Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws 1067
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?"
Number 5 (Score:1, Insightful)
"All Existing Browsers" indeed...
I agree on the dimmed menus (Score:2, Insightful)
Power Failure Crash... (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh! Award Nominee (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been trying to repair the boot sector on a HD with WinXP on it and the damn thing wants an administrator password for the damn disk. Wtf kind of logic is that?
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:4, Insightful)
Answer? Nothing about computers is 'intuitive' it's all learned behaviour. The fact that people actually whine and bitch about something that small makes me laugh, expecially now that in OS X the Trash turns into the Eject icon when you grab and move a removable disk.
Bruce has always been the ultimate whiner, in and amongst some of his valid critiques, and he still wants a computer to be a mindreading typewriter at the end of the day.
Re:Number 5 (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox will not convert www.barnes and noble.com to www.barnesandnoble.com.
Yeah, it doesn't "nag"... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if a user has an open file, and yanks the drive? How does Windows "gracefully" deal with that? Answer: it can't.
You can pull the drive on a Mac, too - the difference is that the Mac will say, hey, you should have unmounted this first...hope you saved everything. And instead of doing something like auto-unmounting-without-nagging-when-no-files-are
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the above, swap user with driver and you may see my point.
Re:Power Failure Crash... (Score:5, Insightful)
UPS is ok to weather the power shortage, a battery inside the power supply would allow for clean shutdown.
Agreed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Stealing Focus (Score:5, Insightful)
You lose your thread of thought AND the computer decides you said "OK" to "do you want to email your credit cards around the world" while you sit there wondering what just happened.
Reverse dates (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Bugs, Maybe Not Really a Problem, Either (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, this affected Macs much less in a brownout situation than PCs. The Macs (at the time, desktop G3 systems) stayed up after a power blink of 0.5 sec, losing no data. I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
Workaround in a mission-critical area: Buy an uninterruptable power supply, petition Apple to make a computer with very expensive (but non-volatile) flash RAM, or use an Apple laptop, which has its own battery that makes it resistant to brownouts and blackouts.
Issue 2: The Dock in Mac OS X.
Grousing. In the old Mac OS 9 days, there was a Dock analogue called the Launcher. It was ugly, and I rarely set it up for users, but it worked. Some people still use it for their Classic apps in OS X.
Workaround: Many, most third-party. Apple's interface, until OS X was icon-centric for launching apps, rather than menu-centric (in Windows Start menu). The Dock is no more perfect than the Start menu, but at least it provides a consistent launcher for common apps, instead of having the user search through folders for the right app icon to launch.
Better: Have installers ask user to add icon for applications to the Dock, which isn't done most of the time, forcing users to search about in the Applications folder.
Issue 3: Dimmed menus.
A bit of a grouse, but logical. Some OS X apps by third parties HAVE shown info in the greyed out menu as to why the option is not available. I believe it is more programming efficient to leave a greyed out menu than to attempt to hide it (affecting where and the order of menus on the menu bar from one moment to the next, which would confuse the hell out of me).
I believe Tog's thought, of adding a special option in a greyed-out menu as to why this command is dimmed, could be useful. Otherwise I think he is blowing the issue up. Of course, the more complex the app (especially with palettes and THEIR commands, the more weight his argument holds.
Issue Seven: Disk Drive Nazi.
Not a problem, at least until removeable drives arrived.
The Mac OS has always been intelligent, preventing you as the user from accidentally ejecting or formatting a disk you are using, including network devices. This is a Good Thing. Compare this to the behavior in Windows, which will still allow you to eject media in use, causing All Kinds of Hell.
Workaround: His point seems more specific to USB and FireWire drives. Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
Good so far (Score:3, Insightful)
And on that note, why can't the BIOS battery be rechargable? Why should my computer *ever* think it's 1969, or 1980, or 1984?
ASCII Sort (Score:2, Insightful)
The author is essentially asking for the computer to be able to do reliable lexical analysis to determine what parts of a string are supposed to be a date, for example. If it sees "1/7", it has to guess if you mean "January 7", "July 1", "0.14", or something else. If it guesses wrong, how would I be able to correct it?
At least with the ASCII sort, the results are entirely predictable and it is obvious how I can tweak my strings to sort correctly.
Generally, I'd rather that my computer be stupid then that it try to be smart and fail.
Eight (Score:5, Insightful)
Bug name: PDF
Duration: 10+?
Supplier: Adobe et al
Alias: Why-is-it-so-hard-to-write-decent-software?
Product: Various PDF viewers, primarily for Windows
Bugs: One: Acrobat kills Mozilla. Two: Hidden "check for updates?" box locks up IE.
