Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bug Blindness

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 263 posts

Re: Bug Blindness

#61

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

ChannelFence wrote: post #47
sgentle wrote: post #27

I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model. For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into…

the people without a model are also the easiest users to lose, they won't file a bug or explain what broke. they'll just click twice, decide the product is unreliable and use something else. then the team sees no bug report and assumes everything is fine.

Why should I file a bug? So it can be ignored until a PM eventually declares bankruptcy and wipes the tracker clean?

There are some well reported bugs in Microsoft/Google/Apple that have persisted for years. Nobody cares.

Re: Bug Blindness

#62

Post by ghastmaster »

>I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.

I suspect I know why they do not notice. See below.

>it works well, etc., but when I open up the thing and try it, it's in a state where the thing only works if you do quite a few non-intuitive workarounds.

I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.

I can use a novel UI and figure out where to find what I need to do very quickly. In my experience with lay people, they can use the software for a decade longer than me and still not understand some of the capabilities and navigate to utilize them as I can within a few minutes or small amount of research.

Shoutout to https://grumpy.website/. Love it.

Re: Bug Blindness

#63

Post by coder-pm »

Hah in the AI era I noticed the agents are worse than the average person at noticing bugs. Agents use their own scale to decide if something is a success even if the output is broken. Agents are bug-blind to their own work. The consequence is that spotting bugs is now the key reviewer skill. The human’s job shifts to catching what the agent is blind to in its own work.

Re: Bug Blindness

#64

Post by meling »

Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

Re: Bug Blindness

#65

Post by hypfer »

DrewADesign wrote: post #42
sgentle wrote: post #27

I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model. For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into…

> a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't re…

I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.

Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.

This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").

This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.

Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.

Re: Bug Blindness

#66

Post by qsera »

> Bug Blindness

This is why I find that it is better to wait a couple of months before actually do the final test before shipping your own software.

Re: Bug Blindness

#68

Post by Jach »

atmavatar wrote: post #45
DrewADesign wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't re…

> They’re smart enough I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better. I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's…

There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.

Re: Bug Blindness

#69

Post by watermelon0 »

meling wrote: post #64

Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

There is no CSS configuration for text/font on the website, so it's using browser defaults.

Seems like reader mode is needed due to bad defaults.

Post reply on HN