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?"
In My Book... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tight security where it doesn't matter and sloppy security where it does.
Inexplicable configuration. This is broad a broad item and includes buried preference settings where you'd never think to look, default settings to most frustrating (think Word), system settings under inappropriate categories and items with more than one relevence only found under one.
Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up? Gee, what the heck was that about?
On the Written Word (Score:5, Interesting)
SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!
Re:I agree on the dimmed menus (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the guys other items were just kind of "blah" to me - the dock, removal of hard drives from the powerbook, but the "grayed out for no reason" at least made some sense.
Re:Power Failure Crash... (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading about a OS that they demo'ed
by kicking the plug out of the wall.
After plugging it back in, the machine would
replay its "journal", and continue as if nothing
had happened.
If someone remembers the name of this system, or
has a link, that would help.
Re:Reverse dates (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, someone else that agrees with me on that!
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the US) drive me completely batty. MM/DD/YY? No! That makes no sense. YYYY-MM-DD makes the meaning far more clear, and you can even extend it arbitrarily... YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-uu.
As an aside, how often do you have secretaries and public clerk type people (ie, the DMV) freak out on you because you write dates like that?
I often get "How long did you serve", since apparently the military (only some branches? no clue, just speculation) encourages that date format.
I have learned that any answer involving the phrase "lexical order" will only result in blank stares.
Re:Dimmed menus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Interesting)
MOD UP Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:On the Written Word (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting. Ancient Chinese also did not have spaces. Furthremore, ancient Chinese did not have any punctuations either. No comma, no period. It was a continous paragraph.
Re:In My Book... (Score:2, Interesting)
This kind of thing isn't just limited to computers. I was checking the voicemail on my cellphone earlier. A friend had called on his cell phone and left the number to his new office (he just got a new job). Right in the part where he was saying the number I got a text message on the phone, so it beeps telling me there is a new text message. So, I have to listen to the message again. But there were more text messages, so it kept beeping as more messages were received. I had to listen to the voicemail about eight times to finally get the number. And you can't just listen to the end. No, you have to start over from the beginning. Why do I need to be told I have a new text message when I'm on the phone? Can't that wait until I hang up?
grey doubt (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh well
Re:In My Book... (Score:5, Interesting)
And the corollary, applications that don't steal focus and don't create an entry in the taskbar - so they just sit there in behind your windows - like Winzip at its license screen. Did it finish loading? Where is it? Idunno. Or even worse, windows properties windows and the way they pile up back there.
But the biggest one: apps which can have a subform that disables access to the rest of the app, but if you move to another window and then move back, you can obscure the active subform with the disabled forms, leaving you with a missing form and a curiously locked application.
you can tell I'm a windozer can't you. And anyone who complains about mounting/unmounting should find out what an excruciating pani the old 3.5" drive is on a win box.
My take on their take. And I'm not too kind... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dynamic electronics tend to like power. That's in their nature. If that upsets you, use static RAM (which doesn't need refreshing, so has a retention level that can handle power spikes and stuff) or FLASH RAM (which retains data indefinitely without power). You get a performance hit, but you can't always get it all ways. If you absolutely must have the performance, then use full log journalling for all transactions. If you can't afford to be down, then use hot-standby High Availability. So what's your excuse for ignoring what is already out there?
Dimmed menus work a hell of a lot better than not having the options at all, which is a popular alternative. (It's popular, because you don't end up with a gazillion greyed options cluttering your menus.) The problem is not the dimming, the problem is that menus are too big. The dimming has nothing to do with it. Keep It Simple, Stupid is the only bug you can legitimately claim here.
DOS and Windows' DOS shell don't sort at all. Windows' GUI doesn't auto-place unless you tell it to (and even then it can require a crowbar and the suitable application of threats). Unix and all derivatives allow you to pipe ls through any text processing code you like, and GNU's ls has so many sorting options built in that you almost don't need to do that. If this is an Apple bug, don't blame everyone else.
I know of no browser on Earth that doesn't allow you to escape a space. What, that's extra typing? That's not the bug described. The bug described is that spaces "aren't allowed". You know what? Yes they are. Even if your browser won't let you enter spaces directly (and I know of none like that), there are ways round it. All you need is something that swaps spaces for a %20. What, you can't do macros? Don't blame software engineers. Maybe blame your browser, but most likely you need to take a good look in the mirror and blame that person instead.
This is one of the few genuine bugs I've seen on the list. And it's not exactly unique to computers. It's also nearly unsolvable. Let's take the date 01/02/03. Is that European format? (February 1st, 2003), American format? (January 2nd, 2003), or International format? (February 3rd, 2001). You can't tell from that information, as it's ambiguous. That's a good word to learn, in computing. Computers don't like ambiguity. You'd need an additional drop-down menu, from which you would pick the format. For EVERY data entry panel. The format list would be between 4-2,000 entries long, depending on the type of data. You don't think that would confuse the users a hell of a lot more?
Many problems fall in this list.
As for problems with docking bars, the Windows GUI, etc, that's what FTP sites are for. Prefer a UNIX-like environment to MS Windows' desktop? Just download Afterstep for Windows, or use the X11 package from Cygwin.