Class of error: Poorly written software
Principle: Simple software shouldn't hog resources or kill other apps.
Discussion:
Why is it so hard to write a decent PDF reader? Preview for Mac is fast and doesn't crash anything. And yet Acrobat for Windows (and maybe for Mac--I haven't tried it) is slow, a resource hog, locks up Mozilla/Firefox until the file is done loading, hides its "check for updates" window (without a tab on the XP app bar), and locks up the PDF-viewing window in IE until the "check for updates" box is dealt with.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Insightful)
The one I found funny was the continuous save. Computers "used" to do things that way (in the 70's) and if the power went out not only was your in memory copy bad, so was the one on disk because it was saving when the power went down (well back then it was on casette but the damage was the same) and is corrupted. Thats not even thinking about the fact that writing to disk all the time would slow the application down to the speed of molasses flowing uphill in January. This isn't to say that there is no happy medium. I find that 5 minute saves are plenty for me and I prefer them to go into a "backup" file that the application can handle instead of being saved in my actual document.
menus are grey because they're disabled, get help. (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, they're grey because they're disabled ?
I'm sorry, I don't understand how this is a design flaw. You'd rather the menu in question _always_ do something? What do you want copied when nothing is selected? Would you rather the menu was enabled always, but just beeped or did something else ( i.e. not the desired action ) when clicked ?
The menu is grey to let you know it can't do anything until some other action is taken. It doesn't just disappear because location/muscle memory is how we remember where that menu is. What would be the better design? How is a disabled menu a flaw, again? You'd rather get a dialog box telling you that you need to do something before clicking here... how could you have known ? Why is clicking "copy" bringing up a dialog box ?
TSFA says :
The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right.
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
Gee, I wonder why that one hasn't been fixed. Yea, that's a real design bug, right there. Just like the dock, which even my mother-in-law can use, with it's 9 bugs and all...
Now, ASCII sort and reasonably flexible data entry ( aka Bug Name: Let's you save me some work ) now, those are real design bugs. Design bugs which are usually there ( as the article notes ) doe to lazyness of the software designers/creators.
A few of these design problems I can agree with, but IMHO, if you're troubled by a disabled menu, that's a clear sign you don't understand the function of that menu, and you might want to try a menu item that isn't greyed out, like that one labeled "Help".
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Answer? Nothing about computers is 'intuitive' it's all learned behaviour. The fact that people actually whine and bitch about something that small makes me laugh, expecially now that in OS X the Trash turns into the Eject icon when you grab and move a removable disk.
As the saying goes; the only intuitive interface is the nipple (and even that barely qualifies, some babies have a hard time coming to grips with it). But at least a user interface can be consistent. Dragging the floppy to the trash would suggest wiping the entire floppy disk, but it doesn't do that; in fact, it makes sure your files aren't deleted!
In fact, good graphical user interfaces are user-friendly (to neophytes at least) not just because they're consistent, but because they are modeless - vim is pretty consistant, but not modeless.
I think this is a justified gripe, now matter how easily it is learnt. Other user interfaces might have more deficiencies, and ones that are harder to overcome, but mac ain't perfect either.
Re:Dimmed menus (Score:5, Insightful)
And in Word it's not a case of 'least used menus'; I'm using word this very minute, and menu items that I've used, seconds apart, are always hidden ('minimal menu' mode for lack of a better or official term). So I'm wasting more time searching for menus than I should, and it's just totally annoying.
Comments (Score:5, Insightful)
This is due to the save file paradigm. Changes only get saved if you tell the computer to. People have long realized this is bad; this is why some programs have autosave. I am all for saving changes continuously - and forking a file if you want to have distinct versions.
The Macintosh Dock
I guess this is more of a personal thing. Personally, I think the Dock is great, although I prefer separate launch icons and open window icons (aligned at separate edges of the screen), a la NEXTSTEP. The Mac doc certainly kicks the Windows taskbar (and imitations') ass.
Mysteriously dimmed menu items
I don't necessarily agree these are bad. The alternatives are removing them (bad because menu structure changes), not disabling them (makes no sense - they are disabled because they aren't meaningful right now), or not dimming them (bad because you don't signal the action is unavailable).
The proposed fix is a good idea, though.
ASCII Sort
This issue has never affected me much. The alternative is is having lots of black magic exceptions to get items sorted the way humans might sort them. To me, it seems these exceptions are hard to deal with for machines, but for humans as well. I don't think it's worth the trouble.
