131–140 of 262 posts
What they should be doing is having a goal of software that cannot fail to complete the task.
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> 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…
In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have this policy, I don't know.)
It shaped attitudes and cultures quite a bit.
>And, sometimes, the issues are severe, to the point where one might even say the thing actually doesn't work. >I find this last category a bit mysterious, as when I look up discussions on how the thing got into this state ... I'm currently on the dev side of such a product and can tell you one way it can end up like this. Leadership decides a new feature is required, but refuses to commit to writing what they want.…
If you mean that leadership IS the business analyst, then you are in trouble :D
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> 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.
Could you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?
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> 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 love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.
This means that if there is an actual, finite button on a corner, the easiest way to click it is to position the cursor on the very corner, rather than attempting to position the cursor in the middle. But this is ruined if this button has padding. So for example, the start button on windows at the bottom left corner had padding in earlier versions of windows like windows 98, but the actual hitbox of the button shouldn't have padding, so that it's easier to click.
This is all to say that I use Firefox maximized, without a titlebar or menubar, so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen, and the hamburguer button is at the top right corner. But those buttons have padding! If I actually move the mouse to the very corner before clicking, I miss the button
That shit is infuriating
I’m really anal about the Quality of my own software, and tend to be hard on others’ software (doesn’t make me too popular). > I've had multiple jobs where directors/VPs/execs/etc. sometimes ask me to evaluate something when they want an actual opinion from someone who is relatively likely to notice issues (and fix them or drive fixes for them if necessary). I’ve had the experience where I need to be asked, and even…
I feel for you and I'm similar too. However, there's a fine line between what you are describing and "perfect is the enemy of the good". I've seen some who claim to be like you but in practice they are a net negative to everything because they can never agree to anything until it is perfect even when the perfect solution is beyond the capabilities and/or out of project scope/budget and/or take too long to implement i…
But there’s a lot of room between “perfect,” and the "quality" of most of today’s tech, and I worked for a company that routinely shipped gear that had a very high level of Quality.
I’ve watched people use “Perfect is the enemy of good” to justify shipping absolute garbage.
We can do better. Much better.
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 sin…
So... do we restrict the meaning of the word "bug" only to the mismatched (developers') expectations, or do we extend it to cover bad expectations too? I'm in the later camp, because I'm not aware of even a single company that has any department or a process that would systematically address the existence of bad expectations. And, if anyone should be given the power to act on it, the QA seems to be the most likely candidate.
Unnecessarily long post. It could have been 4x shorter and conveyed the same message better.
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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? ")
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> 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…