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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#91

Post by socalgal2 »

m463 wrote: post #52
socalgal2 wrote: post #35

I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details. I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week. I've run into the MacOS one mention…

> I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. wow, you just reminded me. From time to time I bring up the camera app, and I just get a blurry screen. I have to lock the phone and unlock it, maybe quitting the camera app before I get the camera app coming up showing what the camera sees. I just worked around it and got on with my life and didn't yak-shave (search for a solution or file a bug)

It shouldn't have that bug in the first place. It's not about yak-shaving

Re: Bug Blindness

#92

Post by the__alchemist »

jiggawatts wrote: post #58
Groxx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorites is spending nearly 10 minutes trying to get someone to read a single word on their screen correctly, in a dialog box that was blocking them, containing fewer than 10 words, so I could find the cause of their problem. After nearly 30 minutes to figure out that they had a popup blocking them, and not "the computer doesn't work". What eventually worked was getting them to spell it to me backwards. Th…

The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner remini…

This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.

Re: Bug Blindness

#93

Post by ksec »

I do think a lot of these are not Bug Blindness, but a bar for acceptable quality standards.

A low bar means people walk past without realising it, a medium bar may take notice but it doesn't bother them and tends to get throw out within min or seconds. A high bar gets insane irritation that some may even call OCD.

And unfortunately, these spectrum follows an S curve. If you have a high bar, you are likely in the single digit percentage monitory. And the same is across all things not just software.

Re: Bug Blindness

#94

Post by danjc »

This hits. Ive had an annoying issue with Codex VS Code extension for weeks if not months when queuing up a follow up. Often it just disappears, I think it's just a UI glitch is actually queued but I can't click steer if the UI doesn't update and I find myself automatically going CMD+A, CMD+C before sending a follow up message.

Re: Bug Blindness

#95

Post by nottorp »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width.

Someone always complains about that when a danluu link is posted.

Every time I have to go back to the article (usually after having already read most of it) and notice "yes, it's using the whole browser window".

I think you can obtain the common experience of one sentence per screen and lots of scrolling by pressing ctrl/cmd and plus a couple times.

Re: Bug Blindness

#96

Post by nottorp »

ghastmaster wrote: post #81
gieksosz wrote: post #70

Unnecessarily long post. It could have been 4x shorter and conveyed the same message better.

I usually agree with this sentiment. I have a general disdain for elaborations and novelization. Get to the point! Give me the necessary facts and make it concise! In this case for some reason, I disagree. This post is engaging for me. I sometimes elaborate on how I came to a conclusion because that journey is equally as fascinating as the conclusion itself. While reading this authors post I was happy to see what see…

If you think a bit, you'll notice that it's long but it's not padded for content length. It does not repeat the same thing 100 times with different wording. Every "bug" he talks about is somewhat different.

Re: Bug Blindness

#97

Post by dusted »

I also think it's due to normalization of deviance, people are just used to it..

- You can't build a model, because everything will be changed with the next update, so, even if not consciously, people won't do it, why bother learning something that's not going to be of any use next time you use the application.

- because you basically don't know how anything works, it's a coin toss whether it's actually not working, or you're just "using it wrong".

- most things won't do the thing you expect of them consistently, so you don't expect anything of them.

Last night, I uploaaded some documents to my insurance company => modal:

- Title: "Files successfully uploaded"

- Text: "An unknown error occurred"

- Button: "Ok"

Thank you.

Re: Bug Blindness

#98

Post by miki123211 »

jdm2212 wrote: post #77
bsder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware." A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically. The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system…

It's not really regulation-driven. It's just what happens when the people buying software and the people using it are different. This is the standard problem of enterprise software is marketed to the IT department (which cares about cost, box-checking, vendor relationships, lock-in risk, bureaucratic turf wars, headcount preservation, SLAs, etc) with little or no regard for responsiveness to end user needs. It is def…

This goes even deeper than that.

Users don't choose their university by how good that university's software is (just as we don't choose apartment complexes and power companies this way). This gives university IT no incentive to deploy software that doesn't suck.

Banks and cellphones also used to work this way, until they suddenly didn't, which was quite a shock to the existing players in the market.

Re: Bug Blindness

#99

Post by brabel »

the__alchemist wrote: post #92
jiggawatts wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flip side of this is the pleasant surprise of working with a near-retirement age grandma who assures you that she "isn't technical" and "doesn't know how to use a computer", but will studiously write down every keyboard shortcut on little post-it notes and add it to their collection like they're porcelain cats she found at the Sunday markets. I've watched some of these people operate a computer in a manner remini…

This sounds like "Smart person who has little technical experience and might have cognitive decline from age". The world is fully of people who's intelligence is legitimately lower than you might expect.

> The world is fully of people who's intelligence

What an example of a sentence a person *whose intelligence is lower than you might expect would write. I can only imagine this was intentional.

Re: Bug Blindness

#100

Post by lmm »

lelanthran wrote: post #73
watermelon0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a cop out in this specific instance: he knows the defaults are a bug, he can change it with maybe 2x lines of CSS, but he is blind to the fact that it's a bug. After all, he is complaining about the defaults in other software, but he is blind to the defaults he presents the user.

There is no way to specify a good size in CSS - a size that looks good on current computers will be too big on old computers, and a size that looks good on old computers looks too small on current ones. Browsers and users are the ones who can fix this.
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