What is good, though, is having proper metadata support, so that we can sort not just by filename, but also by author, project, modification time, etc. Add in a search function, and you don't even notice the asciibetical sorting anymore.
URL Naming Bug
Some browsers already convert spaces in URLs to '%20' or '+'. I think this is the way to go. I'm not sure if stripping spaces (as the author suggests) is a good idea. Does he mean to make "my birthday pictures" internally translate to "mybirthdaypictures"? Why? My filesystem can deal with spaces just fine. Perhaps stripping all spaces after the first (i.e. removing errorneous spaces) is a better option.
Let's you save me some work
So, not accepting multiple formats for the same data is bad. I have to ask why the multiple formats exist in the first place. If we're talking about SSN, library card number, etc. there's always an authority issuing these numbers. Why not use the same format they use, everywhere? If users want to be inconsistent, they must be prepared to deal with the consequences.
The Disk Drive Nazi
I, too, hate that machines don't let me have my device back. Linux and BSD (and probably other unices) can be particularly annoying in this respect. Someone once tripped over the USB cable of my webcam, unplugging it. Nothing but a reboot would let me kill the program (which was in uniterruptible sleep), reload the (confused) driver, plug the cam back in, and start streaming video again. Grrr. Isn't this what exceptions are for?
Re:On the Written Word (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
And people wonder why software engineers get testy with designers sometimes. We're supposed to engineer systems that let users do whatever they want without reprisal. I can't think of anything else I use where I have that guarantee... even something as simple as using of humankind's oldest tools, the knife.
Re:I agree on the dimmed menus (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:2, Insightful)
scroll bars with ADD (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all part of MS's policy of torturing their users until they buy "intellimouses" with scroll wheels.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only stupid and careless people can figure out the mac interface by themselves - intelligent, careful people won't perform certain experiments. Example: 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.
Saying RTFM is disingenuous - the manual has several obviously wrong things in it, like typos for example, and mislabeled illustrations, so anyone who was willing to risk their network drives because the manual says it's OK is either stupid or very inexperienced.
I actually like macs (I own a couple) but I've never liked the GUI. MacOS X is a huge improvement since I can modify the GUI or just use the command line.
ejecting disks (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's pretty irrelevant. Dragging the disk to the trash is a quick shortcut for skilled users, but has never been the primary method. The primary, normal method of ejecting a disk has always been the same way you perform actions on other icons: select it, then choose "Eject" from the "File" menu. No voodoo, no risk, no inconsistency.
Re:On the Written Word (Score:2, Insightful)
That is not to mention the case where the space is actually part of the url (and converted to %20). I would get pissed at my browser if I was looking for my file.doc (my%20file.doc) and the browser grabbed myfile.doc instead. I want the address bar to go where I tell it, not where it thinks I told it.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:4, Insightful)
This complaint is crap. You don't have to drag the disk to the Trash to eject it.
In Mac OS X you can also eject a disk by clicking the eject button in the Finder. Which makes good sense as a UI operation, especially since you "eject" other mediums (shares, usb disk, iPods,
Slashdot Design Flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Example: A post of "Often it is difficult to figure out why certain options are dimmed and under what context they will become active. I don't see a better alternative though other than better documentation..." attached to a story containing the solution of "Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it."
First Noticed: 1996
Proposed Solution: Require the user to read the article. This could be implemented in a number of ways: either the referring home page to the message board should BE the article, or a page between the story and the article should contain some sort of code permitting posting. Or a mod of "-9999999, RTFA" should be added.
Solution: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you have a folder containing files named
1 Report
2 Report
3 Report
10 Report
11 Report
100 Report
then Mac OS will sort them in the way indicated above, whereas any other operating system would show them as
1 Report
10 Report
100 Report
11 Report...
2 Report
9 Report
This doesn't solve every asktog gripe about sorting, but it is nice to have.
May not be intuitive, but it makes sense. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Edit -> Undo
"You don't have anything to undo"
Edit -> Redo
"You don't have anything to redo"
Edit -> Cut
"You haven't selected any text to cut"
Edit -> Copy
"You haven't selected any text to copy"
Edit -> Paste
"You haven't copied any text to paste"
Great, one more way for my computer to treat me like a complete imbecile.
If an option is greyed out, it's usually because -- shocking -- you can't use it right now. This is Common Sense. If it's not Common Sense, it's because that application's UI designer made their menus too complicated to begin with, and in my experience software programmers who do that sort of thing would also make their pop-up help even more useless, something like: "This option is disabled because you can't use it right now."
Rule #1 in UI design: if you have to explain something to your user, you're doing it wrong. Or at least you're doing it inconsistently, which is the same thing in this business. I shouldn't need to wonder WHY an option is disabled, at if for some reason I should, it shouldn't be disabled at all.
