Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws

jlouderb writes "Bruce Tognazzini former human interface evangalist at Apple, and currently a principal at web design firm Neilsen Norman Group has begun cataloging the top ten design computing flaws that we just live with with, but shouldn't have to. Only seven are found at his article, and (not surprisingly) three are Mac related. My favorite: the mysteriously dimmed menu options. Why are those darned things grey anyway?"

Some of these things are valid...

[daveschroeder]

...and some aren't.

Like the thing about disk removal. The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy (and I'd hardly say "gracefully", if you had a file open on the disk). And Mac OS could have done that, but the idea was to prevent the user from removing the disk until, say, its contents have been properly saved. So Windows let you remove a floppy. So what? What if you hadn't saved the file on it that you "meant" to? Then what? At least Mac OS enforced the proper order of operations, i.e., finish what you're doing with the disk first, then eject. To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap. Since Macs don't even have floppies anymore, and this argument doesn't apply to FireWire/USB volumes (though he implies that it does), this argument is somewhat moot.

And I can categorically say that his "computer not booting" story after he removed a FireWire drive is bullshit. If you remove the drive while it's asleep, yeah, it won't like that when it wakes up; usually, it will say a FireWire device has been removed before being unmounted. Worst case scenario would be rebooting the computer. But there is no way the computer just "wouldn't work" until the drive is plugged back in. That's just bollocks. Sounds like he had one bad/erratic experience that he thought was related to disk removal, and created this entire issue around it.

Other observations are kind of generic wishlists for the behavior of various features and functions. Some of them are frankly good ideas.

But when I read "Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" I just about lost my lunch.

Coral Cache Link

[RAMMS+EIN]

http://www.asktog.com.nyud.net:8090/Bughouse/10Mos tPersistentBugs.html [nyud.net]

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[tanguyr]

The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy...To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap.

Actually Windows (XP) doesn't nag if i just yank my USB thumb drive out without doing the "Safely remove hardware" thing.

From that mysterious text called the article:

[elid]

Proposed Fix: Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it.

Lists

[eMartin]

How about combo boxes, that only show X number of items. and you have to scroll to see the last 3. Until recently, AutoCAD was one of the worst examples of this, with it's layers toolbar popup, that only showed 10 items and truncated them horizontally (even though most AutoCAD drawings have many more layers and they often have similar names, so they appear the same in the tiny list at the top of the screen).

Or how about non-resizable dialogs with a set number of items in a list which displays all of the items minus one. WTF!?!

Re:Number 5

[Anonymous Coward]

>Firefox already does that. Type "barnes and noble" > in to your address bar. It'll take you to barnesandnoble.com.

But that's just coincidence. Firefox googles "barnes and noble" and goes to the first matching page. It doesn't just remove the spaces. Compare, for example "tried and tested" with triedandtested.com.

Re:/. ed already?

[zaren]

And the Coral link:

10 Bugs [nyud.net]

Re:Dimmed menus

[savagedome]

I agree. That is one of the first things that I disable on a Win2000 box.

Right click on the Taskbar and open up Properties. Then uncheck the 'Use Personalized Menus' box to disable it.

GUI design - favorite site

[juglugs]

Alas, this site is no longer updated, but it still serves as my very favorite "UI Hell" page...

http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Enginee ring/iarchitect/index-1.htm [libero.it]

Check out the hall of shame section, it's hilarious!

PS - this link is a mirror of the original site

Article not quite right...

[gillbates]

Microsoft's GUI has, from the beginning, given users the freedom to remove their disks without notice, recovering quite smoothly from the surprise events.

Um, hate to burst your bubble, but MS GUI does not recover smoothly from such events, unless one considers a BSOD smooth recovery. Since Windows 95, and still today in Windows XP, removing a CD or floppy from the drive before Windows is finished with it will result in the system hanging at best, and BSOD at worst. Not exactly what most people would consider smooth operation.

