by someone who is paid to make something that looks good and is impossible to penetrate.

In this case, the main value of the CD is a 400 Megabyte video. You might guess that the video would by lying on the CD in some standard video format so I could play it.

No.

It is in flv format and it can visibly only be launched from the CD's dedicated Flash player, which is given the same name as the book, to confuse things. Yes, the Flash player is not called Flash player. (Why?!) The dedicated Flash player then launches some sort of web page view, where the video is embedded (!) among text in thumbnail size.

Clearly I cannot watch a one hour long video like that, so I google around and discover that VLC is supposed to play flv files. I download VLC, and launch the file.

And all this, because some incompetent designer has been paid a fortune to make it impossible to view what I have paid for.

What the book is about? Well, this and that. Usability among other things. Let me quote one of the phrases from the CD:

"You must test your website to understand customer behavior and incorporate those findings into it. Even experienced usability experts test their assumptions."

Clearly, the designer did not read the file s/he put on the CD.