Drenched in irony (Score:5, Insightful)
1) No alt tags - you've used images to number your list, yet no alternative text for blind users (or those with images off), this is a very well established as bad usability
2) Confusing title - you say top 10, but don't actually have 10 items on your list, an important aspect of usability is clarity, which your title lacks.
3) Consistency - you've divided each item into sub-sections, yet the sub-sections are inconsistent with from one item on the list to the next. If a sub-section is not applicable, I suggest you add, for instance: "History: N/A," this will save readers scrolling back and forth for a section they might believe to have missed
4) No submission form - You provide an option for people to submit suggestions for your list, yet fail to provide a basic HTML form for them to do this, instead you opt to let them do the work.
There are more, but I'll stop here, since I expect this to be modded down anyway. I hope you see the irony.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt many applications would cause noticable performance degradations these days just by doing automatic saving. Save for a few specialty applications, there are more than enough idle cycles hanging around to do that work while the user picks his nose.
Re:menus are grey because they're disabled, get he (Score:1, Insightful)
I've seen lots of applications graying out menu items for _very_ obscure reasons.
Re:He has such a hard on about the Dock (Score:5, Insightful)
Or another Tog bug, based on 5.
Bug Name: Tog knows nothing about the history of the web.
Duration: Just discovered, but probably years.
Supplier: Tog
Alias: "I'm trying to impress you because I used the web WAY before you chowderheads did."
Product: Tog's Design Flaws list
Bug: Tog's incorrect memory of history.
Principle: "I will spout off knowing nothing about what I'm talking about."
Proposed Fix: Lateral Cranial Impact Enhancer of your choice.
Discussion: Claims to have reported URL space bugs to Netscape in 1991 and Microsoft in 1992. However, Microsoft didn't have a web browser until 1995 and Netscape didn't even exist in 1991.
Bug First Observed: Today.
Observer: Hopefully, the greater part of the Slashdot readership.
Bug reported to supplier: Ha!
Bug on list since: about now.
Re:And related... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, to be fair, many X apps do the same crap. Here's one thing about X-Windows (or Gnome maybe) that drives me nuts: Let's say I have four workspaces...I like to use workspace one for Internet-related activities, workspace two is development-related activities, workspace three is productivity-app hell, and workspace four is terminals. Now, let's say I go to workspace one and launch Mozilla...(really any app will do), then, while it's loading, I switch back to workspace two to continue debugging an app while Mozilla loads...then, BING! Mozilla pops on workspace two. Why won't an app stay on the workspace it was originally launched from? Does it have to follow me to the current active workspace?
I would think any app should be smart enough to do two things: (1) know where it is when it's launched and stay there; and, (2) know if it loses focus during start up and NOT re-take it. How hard could that be?
Sin number 0. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are not playing quake or starcraft, a mouse is just a luxury. Design to avoid its use.
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia [uchile.cl]
Re:That's a solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
modal dialog error message (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dimmed menus (Score:3, Insightful)
Rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
2) The Macintosh Dock
-- "It's not that the Dock sucks so much as a productivity tool as it is that Apple threw away so many more powerful, useful objects in its favor." So it works, but there were better options in his opinion? You'd be hard pressed to find anything that couldn't be described in this way.
3) Mysteriously dimmed menu items
-- I can see the point of wanting them to say why, but it is very short sighted to say the message must be exact. A much better solution is that in Help, every menu option should be searchable and explain exactly when it can be used and how. (Though I miss the Apple Help Balloons. Heck, now that I think about it I think they worked and could explain disabled Menu Options but no one bothered to fill them out.)
4) ASCII Sort
-- This is a consistent extension of alphabetic sorts, and will likely never change in standard file system listings. The example of iTunes is a specific application with a specific data set, and any application should organize data as appropriate for the use. Part of the point of iTunes IS to organize files in a way that makes sense for what they are, whereas the operating system must treat all file names equally and not make assumptions about what they represent.
5) URL Naming Bug
-- Correct history: filenames didn't have spaces because the early command line parsers separated tokens by spaces. Even today, command line parsers need help either by quoting the entire name or escaping the spaces. (The Apple II worked because the parser was even simpler; every command was only one word and everything afterwards named the object to be acted upon.) The problem with the proposed fix is that the only place spaces are not allowed is in the machine address part; spaces are allowed willy nilly in the directory portion as per the server's setup. There is no consistent way to know whether spaces in that portion should be dropped. While the browser could be written to automatically remove spaces in the first portion doing so in the directory portion would be disastrous for many web sights. Having it do both would seem to be a blatant inconsistency.