Neither Linux nor Apple nor Microsoft correctly address the problem of removable media:

• The first problem is bad physical design: the same people who brought us a filesystem where a failed write ruins the disk (*cough* CD-R *cough*) previously brought us the brain-dead floppy drive, where a user could mechanically eject the disk in the middle of a disk access. Without the hardware facility to be notified of media change, there weren't any disk-change events for OS drivers to capture, which lead to:
• OS designers didn't write drivers to correctly handle an eject event. Windows either doesn't listen for, or doesn't care about CD eject events. The result is that a CD or floppy can be ejected and the dumb OS attempts to continue as if the media were still present.
• Iomega got it right - the zip disk drivers signal the OS that an eject has been requested, and then (theoretically, at least) the OS flushes the write queue, unmounts and ejects the media.

Re:Dimmed menus

[Epistax]

Right, except "Personalized Menus" makes catastrophic changes aside from that one. such as no longer having personalized menus. It's like telling someone if they don't want any salt on their eggs to not have eggs to begin with.

Mirrordot Link

[shaneh0]

Mirror dot [mirrordot.org]

Power Failure is a Bug?

[sucati]

Bug Name: Power Failure Crash

Since when is a power failure a bug? I had thought a bug is an unintended behavior in software/hardware.

text in full

[oscast]

Welcome to the Over the Hill Gang, design bugs that have been around so long that we've begun to think of them as folk heros. However, the usual requirement for turning a public enemy into a folk hero is death, not longevity, and so it should be for these worthies: Their executions are long overdue. These bugs aren't necessarily fatal. The are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first.

In some cases, the bugs have outlasted the original developers, persisting so long that their successors may not even realize they are bugs--they seem the result of "natural laws." In other cases, the developers know these bugs full well, but refuse to address them. These all need to be addressed, and that address should be far out of town.

Bug Name: Power Failure Crash

Duration: >30 years

Supplier: Desktop computer manufacturers

Alias: "Oh, Sh--!"

Product: Desktop computers worldwide

Bug: If the computer loses power for more than a few thousanths of a second, it throws everything away.

Class of error: "That's the way Grandpa did it..."

Principle: Protect the User's Work

Discussion: Somehow, the most destructive act a computer can carry out, other than destroying the contents of a hard disk, got "grandfathered in." Somehow it became OK for computers to just die if the power fails.

If cars modelled this behavior, you might drive your car from New York to Miami, run out of gas in Fort Lauderdale, 10 miles from your destination, and suddenly find yourself back in New York.

Immediate Fix: Web Developers

Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."

Proposed Fix: Application Developers

Convert your existing software and write new software to perform Continuous Save, so users cannot lose more than the last few characters typed or gestures entered. Do not fail to provide sufficient Undo and Revert facilities enabling users to get back to where they were before they started doing the wrong thing.

For all the drawbacks of the crude system most applications have had until now, one advantage was that new drafts did not take the place of old until we said so.

Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable substitute for a Revert facility for anything at any time.

Proposed Fix: OS's

Build support for Continous Save and Revert into the toolbox.

Proposed Fix: Computer Hardware

Add very short term batteries or tantalum capacitors to systems with volatile memory with enough power to dump the memory to disk and go into hibernation, perhaps 30 to 45 second worth.

Bug first observed: 1976

Observer: Tog

Bug reported to Apple: 5 Mar 1985. Quote from that memo:

The age of computers that die when the power goes off will fade to an interesting footnote in history, just as radio gave way to TV. The question is not whether Apple will [address the problem], but when. I believe the time is now....We
have the opportunity to add another dimension to computers; let us take it.

Should happen any day now...

Bug on list since:List inception: 1 Dec 2004

Bug Name:The Macintosh Dock

Duration:Four and counting

Supplier:Apple Computer, Inc.

Alias:"The Cool Demo"

Product:Mac OS X

Bug:There are actually nine separate and distinct design bugs in the Dock, probably a record for a single object. You can read about them all in my Article, "The Top 9 Reasons the Dock Still Sucks."

Class of error:Confusing a demo with a product

Principle:Demos and products are two separate entities. The Demo's purpose in life is to help sell the product. The product's purpose is to serve the user.

Proposed Fix:Leave the Dock just as is. It looks great on stage durin

Re:On the Written Word

[Vaevictis666]

This also notably applies to Japanese and Chinese - typically the characters jusr run on and on. Any spaces added are typically a modern addition (I believe japanese newspapers space their words)

Re:Power Failure Crash...

[shepd]

It would be trivial to have a small battery, on the DC side of the power supply instead of trying to hook up a UPS.

