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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#101

Post by JimDabell »

Groxx wrote: post #54
atmavatar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other ways of phrasing it, he was unable to understand that the error message contained useful information that we needed to see. I’m not even sure he was consciously aware it existed or that he was doing it. After many failed attempts at getting him to stop I literally had to take the mouse away from him and do it myself. I was shocked that apparently nothing anybody could say would stop him from dismissing the error message without even looking at it.

Re: Bug Blindness

#102

Post by lmm »

socalgal2 wrote: post #36
kmoser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which…

> I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. You must find it difficult to read books, magazines, newspapers, as all of them have short lines

I am in the same boat as GP, and I wonder if it's one of the reasons I migrated hard to ebooks and online magazines/newspapers as soon as that became possible and never looked back.

Re: Bug Blindness

#103

Post by OJFord »

JimDabell wrote: post #101
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…

I have experienced this in person with a developer who was failing to debug something. An error message was popping up on screen and he was reflexively clicking it away faster than anybody could read it. Even after being told “an error message is popping up, don’t dismiss it”, even after being told “[do the thing that triggers the bug] and then completely stop without doing anything else”, and a whole bunch of other…

That's even worse than the "I'm getting an error when I ..." type! ("...ok... What's the error?")

Re: Bug Blindness

#104

Post by codeflo »

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…

It's still a wild logical leap to me that we went from this observation, that maybe the bottom half of users never learn how the software works, to the idea that we should build software that is actively learning-hostile. In the old era, we established consistent UI patterns: this kind of button does X, this kind of button behaves like Y, here are the tools to solve your problem. Maybe not everyone learned the patterns, but those that did became wildly productive. Now: who cares if buttons are recognizable as such, your bottom half of users tap all over the place anyway, so design for them exclusively. It's good to enable more people, but we also lost something in the process.

Re: Bug Blindness

#105

Post by paganel »

> so the non-LLM options here are some posts that are much sloppier than my normal posts (in a human slop kind of way), or almost no posts.

I'm a little confused, but as far as I understand this is a LLM-written post, isn't it? That would explain the very big length of it. Or maybe I've understood things wrong, in which case my excuses to the writer (which, in that case, could reasonably be called a writer).

Re: Bug Blindness

#106

Post by bambax »

Our brain is geared towards efficient signal processing, and is actively working to delete signals it deems "unnecessary". It wants us to notice only the new and the unexpected; that's why after a short while you don't notice the same smell or the same recurrent noise. They are just ignored as "already detected / not new".

The reason for this may be evolutionary (although we don't know what traits were the most effective to help us survive in the wild); but there is a very practical reason to ignore signals, which is that there's so may of them: if we did process every data sent from every sensor and thought about odors, light, temperature, noise, etc. then we would be overwhelmed and could not do anything else.

That's also why we usually don't "see" things or people: we identify them. We don't see faces, we simply identify Alice or Bob. Which in turn explains why most people can't draw: the concept of Alice can't be drawn; to draw Alice we need to actually follow the features of her face. Being an artist means being able to unlearn (or disable) that identification process.

And I think the reason most people don't see bugs is similar: they're not interested, all they want is to get something done. If there's a simple workaround that makes the thing work, then that's good enough; all the rest is irrelevant. This is not bias or benevolence: this is efficiency.

Re: Bug Blindness

#107

Post by gmm1990 »

It’s interesting the author ponders what they might be missing now. it seems like it’s the deterioration of the writing due to llms. I’ve liked some of the authors posts in the past. And might look in more detail at the differences between the old posts and new ones because it could be a great example for what to watch out for when using llms for writing and maybe coding.

There weren’t any concrete examples of bugs besides the Google Docs issue. Like what was so bad about blackboard (I also remember thinking it was terrible). There was a link to a great article about search but again no specific example here. There are a lot of words but not a ton of new information. Maybe I’m just bias against llms, this could have been written entirely without then for all I know.

Re: Bug Blindness

#108

Post by hibbelig »

kmoser wrote: post #20
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

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

I had this same discussion on another HN thread a while back. I prefer lines to run as long as possible; I find it difficult/distracting to move my eyes to the beginning of the next line every few seconds. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I have to believe I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. Rather than having the website author wrap lines at a width that works for the average user or use case (which…

Making the browser windows narrow is a bad suggestion. Because most websites have some sort of navigation bar on the left and another bar on the right, so we need a wide enough window to get enough of the main text (width).

There are very few websites without those columns.

Re: Bug Blindness

#109

Post by frabcus »

skydhash wrote: post #21
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

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

> Bug: this blog has no max-width. Lines of text will grow infinitely long with width Are you maximizing your browser’s windows?

I do - I much prefer using computers with only one window visible. And use all the keyboard shortcuts (tab, window and desktop switching) to rapidly change what the thing it shows is.

I reckon there's something interesting about human variety in focus and/or visual processing this tells!

Re: Bug Blindness

#110

Post by andyroid »

swiftcoder wrote: post #75
hypfer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bette…

> 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 is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew…

Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives. Still, they get it. Some icons outlive their era, some don’t.

> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked

I hope that’s still the case!

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