6) Let's you save me some work
-- This is actually reasonable, and as a programmer it's a pet peeve of mine that the computer should do the work. It's not always possible though, and sometimes compromises must be made. I prefer if the field only wants numbers it would say so and prevent numbers from being typed without beeping or anything. I think it's a good compromise between getting a clean entry and not interfering with the user, since any spaces/dashes would just be ignored.
7) The Disk Drive Nazi
-- This was a feature. It prevented floppy or system corruption. (The System was on a floppy and could otherwise be ejected.) OS X is much more dynamic in recovering from these incidents, having to deal with USB, Firewire, and Network drives. The incident with the Powerbook described is most likely the result of using a non-Apple drive with a bad driver. Booting from an emergency CD would eliminate. Given the author's history it's even possible he was using OS 9, increasing the likelihood of a driver problem.
8) 9) 10)
Apparently, he's counting in base 7.
Re:Yeah, it doesn't "nag"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Something along the lines of:
"Windows failed to write files to a volume. These files may have been lost."
No applications crashed, no nothing but that error.
That's about as gracefully as is necessary when it comes to the user purposely (or accidentally) abusing the computer.
Yeah - and that's fine. And Mac OS X does essentially the same thing. But Tog is somehow asserting that Windows does/did it "better", because it used to let you remove a floppy without doing something in the OS to unmount the volume. Huh? So what? A user could still screw up their data; they have LESS of a chance doing that when they're at least warned BEFORE they unexpectedly remove a volume.
Spaces in filenames (Score:3, Insightful)
> People separated written words with spaces from the time writing was invented up until around 30 years ago whenaspacebecameavaluableobjectnottobewasted
Tog, that whistling sound is the point going over your head.
30 years ago, we took spaces out of filenames not because we needed to save characters, but because we were all using a CLI, and we did it because we were using spaces to separate words.
then: vi ~fredfoo/stupidapp/stupid.cfg
now: vi C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg
("/c:/documents: new file")
now, once more, with feeling:vi "C:\Documents and Settings\Fred Foobar\Application Data\Stupid Company Name Here For No Reason At All\Stupid Company's Application\Configuration Data.cfg"
For the love of fuck, I'm not asking to go back to 8.3, but would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"?
Re:menus are grey because they're disabled, get he (Score:4, Insightful)
This argument doesn't seem very consistent. You're suggesting that the first time you see something and it's not obvious to you, it should tell you so you'll know, but at that point, it's not useful to you. What if someone else is using your computer and has not seen that message? Would it be useful then?
Do you realize that there are more menu items than just ``copy''? I use a lot of applications with a lot of menu items (i.e. Final Cut HD) that will occasionally have something that sounds like what I want, but it's greyed out. Why would I not want immediately contextual information describing what I need to do? Is it really practical to suggest that I pull out the manuals and try to figure out what all is required to use something when I could just hit the brief contextual help?
A more concrete example: I'm in gimp which is giving me the option to scale my image, but not crop it. Why is that? Why can I move this layer down once, but not twice? I happen to know these answers, but it wasn't very long ago that I did not, and it was frustrating to want to bring a layer to the bottom and having gimp just refuse to do so with no explanation as to why (which was added in 2.something...but not on the menu).
Re:Slashdot Design Flaw (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, mod points are often easier to get the earlier one posts, which encourages one to rush. The first reason for this is that moderators tend to be more active just after the article appears than later on. Second, if somebody says what you wanted to say before you, then you either don't get the credit or get marked redundant.
Re:Power Failure Crash... (Score:5, Insightful)
> shortage, a battery inside the power supply would allow for clean shutdown.
It shouldn't even need to be enough to shutdown -- all it needs is to dump the
RAM and processor state (register contents and such) to a designated area on
the hard drive (or flash RAM dedicated to this purpose, or whatever) from which
the BIOS firmware can restore everything when power comes back. The OS would
not even need to know the power was ever out, except to fix the system time.
Re:Stealing Focus (Score:3, Insightful)
He left out the BIOS (Score:3, Insightful)
Most BIOS are littered with design bugs (not to mention the heap of implementation bugs).
The oldest is the "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue" bug. Fortunatly, that one seems to FINALLY be going away.
Next, why is serial console (where supported) turned off by default? If the CMOS gets corrupt, that's exactly when I need serial console access, but I won't have it because of a silly default. The whole point of serial console is that it gives you some hope of dealing with this sort of problem remotely.