Trivial? Not really. Your power supply is probably at least 300 watts maximum output, right?

300 watts @ 12 volts = 25 amps. And that's assuming perfect efficiency (impossible).

You can get that from a lead acid battery, sure. You'll only quintuple the price of a power supply. Oh, and then there's the disposal issues and other environmental laws. Let's make that octuple.

Yeah, there's other batteries. No, almost none of them can be tossed, and they're all more expensive, too.

I've seen these supplies where the UPS is built in. They usually start at about $150 US...

Re:EROS - an orthogonally persistent OS

[Rich Dougherty]

The OS you're talking about is EROS [eros-os.org], an orthogonally persistent [tunes.org] operating system. EROS doesn't seem to be under active development, but other OSes are. The one I know about is Unununium [unununium.org].

And yes, I agree it is a design issue, not a limitation of our hardware and software.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[rgarcia]

Actually Windows (XP) doesn't nag if i just yank my USB thumb drive out without doing the "Safely remove hardware" thing.

That's because XP defaults to not using drive buffers whereas W2K used them by default. If you use buffers, you have better performance but the danger of losing your data. With no buffers, you can just yank the thing but you get slower performance (although I can't really tell the difference without a benching tool).
You can change this in the drive's properties (both OS's)

Re:Dim consistency

[Mundocani]

I don't believe he suggested not dimming them, but that you can still click them if they're dimmed and they'll explain why they're dimmed. The issue isn't that dimming is useless (it's quite useful), but that it's sometimes a complete mystery as to why it is dimmed. Help files rarely address these issues too -- they explain what the menu item does when it's available but they often neglect to tell you why it might not be available to you right now.

Long ago, Balloon Help on the Mac did something like what he's suggesting. When you'd hover over a menu item it would pop up a balloon (tooltip) explaining what the item did. If you hovered over a dimmed item, it explained what the item did and also went on to explain why it was not available at the moment.

I don't believe that dimmed items are inherently confusing -- I know perfectly well why Firefox has dimmed my Cut and Copy commands right now -- it's because I don't have anything selected. On the other hand, I have no idea why Outlook Express has "Block Sender" (under the Message menu) dimmed while I've got a message selected in my Inbox. It'd be nice if I could easily find out ("This command is disabled because you don't have message filtering enabled" or "You must read the message first" or whatever the reason may be).

Re:scroll bars with ADD

[mmkkbb]

That's so you can abort a scroll, I suppose.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[network23]

Am I the only one old enough to remember the history behind dragging Mac disks to the trash?

If you were using an original Mac with only one disk drive and you'd like to copy a diskette to another diskette, you had to do some serious juggling.

Insert diskette one, eject it, and it left a "ghost" diskette image on the desktop. Insert diskette two, drag "ghost" diskette one onto "real" diskette two to show how you wanted your copying to be done.

The Finder then asked you to insert diskette one, read some blocks into the RAM, spat out diskette one, asked for diskette two, wrote some blocks from the RAM, spat our diskette two, asked for diskette one...

When the copying was finished, you had diskette two in your computer but the "ghost" diskette one was still on your desktop.

So, to get rid of the "ghost" diskette image, you simply and correctly threw it in the trash.

Re:Yeah, it doesn't "nag"...

[ShawnD]

What if a user has an open file, and yanks the drive? How does Windows "gracefully" deal with that? Answer: it can't.

AmigaOS handled it pretty well. If a disk was removed while in use you would get a dialog saying "You must replace volume DiskName in Drive 0!!!!". If you did it would complete the operation and everything was fine. If you hit cancel a few times it would give up, but then the application would start giving errors since the operation was aborted. This would also screw up the disk a bit requireing a long repair process when you next used it.

BTW AmigaOS mounts floppy disks as soon as they are inserted and automatically unmounts them on removal.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[Blakey Rat]

Well, the "correct" way to do it in MacOS has always been the Put Away command. You select the disk, then you select Put Away, then the disk ejects so you can put it away in its little disk-holder box.

The drag-to-the-trashcan thing is just a shortcut that somebody made and happened to become much more popular than the correct Put Away method.