If solutions exist, but you persist in living in the problem, why the hell should anyone feel sorry for you? This list is about as valuable as a Windows user complaining about all the security holes and speed issues, KNOWING there's plenty of free alternatives, but CHOOSING to ignore them, because only by staying with Windows can they continue to feel sorry for themselves.
When living in misery is a choice, the misery ceases to be a defect of other people and their work.
Re:Article not quite right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Bug Name: ASCII Sort
Proposed Fix: Add intelligent Alpha-numeric sorts to lists throughout the world of computing.
Actually, this seems to have been quietly implemented in Windows XP. I have a list of several files named picture[number] and once I got into 3-digit numbers I noticed that XP was still listing them in order, i.e. picture121 is not listed after picture10, but after picture96.
Re:May not be intuitive, but it makes sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
That particular old Mac way of ejecting disks is still crap - personally, I tend not to store important things in my rubbish bin, 'cause that's where rubbish goes.
The Mac method particularly rankled me because I had an Atari ST, with the so-similar-Apple-sued-Digital-Research GEM desktop. Where, of course, dragging a disk icon to the trash would delete everything from the disk. It would ask first, mind...
Re:Yeah, it doesn't "nag"... (Score:2, Interesting)
Rebus icons (Score:5, Interesting)
Duration: 15+ years
Supplier: Eudora, Rational (now part of IBM)
Alias: "Let's play a game - can you guess what this means?"
Product: Eudora mail reader, Atria/Rational/IBM ClearCase revision
control system.
Bug: Eudora: The 'check mail' icon has a picture of an envelope and a
"check" mark. ClearCase: The 'check in' icon has a picture of a
document, an arrow (in a direction arbitrarily ordained to be 'in') and
a "check" mark.
Notice the use of the "check" mark to imply the English word "check".
Not only is this going to be completely opaque to every non-English
speaker, it is very murky to about half of the world's English speaking
population also. "Check" is the American name for this mark, in British
(and Australian, New Zealand...) English it is a "tick" mark. It took me
two years before I realized why it was on Eudora's "check mail" button.
Discussion:
Icons are supposed to transcend language barriers - not to limit
themselves to one dialect. A related bug are the highly stylized icons
found on Swedish home appliances: circles, crosses, dotted arcs etc.
These are quite incomprehensible without a manual, which likely has been
lost. If they just wrote Swedish words, at least I can find a
Swedish/English dictionary in my local library.
Bug first observed: c1987, "Eudora" mail reader, c2000, Rational (now
IBM) ClearCase.
Bug reported to supplier: Reported to Rational c2000. They told me where
I could find the bitmap file for the icon so I could edit it myself.
---------------------
As an aside: I expect this one has long since been fixed. Macintosh,
c1990, in a shared computer room environment: You'd start using a
computer, and at some point the computer would demand that you insert
some floppy disk. Said disk belonged to the previous user of the
computer, who has left. The computer would refuse to do anything at all
until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I
knew of to this was a reboot.
Re:Spaces in filenames (Score:3, Interesting)
would it have killed you, Mr. Gates, to have named the two most commonly-used directories on a Windows box "/Programs" and "/Users"
Well, when Win95 first came out, one of the "features" being touted was the ability to use spaces -- and up to 255 characters -- to be "more like proper English". For a number of people, this was a welcome change to the 8.3 mindset.
Of course, I'm not saying that Microsoft couldn't have provided this ability and still named those folders "Programs" and "Users" respectively, but by doing so, Microsoft was demonstrating their new feature. And they were doing so in such a way that people who wanted this feature would not be content to stick with conventional 8.3 OSes like DOS. It was a simple push to upgrade, as Redmond is so fond of doing.
Re:And related... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is by far my #1 peeve, and I really wish it would stop. Even Apple's apps do it - how can we convincingly yell at other apps like MPlayer (which is truly evil, grabbing focus even when it's invoked in a batch file) for the same transgression?
Re:In My Book... (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows is really bad at this, including in WinXP.
I was performing a very lengthy download in the background of a multi-hundred megabyte file from a website. While that was proceeding, I was typing in an on-line forum, similar to Slashdot here.
Well, of course, as I was typing along, the download finished, and Windows XP popped up this little dialog saying "Copying to destination", since Windows downloads to a temp folder first, not directly to the location you specified. Worse, instead of just doing a 'move', it actually COPIES the file, so it takes a long time for large files.
Anyway, make a long story short, that dialog popped up and stole focus JUST as I was typing the letter that is the accellerator key for the "Cancel" button on that dialog... which canceled the copy. Poof, file gone. I had to restart the download from scratch.
Stupid piece of crap computer. There are just so many things wrong with the whole scenereo... why would it COPY instead of just move a directory entry and be done with it? Why would it pop up a dialog? Why would that dialog steal focus? Why would it have a cancel button on it anyway? And why would that cancel button have an accelerator key that is very commonly used ("n" in this case, I believe)?
Basically it means that when downloading files, you cannot type anything else until the transfer is complete, for fear of accidentally aborting it.
Really, really bad design and implementation, Microsoft.