Next in line is the way PXE boots will demand "press any key to continue" if the DHCP server doesn't respond for some reason (perhaps it was reloading it's config at the time). It's not as if the machine has anything better to do than try the boot again. They could at least make that configurable.
It's stupid to bother adding wake on LAN,modem,keyboard,moon phase, etc into the chipset and then have the BIOS do the least useful thing possible on any given error.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Answer?
It is a metaphor.
There is something on your desk that you no longer want (there). How do you get rid of it?
Answer: Throw it away.
---
The real problem, IMHO, was having the drives show up on the desktop to begin with. That totally messed up the metaphor.
Who keeps a filing cabinet on there desk? That is what a disk really is (in this mataphor)... a place to store documents.
There should have been a part of the "floor" visible on the side of the desk with the trash can... and a filing cabinet.
Maybe even space all around the "desktop" so you have a "place" for the printer, an "incoming" bin... things like that.
---
Then again, we have to remember... they didn't even have color back then.
Re:Dimmed menus (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just that the items in the menu change, but the order of the items change in the menu. It completely destroys muscle memory and spatial awareness. When a user utilizes the menus he knows about where the item he wants is or will be located. Typically the user moves the pointer rapidly to the items general neighborhood and then much more slowly selects the item in question. With the menu order changing the user suddenly finds the pointer in the wrong part of the menu, and becomes disoriented. This is incredibly frustrating.
Yes, having menus only display the items the user actually requires does improve usability. Frequently adding and removing items automagically does not.
Re:From that mysterious text called the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
Stupidest. Complaint. Ever. (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking through Camino's menus right now...
Apple menu: nothing greyed out.
Camino menu: nothing greyed out.
File menu: nothing greyed out.
Edit menu: Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste Plain Text, Delete, and Get Info all greyed out. Let's look at why.
Redo: I haven't undone anything. Duh.
Cut: Nothing selected. Duh.
Copy: See above. Duh.
Paste Plain Text: Wild-ass guess -- the text on the clipboard is ALREADY plain text, or is a format (like an image) that can't be converted logically to plain text.
Delete: What the hell does this command do, anyway? Has anyone EVER used it?
Get Info: Nothing to get info on, obviously. Duh.
Moving on...
View menu: Stop Loading Page is greyed out. Gee, might that possibly be due to the fact that I'm not currently loading a page in this tab?
Go menu: Forward is greyed out. Yeah. Because I've never hit "Back," so I don't have anything to go Forward to. Duh.
Bookmarks, Window, and Help menus: nothing greyed out.
OK, maybe Camino is just a stellar example, but remind me WHY this is a problem again...?
Man, I really wish Tog would just realise he's irrelevant and shut up about it.
p
Re:MOD UP Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dates and other design flaws in the U.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't live there any more, but I was born there, and the dates aren't the only thing that drive me batty. How about that oh-so-intuitive measurement system which is just slightly different from that other oh-so-intuitive Imperial measurement system?
U.S. and Imperial measurements - OLD and BUSTED.
Metric measurements - NEW and COOL.
My biggest PITA design flaw in software (just so I'm not completely offtopic) is the inability to remember previous user input, such as the directory you picked the last time you hit "File -> Open". I don't care when the last time was, just remember the directory I was in, dammit! This falls under the general principle of "Make the user's life easier and simpler", and yes, I did send it in to TOG.
Re:Sin number 0. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in the early days of the Mac, the rule was in reverse. That is, everything should have been possible without a keyboard, without having to emulate one. Keyboardless Macs were actually common during the 68k era; they were used for kiosks, printing stations, status checking and other tasks which didn't require data entry.
For every user who has trouble manipulating a mouse, there is a user who has trouble dealing with a keyboard. This notion that 2-D manipulators are a inconvenient UI concept boggles my mind; I just don't see how you can use software like graphics editing, page layout, or reality simulation effectively without some form of input from a mouse, trackball, or tablet...
Re:Reverse dates (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Reverse dates (Score:4, Insightful)
YYYY-MM-DD makes sense because it's listed in descending order of unit times. It's like a numbering system, with most significant digits first.
MM/DD/(YY)YY makes sense because many people write their dates like October 11, 2004.
If you have to communicate with people, don't be a lazy ass and write out the name of the month, to remove ambiguity. If you have to communicate with machines (or if you like to think this way, like me) then use the YYYY-MM-DD form.
Actually .... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's because in X-Windows an application has absolutely no concept of what the window manager is, what functionality it offers, or that the window manager even provides desktops.
This is so that every single application doesn't have to hold onto code to make it act correctly in this window manager.