Re:Reverse dates

[scribblej]

I might point out that YYYY-MM-DD, in addition to being easier to sort, IS THE ISO STANDARD FOR DATES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

So you people who still insist on MM/DD/YY, you are OLD AND BUSTED.

YYYY-MM-DD = NEW HOTNESS.
MM/DD/YY = OLD AND BUSTED.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[B'Trey]

Because someone found a silly way to implement a concept doesn't mean the concept itself is valid. Do some research on journaling file systems. They're called "journaling" because they keep a journal of what happens to the disk. If you lose power, it pulls up the journal and replays it to repair any damage done to the file system. An application could do the same thing - keep a journal of every command done to a file until the file is succesfully saved. If you lose power, you restart the app, it opens the file at the point of last save and replays the journal on the file in memory, putting you right back where you were at the time of the loss of power.

Re:On the Written Word

[urbaneassault]

Even better, the Greeks would wrap their sentances in reverse on a new line so:
THISWOULDBEA

ECNATNESDILAV

Re:On the Written Word

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, one character is not one word in general in Chinese or Japanese. A better analogy would that a Chinese character is a part of a word carrying meaning. E.g. the English word "nationalism" can be divided into "nation", "-al" and "-ism": this is analogous to a Chinese word containing 3 characters. You are correct, though, that spaces are not necessary (and are even annoying) in those languages: the eye tracks the text character-per-character instead of relying on the shape of entire words.

Also, replying to the grandparent, Japanese newspapers almost never use spaces.

Re:MOD UP Re:Some of these things are valid...

[pediddle]

Well where else are you going to drag it? If it confuses you too much, then go to the File menu and choose Eject or hit Command-E.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I agree on the dimmed menus

[geoffspear]

It has tooltips. They're like balloon help, only they're always on, and they're a lot less annoying because there's a delay before they appear and they don't make a squeaky noise when they pop up.

Balloon help was nice to find out what a specific UI element did, but I can't imagine anyone leaving it on for more than 10 seconds at a time without going crazy.

Re:On the Written Word

[Anonymous Coward]

YES! Proto indo-european, from which are derived all but two of the extant languages spoken in Europe (as well as Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, and many Indian languages), also had no space to delimit words.

Re:Reverse dates

[legirons]

"No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly!"

Ah, but which came first, the ISO date format, or the need for a fix to the problem of computers that can't sort dates properly?

From the main advocate of that format: [cam.ac.uk]

"Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants:
* easily readable and writeable by software
* easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison"

So the ISO date format seems to have been developed as a workaround to the deficiencies of computer software.

And yes, I consider "m/d/y" to be as moronic as everyone else. "Middle-endian" I believe is the name for it. Do these people write a hundred and twenty three as 231?

Re:On the Written Word

[kahei]

Japanese newspapers don't space their words, as a rule.

Spaces in general are by no means universal; they're more a property of Latin script than anything else although spaces do occur in various other situations (oghams, some cuneiform scripts, many others).

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[Lars T.]

So what is the intuitive way to eject a floppy with a GUI?

And what will it do for all other objects? There is a difference between an intuitive interface and one that takes a metaphor to damn literal.

And finaly [kernelthread.com]:

Since the original Macintosh had no hard disk, and a single floppy drive, it was expected that users will typically use several diskettes while working on the Macintosh. A convenience feature of the system was that it cached (in memory) the list of files on a diskette even after it had been ejected. This was indicated by a grayed-out icon for that diskette on the Desktop, clicking on which would prompt the user to insert the appropriate diskette in the drive. If a user wanted to free-up the memory used by a diskette's cache, he would have to drag the grayed-out icon to the trash.

Thus, even if a user intended to permanently eject a diskette, two actions were required: the eject command, and dragging an icon to the trash. The redundancy was removed by combining these actions to a single action: dragging an "active" (non-grayed-out) icon to the trash caused the disk to be ejected, and its cache to be deleted.

Re:Reverse dates

[psetzer]

You mean Einhundertdreiundzwanzig? Translated to English, it's one hundred three and twenty. So yes, someone does use that method, even if it is confusing as hell.

Re:In My Book...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can fix this,

1. Download TweakUI from Microsoft (Tweak UI [google.com])
2. Check "Prevent applications from stealing focus"
3. You're done!!!!

