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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#141

Post by stevoski »

nextaccountic wrote: post #135
mcbishop wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.

There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click because you need to stop the cursor inside its hitbox, but moving the cursor to the edge of the screen is easy because it's effectively a huge button whose height is infinite (or infinite width for lateral edges). And hitting a corner is even easier because it effectively has both infinite width and height! This means that if t…

> There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click

That would be Fitt’s law, which - if you can believe it - dates back to 1954!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Re: Bug Blindness

#142

Post by amadeuspagel »

> Almost nobody objected to my characterization of Google and Bing search results, but people told me that I was wrong about Kagi.

Paying for a product makes you defensive, especially if there are free alternatives.

Re: Bug Blindness

#143

Post by javascriptmick »

I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.

After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.

I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.

I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.

Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.

Re: Bug Blindness

#144

Post by lukan »

javascriptmick wrote: post #143

I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed. After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster. I came to realise that to a mechanic, little…

That is the reason why too many nerds recommended Linux as a "easy" windows alternative. What for us is easy to fix and often not even worth thinking about it, is impossible for a normal person.

Re: Bug Blindness

#145

Post by thaumasiotes »

munch117 wrote: post #121
swiftcoder wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers. We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible. But skeuomorphic iconography works:…

> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.

Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D

Re: Bug Blindness

#146

Post by the__alchemist »

brabel wrote: post #134
the__alchemist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify? Are you using the typo as this basis, or something else?

There were 2 typos in that sentence (the one I didn’t mention is “fully” instead of “full”). Talking about intelligence in such a sloppy manner sounded like a joke to me.

Ah sry - phone typing

Re: Bug Blindness

#147

Post by thaumasiotes »

andyroid wrote: post #110
swiftcoder wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

> Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives.

It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.

This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.

Re: Bug Blindness

#148

Post by yyny »

syngrog66 wrote: post #32

Long ago I realized I had the ability to see race conditions in source code, at least more easily/accurately than others on average. It was helpful when reviewing the code of others, esp more junior. And I once briefly considered getting a custom T-shirt made with the words "I see race conditions." (in the spirit of the famous scene from The Sixth Sense with "I see dead people.") and wearing it to the office during f…

"infinite looping, deadlocks, race conditions, memory leaks... these are the words I use to describe my ex-girlfriend"
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