What actually happens is that all of that behaviour is deferred to the Window manager, unlike in Windows where the OS == Explorer == The Window Manager all there is.
Basically the app gets told to launch, you switch to a new context, the window is ready and says to the window manager "draw me please", and the window manager does so, where you happen to be.
Trust me, the X-windows model specifically precludes the application from being supposed to keep track of your environment/windowing issues.
That's why it's so easy to change window managers in UNIX and almost impossible in Windows. That's also why we don't want it pushed into the application, because whatever you want as default behaviour, I expect my window manager to decide based on my settings. (And by 'we', I mean long time X-users)
Starting an application in X-windows is much more like a command-line to put something in the background. The mechanism which draws the resulting application does not by design consult the application, nor does it have anything to do with wether or not your application will even draw a window or not.
Cheers
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In My Book... (Score:3, Insightful)
Has anyone else ever mistakenly IMed someone part of your root password? You're typing it into ssh or something, and AIM pops up?
Sometimes it seems something popping up in front of you is the best solution, but sometimes it's a terrible annoyance.
Playing a full-screen game is horrible, too, when something like AIM again steals the focus.
Re:Power Failure Crash... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need the whole computer to work.
Put a chip on the motherboard to manage the whole thing. The OS gets an alert from the power supply that everything is about to die. It immediately dumps whatever it was doing to RAM, and gets the CPU to flush the write cache. Now, everything we need to save is in RAM (And that took probably a microsecond - the power would probably last this long without any backup.) The OS sends a message to the hibernation chip on the motherboard. This chip immediately cuts all power to the CPU and all peripherals except a single hard drive, and the RAM refresh (no fans, PCI bus, etc). It then does a DMA transfer of RAM to the hard drive, and sets a flag in CMOS for the next power-on to indicate that it needs to restore.
So, you need full power for about 1ms or so, and then power for one hard drive and RAM (no CPU) for about 30-60 seconds. That can't be more than a watt or two. If you were really slick you'd design any extra hard drives to put power back into the system as they spin down (regenerative braking - but we don't really need it). The power could probably be generated by standard-sized (AA/9V/C/D/etc) batteries - which are a trivial expense compared to UPS batteries.
Even a desktop running full-speed doesn't pull 300W - that is a peak capacity which is probably only seen when drives are spinning up initially.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
So where is this Put Away thingy? I don't seem to find it lying about anywhere
(So far, I'd have to say that all the vaunted intuitiveness of the Mac interface is merely the usual sort of marketing hokum. Few things about it are obvious, and it's difficult to learn about the gimmicks in any manner other than playing dummy and asking about them. Sometimes you get answers that you'd never have guessed. Sometimes you get ridicule for being such a dummy. Sometimes you get both.
Blind users (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the ability to see that there is another option if you do something else. Sometimes it is good to hide these for security reasons otherwise you have to indicate that 'yes we can do this but you have to do something first' be nice to figure out what though, which brins us back to the comment in the article.
One man's bug is another's feature. (Score:3, Insightful)
For a trip from New York to Miami, that would be considered a bug.
For a trip from Earth to Mars, that would be considered a feature.
My top-10 design flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Expecting that users will (or should have to) read anything.
3. Expecting that users will (or should have to) possess technical expertise or jargon.
4. Expecting that users will (or should have to) configure it before using it.
5. Guessing or questioning the user's intent.
6. Neglecting to handle all possible failure cases gracefully.
7. Neglecting to save state frequently enough or at all.
8. Pointless rearchitectures (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
9. Avoiding necessary rearchitectures (you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette).
10. Designing based on your own motives (in-product advertising, etc) rather than on the user's needs.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:4, Insightful)
If a computer crashed a dozen times a day and then always came back right where it stopped with all open documents fully recoverable, it would merely be an annoyance. Most people wouldn't care that the system was unstable. Those crashes would just give them a chance to stretch their legs for a minute while the computer comes back up. But instead, their computer crashes once every 3 months and they all too often wind up with documents that are completely unrecoverable, or a totally unbootable computer. Half a day's wasted work that must be rebuilt from scratch. That's the kind of thing that makes a guy pick up his keyboard and start beating on his monitor until it falls off his desk. We've all seen the video, and we've all felt exactly like that guy at least once in our computing career.
If someone would just take the time to come up with properly implemented full-data journaling for some common applications, they would make a fortune the likes of which Microsoft has never seen. I don't understand why common data loss is still acceptable. This is the 21st century after all. Computers have been around for half a century. Yet the closest I've seen is Word's auto-save and recover feature, which more often than not seems to fail to recover your file. Many times I've seen it "recover" on line or even nothing from a document that was many pages long. Not cool.