Re:Some of these things are valid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, look, right-clicking or ctrl-clicking* gives an option to "Eject [Volume Name]"!
Oh, and look what else--in Mac OS X 10.3, which came out over a year ago, most users are navigating their filesystems in a window like this [apple.com], where each ejectable volume has an "Eject button" right next to its icon and name (even in Open/Save dialogs!) One friggin' click! Or is that counter-intuitive for a Windows XP user, who has to locate and click the "Safely remove hardware" icon on the taskbar (which is represented by a tiny 3-D rendered grey rectangle and green left-pointing arrow, and may or may not be hidden as "inactive"), click the USB/1394 drive, click stop, confirm it by clicking stop again, then close that window.
Oh, and look what else, under every previous version of Mac OS/Mac OS X you could eject a disk by just hitting File->Eject (or Command-E on the keyboard). Network or removable.
The fact is, the trash-can eject is an old shortcut (whose origins have already been explained here) and which is still supported if you choose to use it, but which NO ONE EVER NEEDS TO KNOW OR USE ANYMORE. Just because it's a possible way to do it isn't reason to bitch, because there are at least three more intuitive ways to do it. Bitching about that would be just like bitching about the fact that you could open a terminal under linux and type "umount -f
____
* which is what I think you meant--Control, not Command, is the context menu key on Mac OS/Mac OS X.
Re:That's a solution? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Number 5 (Score:2, Interesting)
But Opera will.
Re:Eight (Score:5, Interesting)
I think FireFox would be very well suited to build it's own PDF viewer into the core code (or at least promote a module for Win32 users that ISN'T Adobe's).
Another big bug in Acrobat reader is that if you're in FireFox and try to issue a keyboard command while reading a
If the Mozilla foundation included sane PDF capability, it would end up in even BETTER perception of improved response. Uninformed users automatically make the psychological connection of "poor Acrobat PDF performance"+"IE"="poor IE performance".
I think it would be wise for the FireFox crew to capitalize on this because it would give the user an [even] better browser experience (on Win32).
Re:Comments on the top ten bugs (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope. ASCII was invented in 1963 [wps.com] and finalized in 1967 [wps.com].
You're probably thinking of Baudot's code [wps.com], invented in 1874 and still in (limited) use in modern telecommunications. But that wasn't nearly a century before computers, either.
BTW, it's still conventional to put acronyms in all-caps, with a very few exceptions (Fortran, for example).
Re:On the Written Word (Score:2, Interesting)
Embedded system solved this two decades ago (Score:5, Interesting)
For the last ten years at least companies like MAXIM have been shipping zillions of WDT chips for use in embedded systems. They have all sorts of functionality and cost a dime. There's at least one in about every laptop. But because we have grown to expect our computers to be flaky and unreliable, there's no demand for robustness in desktop systems.
E=1/2CV^2
Most every PC power supply uses a switching convertor jsut like the one in a TV set (some even use the same control chips). They don't use bigass iron core transformers and they don't directly regulate to 12V or 5V or whatever - they use a DC bulk supply that is directly rectified from the AC line (yes, that's right, no transformer) and switch it down at high frequency (thus smaller transformers). A cheapass PC power supply might have (if you're lucky) 2x330uF of storage on this bulk supply - at 170VDC that's less than 10 joules, at 70% efficiency that's enough to drive 140W load maybe 50 mS.
All it would take to increase that to seconds is to add capacity to the bulk DC supply that's already part of every system. This would require getting larger caps to replace the cheap low value caps and a twenty cent varistor to limit inrush current so you don't blow the internal fuse simply by plugging it in.
They could even go to fullwave rectification on the input, use a 350VDC bulk supply instead of 170, and use 1/4th the capacity - a 2000uF/340VDC supply would have enough reserve to keep the entire system running a couple of seconds under "panic load." Stick a single 4700uF/450VDC cap in the "premium" power supply and you'd have a system that would be rock stable through just about anything.
The caps would cost $2-$5 instead of the twenty cent crap that's in there now; the sleep signal is already there, but no one uses it. Figure ten bucks to the end user and you have a system that will perform flawlessly through those little glitches and would have time enough to perform a proper shutdown on those rare glitches when the power didn't come back a second later.
Ten bucks. Maybe. But there's no demand for it because no one knows they could expect better at an equally reasonable price. Reviews don't even test for such basic functionality - no one has a clue, and the industry doesn't want you to know better because they would rather keep those pennies of profit themselves.
And BTW if you are feeling particularly sporty all it takes is a parts order and courage with a soldering iron. I've installed photoflash caps in TV sets to bolster the power supply and it works wonders - the cheapass Philips in my living room had this treatment and it's outlived two others and has a rock solid picture. My ancient HP Vectra firewall PC with the 233mhz cpu and the mighty 100W internal power supply coasts right through brownouts that caused my "better" desktop system to restart... that is, before I fixed it, too.
Re:On the Written Word (Score:2, Interesting)
There is no spoken language where a distinct pause is put in between words during normal speech.
However, Hebrew and some of the Germanic languages put a glottal stop (the sound in the middle of "uh-oh") before any spoken word that begins with a vowel.