Re:Article not quite right...

[dcam]

You get a BSOD with win98 and earlier. Sometimes even when windows has finished with the disk. Actually to be more accurate you get a nasty blue screen with an abort, retry fail option. It doesn't die, but it isn't graceful. But that is back at 98,I haven't seen the same behaviour since 2000.

Windows' handling of CDs in general is very poor though. Stick a CD in the drive, and windows feels an immediate need to lock the machine up while it tries to mount the disk. Because Explorer is responsible both for mounting filesystems and displaying them, you can do nothing until the disk is mounted. This also disables the start menu and task bar.

The process of mounting and displaying filesystems should be separate. That way I can continue to work while the disk is being mounted.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[Juanvaldes]

Put Away went the way of the dodo when Mac OS X took over. The difference between Put Away and Eject is Eject left a ghost image of the disk and you could copy a disk to another disk by storing pieces in RAM. So it was a poor mans disk copy when you had no other storage means. Of course with the advent of hard disks this stopped being useful and became more of an annoyance.

text without spaces

[wolftone]

It is well-established that ancient Greek (as well as many other classical languages) was written with no spaces between words.

SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!

This works quite well in languages that have specific patterns (such as endings) based on the grammatical roles of the words used. Japanese, ancient Greek, and Latin are all examples of this. Spaces might help, but they aren't necessary to separate the verbs from the nouns. English, on the other hand, makes very few distinctions between kinds of words, so text without spaces appears tangled and obscures meaning.

Similarly, this is made easier to deal with when the sounds represented by the text are greater in number, so syllabaries and ideogrammatic systems work much better than alphabets without spaces. Alphabetic systems (Latin- and Greek- based, for instance) are much more legible with spaces as a result.

Re:Some of these things are valid...

[mollymoo]

Nobody with any sense will ever drag a mounted network drive to the trash can, because that would erase their network drive. So they won't figure out how to unmount network drives by themselves.

They have to use Finder to mount the drive in the first place, no? And in Finder the mounted drive appears with an eject icon next to it. Or you can use the menus. Or ctrl-click.

Can I just say this very, very clearly, as this misconception has been repeated endlessly:

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DRAG DISKS TO THE TRASHCAN TO EJECT OR UNMOUNT THEM

Automatically pushing buttons in Firefox (Windows)

[Jon_Aquino]

It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button (PTFB) [pcworld.com]. Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and it will automatically close it for you from now on. Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click by *coordinate*. Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!

Re:Eight

[Spy Hunter]

I have just discovered Adobe Reader speed-up [tnk-bootblock.co.uk]. It is a godsend.

Re:If OS X's Dock sucks...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The real difference between the Windows XP UI and the OS X UI is fundamental, but people always seem to ignore it.

Windows is "document centric". Since 95, Microsoft has been steadily moving to eliminate the concept of the "application". That's why the taskbar displays windows, not applications.

The #1 thing that always bugged me on the Mac was that the window *wasn't* the application. On Windows, when you close a window you close the application. That's not the case on OS X. You can have Safari open without it having any windows. In some areas of the Mac, this is taken to a rediculous extreme. Apps like the System Profiler can be open without having a window open. Why you'd want to do that is beyond me.

Mac OS embraces the concept of the application. The dock shows applications - both active and inactive. They are all jumbled up. The idea is that you will leave applications running.

On the Mac, this is necessary. On Windows, it's not. Word starts up in about 2 seconds on my PC - less if it has been cached in disk cache. Even Firefox starts up quickly.

This isn't the case on the Mac or on Linux. I don't know why it is, but firing up Safari on my friend's 867MHz 640MB PowerBook G4 takes 6+ seconds. When I double-click on the IE icon, it pops up instantly.

But wait... you are about to shout that IE cheats. Perhaps it does. But XP still boots faster than OS X or Linux. Even with all of its "cheating", XP is faster from the instant you push the power button.

Windows Media Player. PowerPoint. Excel. Firefox. iTunes. Visual Studio.

They *all* start up in under 2 seconds on my PC. It's not even a particularly fast PC - an Athlon XP running at 900MHz (so it can use a passive heatsink), 1GB of DDR, and a Seagate 7200.7 HDD.

The interface "feels" faster too in XP.

Why is that?