I tried to pitch an idea for application-level journaling on a BeOS developers' mailing list a few years back and got nothing but blank stares. As far as regular users are concerned, it would be the ultimate advancement in desktop computing, yet they (the developers) couldn't conceive any reason you'd want to do such a thing. "Get rid of one of the biggest annoyances of the whole computing experience? Why would we want to do that?"
Oh, well. Maybe in another 30 years, eh?
Re:That's a solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Needlessly complicated. Not to mention the problems involved in turning it back on again if you should need it in the future.
A simpler solution is to implement the tooltip here. If you hover over the dimmed menu item for a time, pop up the tooltip explaining why the item is disabled.
Expert users don't hover, and never get bothered by numerous messages, beginners do hover and get what they need. The tooltip method also makes it extremely easy to see why multiple items are disabled in a row, without forcing repeated clicking and disposing of message boxes, etc.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:3, Insightful)
They *haven't* corrected it. They've just slapped a sugary coating over the top and moved it to a different shelf.
The UI flaw is the whole concept of ejecting a disk by dragging it onto a UI element otherwise used for deleting things. If anything, they've made the situation _worse_ by turning a simple, single-purpose UI element into a modal, multipurpose UI element that performs completely unrelated actions.
The behaviour simply shouldn't be there, period.
Re:Yeah, it doesn't "nag"... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amazing that even today the amigaOS is still superior in some basic design decisions.
The handling of removable devices would be one. Like, why doesn't windows pop up a message "USB stick removed, re-attach or lose your data" and only if there were files open on the stick? If there were no files open it could just silently let it go.
Another thing would be the consequental use of volume labels instead of drive names. The amiga would never tell you to "insert XY into drive Z" like the redmond crap does. It would just say "Insert volume 'BlahBlah" and you were free to insert it into any drive.
Last time I was hit by the misfortune of having to babysit a wintendo-box the installer of whatever crapware I bothered with still demanded to get its stuff from E:. Unfornationally E: was no longer a cd-rom but now a harddisk partition and I had point it to the right location multiple times.
Top Ten Tantrums of Tognazzini is more like it. (Score:2, Insightful)
2 - Prototype is an acronym for "Short Leadtime".
3 - Google is not "Gray Doubt"
4 - sort -n
5 - It's a (say it with me) s-t-a-n-d-a-r-d
6 - We tried that, and named it CSV.
7 - Turn off your drive cache.
8 - Clean the shit from the mouse wheels regularly.
9 - That's a cdrom not a coffee holder.
10 - Umm...Where did you save it?
If OS X's Dock sucks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither are perfect, but I use both every day and, despite it's flaws, the Dock is better than the Taskbar -- IMHO.
The Dock is an excellent application switcher for me as well as a good visual aid for seeing what's running. I keep about twenty application icons and my Application folder there. I like it pinned to the right side. All the icons are still plenty big enough to quickly see what's running.
The Windows Taskbar becomes useless for me if I have more than about five windows open. Any more and I have to click see what each one is for. Plus, installers just love to crowd it with crap. And, honestly I hate having a Taskbar button for every friggin' window I have open. I much prefer the Mac's application-centric approach.
Anyway, this guy's list of design flaws is lame. I could think of a bunch of much better ones. Many of them in OS X. But, to call the system's application switcher a design flaw is just stupid.
Can't reliably delete/rename files on Windows. (Score:1, Insightful)
All Microsoft file systems (FAT16/32 & NTFS) have a bug that prevents files from being reliably deleted or renamed.
Any process can open a file and hold it "hostage", preventing all deleting or renaming, until the process is killed. If it's a "zombie" (or other unkillable) process, then the file can be held hostage forever.
Therefore, the only reliable way to delete or rename a file on Windows is to reboot the machine. This is frequently why you need to reboot after installing software on Windows. The reboot ensures that the delete of the old version of the file(s) will be successful.
This is a severe "show-stopper" bug under any reasonable definition. Of course, Microsoft has refused to acknowledge or fix this bug for over 20 years. Instead, Microsoft has taught an entire generation of users that frequent rebooting is a normal part of the computing experience.
There is a confusion on number 5 URL Naming Bug (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If OS X's Dock sucks... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just clean up your taskbar - remove those shortcuts AND stretch the taskbar a bit to double the space for more buttons, works fine. Of course you know you have too many windows open when you have to scroll to see the taskbar button you want.
After a certain limit, Windows stops you from opening any new windows. I dunno why it does, but it stops well before 100 windows, even though I have enough RAM.
Oh well