71–80 of 92 posts
> However, as data from that external feed was unavailable, the price of the value of the Index instead defaulted to -1 To me, this reeks of a couple of bad experiences I had repeatedly as a back end developer coordinating with the front end: 1. Demanding that my services always returned correct-looking data, even if it wasn’t available, because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) handle errors. The story always went like th…
> However, as data from that external feed was unavailable, the price of the value of the Index instead defaulted to -1 To me, this reeks of a couple of bad experiences I had repeatedly as a back end developer coordinating with the front end: 1. Demanding that my services always returned correct-looking data, even if it wasn’t available, because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) handle errors. The story always went like th…
"Something went wrong". Sure, many or most users won't be helped by a specific error message, but they can use this message to ask someone how does. Especially if large tech companies just forget to offer support, a sensible error message is better than nothing. Sometimes error messages lead you down the wrong path if you don't know the intrinsics of an infrastructure, sure. But I still don't know which brain is responsible for the "guideline" to hide some essential from users. It is just objectively wrong.
It would be childs play to hide the "ugly information" in an extra menu, window, popup or anything. But doing UX isn't an excuse for bad engineering.
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Therac-25 comes to mind...
Therac-25 was at least more deadly. Also much more complex than a UX failure.
As for the second story, "I’m kind of with Revolut here, but on the other hand, if they’re so sure it’s a scam maybe they should just not allow the transfer? Even if the customer sends the selfie? Perhaps you want a hard block here." Do people want a block? Every story about a bank blocking a transfer draws tons of outrage. It's my money, I can send it where I want, no questions, you can't stop me, how dare you.
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This is a phenomenon in so many different jobs, and is called “alarm fatigue”. From https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/weekinreview/01wald.html : > On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators…
I always wondered: Since Alarm Fatigue is well known, why do UX designers and/or product owners keep insisting on adding new alarms for things? Surely we know they increasingly don't work, the more you have.
"But the A/B tests show consumers prefer it!". Oh? So you have a degree in stats and experience running scientific tests? No? You're just a programmer who only knows how to enable the A/B test feature of your favorite javascript library?
Your A/B tests aren't testing what you think they are testing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a phenomenon in so many different jobs, and is called “alarm fatigue”. From https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/weekinreview/01wald.html : > On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators…
I always wondered: Since Alarm Fatigue is well known, why do UX designers and/or product owners keep insisting on adding new alarms for things? Surely we know they increasingly don't work, the more you have.
it's extremely hard to find the point where it becomes negative.
Think of it like emails, or texts, or calls: What's the exact number per day where you stop paying attention to them?
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Maybe not as bad, but similar ... I've had a frontend dev say they needed to see designs from the designer before they could add any kind of error message or indicator. The status-quo is just silence, the page just stops doing anything. This is not unusual for various SPAs I've seen around the web. It is unfortunately a typical experience to click something ... no response? click again? wait how long? refresh? hello?…
A few decades ago, we chose the most awful color combinations for the UI of an internal system to encourage the designer to get on with it (they wore multiple hats). By the time I'd left a year or so later, the people using the system had not only accepted these disturbing choices, but claimed to have grown fond of them.
Source: was a memegeneer.
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A few decades ago, we chose the most awful color combinations for the UI of an internal system to encourage the designer to get on with it (they wore multiple hats). By the time I'd left a year or so later, the people using the system had not only accepted these disturbing choices, but claimed to have grown fond of them.
Google's internal Memegen platform used to have a disturbing amount of #FF00FF in the UI. Since it was internal and not well funded, there was no designer associated with it. The only full-time engineer at the time asked a 20%-er if #FF00FF looked good, partially as a joke, but not knowing the 20%-er was color blind. The 20%-er responded with a strong positive. The full-timer thought that the 20%-er was saying that i…
I Google'd "#FF00FF" to see how bad it was but was instead returned with a rather pleasant blue. Confused, I tried again. I got a completely different color. Same exact search. Different color. I've done the same, simple "#FF00FF" search and I'm up to five different colors with none of them being magenta.
How do you fuck something so simple as a HEX color code up?
(Hilarious story by the way. For a hot second when I saw the blue come up I thought maybe I was colorblind, too.)
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I always wondered: Since Alarm Fatigue is well known, why do UX designers and/or product owners keep insisting on adding new alarms for things? Surely we know they increasingly don't work, the more you have.
Because if someone dies because you didn't alarm an alarm, you get yelled at. If someone dies because they ignored an alarm you did alarm, that's on them.
When something unexpected or out of the ordinary happens, what do you do about it?
- Nothing? Why did you do nothing? This was clearly a problem. This is your fault. - Figure out appropriate error handling? That’s hard work. - Just throw up an alert on everything and make it someone else’s job to sort through it all? Perfect, job done.