171–180 of 259 posts
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.
I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results. "In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see" Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, i…
While bug has various definitions, not meeting reasonable expectations is common to all.
> That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks
No, because there's no reasonable expectation that a random book won"t suck.
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…
It's quite common, it affects 3–7% of the population; however, up to 20% of the general population may have some degree of symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia
For example, some celebrities with dyslexia:
Jennifer Aniston
Steven Spielberg
Whoopi Goldberg
Henry Winkler
https://www.webmd.com/children/ss/slideshow-celebrities-dysl...
The following is a list of some notable people who have dyslexia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe? I think you may be underestimating how many papercuts of the same kind are there on Windows and on Macs. They're just harder to see when you're used to them.
Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.
I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results. "In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see" Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, i…
At what point does search quality degrade to the point where is becomes a bug? A bug is when actual behavior does not match stated or intended behavior. If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned. Or maybe you mean to say we should reserve the word bug for deviations that are unintentional?
It depends entirely on the commitment made by the service, so e.g. my desktop file search program results has bugs whereas Google's has none.
I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results. "In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see" Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At what point does search quality degrade to the point where is becomes a bug? A bug is when actual behavior does not match stated or intended behavior. If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as the user is concerned. Or maybe you mean to say we should reserve the word bug for deviations that are unintentional?
For me the idea that poor quality search results are a bug muddies the idea of what a bug is. It's like saying the colour of the paint in my living room is buggy because I don't like it. It might be an ugly colour that I don't like, but it is what it is. A bug would be if the colour doesn't match what was shown on the tin. > If the search bears little connection to what was searched for, then it is a bug, as far as t…
What about if B has no connection to A whatsoever? Still not a bug? If it is not, then we may have discovered a software domain (the first for me I should say) where bugs are not possible. Should a be a nice market to launch products for, then.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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. This seems a weird thing to believe given that we know there are such things as black UI patterns designed to keep users from doing things they might want to do, but which the company might not want they do yet still…
>I just give up on because they don't realize that a thing should not be working the way it does, they think it is them that are wrong - as evidently you do as well. I think it is frankly a strange viewpoint to have in the world of software development, which world I assume you are a part of? I agree with, "They think it is them that are wrong", essentially. The end users that I deal with at the consumer level usuall…
The users who don't know how often bugs occur and so forth always think that it is them to blame, but people who know about bugs and how things are made should probably think otherwise, but it seemed the way you phrased your initial post that you are in agreement that it is the fault of the users for whom the UI is always nonsensical and who never put in the necessary amount of effort to understand the UI.
When I worked at Google, it was at least possible to report bugs internally with some hope they would be addressed. Sometimes you could even fix them yourself, given enough time and the relevant skills. Bug bankruptcy was still a thing. Teams would simply throw away all the SWE-years that had gone into documenting and reporting issues in their systems. But there was some possibility you'd get action, at least if you were a squeaky enough wheel and used the right back channels. But now that I'm outside the plex, there's basically no mechanism to report issues unless you're a tech vlogger with a large following inside Google or a >= $100,000,000 customer. Most other companies are much the same. They're not just blind to bugs. They're deliberately putting bags over their heads to keep from seeing what users are telling them.