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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#251

Post by JimDabell »

foxglacier wrote: post #215
silvestrov wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was. It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube. If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?

That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorre…

> If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do.

As I explained earlier, what we were actually trying to do was debug the problem, and reading the error message was a necessary part of that.

It’s weird you’ve cooked up this little fantasy that the error message was getting in the way when it was the most important thing in the whole process and that was the entire point of the anecdote.

> Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful.

Not when you’re trying to debug the problem the error message is telling you about!

Re: Bug Blindness

#252

Post by patrickmay »

wodenokoto wrote: post #74

>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.…

This is why you write the PRD if you don't have a competent Product Manager to do so. Get sign off before implementation.

Re: Bug Blindness

#253

Post by IshKebab »

I want to use some of this guy's software to see how amazingly bug free it is, lol. This is weapons grade hubris & probably autism.

Although I do have to agree with him about Linguist. I also have a PR that was reviewed and then just never merged, despite multiple very polite prompts over several years.

Re: Bug Blindness

#254

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #225
Jach wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a selection effect here in that smart-enough users won't bother contacting support if they work around an issue on their own, or if something is actually a non-issue for 99%+ of the user base. The ratio of usage and support contacts can be monitored. I fear a lot of devs develop unproductive mental models of the user purely from a minority sample.

Designing for the stupid users also makes life easier for the smart users. No matter what you are designing. It makes your product better.

[deleted]

Re: Bug Blindness

#255

Post by mixmastamyk »

mrob wrote: post #163
Tepix wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated. What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example? body { max-width: 70ch; /* Limits the text column to a comfortable reading width */ margin: 0 auto; /* Centers the text column on large screens */ padding: 1.5rem; /* Prevents text from touching the edges on small/mobile screens */ line-height: 1.6; /* Gives the lines room to breathe */ } As for font size, you ca…

>What's wrong with the following CSS snippet The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I don't appreciate designers unilaterally wasting it because they personally think it looks better. The decision of how much (if any) space to spend on padding should be made by the user.

Learn how to resize windows, multitasking, tiling, etc. I prefer to have one monitor in portrait but understand many don’t have or not able.

Re: Bug Blindness

#256

Post by Groxx »

silvestrov wrote: post #209
blfr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS has no (user-viewable) notification history?

Very limited: as soon as you have cleared a notification it is gone forever and old notifications are also gone rather quickly. https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...

It's so weird to me that this kind of thing wasn't a day-1 kind of thing. Android's has loads of issues too[1], not least of which is that you need to manually enable it.

1: you can't get access to actions or details in the history (e.g. no long-press to change settings), nor does it show you ones you didn't dismiss by hand afaict (I've been having Discord notifications disappearing almost immediately after making a noise, but there's nothing in history even though I saw it for its whole half-second existence because it popped over my screen).

Re: Bug Blindness

#257

Post by thaumasiotes »

andyroid wrote: post #191
thaumasiotes wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.

The disk icon is skeuomorphic because it's a picture of storage media. That has now gone obsolete and, instead of being skeuomorphic, it's vestigial.

Play and pause icons aren't skeuomorphic. They're symbolic. There is no point at which they were a reference to some phenomenon earlier than or other than themselves.

Re: Bug Blindness

#258

Post by ponector »

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…

>> post the 100 bugs I hit that week.

But nobody cares. Posting bugs is mostly pointless, it's wasted time. Nowadays even for paid products quality is not a priority.

Re: Bug Blindness

#259

Post by mrob »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #255
mrob wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's wrong with the following CSS snippet The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I don't appreciate designers unilaterally wasting it because they personally think it looks better. The decision of how much (if any) space to spend on padding should be made by the user.

Learn how to resize windows, multitasking, tiling, etc. I prefer to have one monitor in portrait but understand many don’t have or not able.

Useful things to know, but how do they undo a designer wasting my screen space? If you're going to tell me to learn something, it should be CSS. At least Firefox can still be configured to follow its traditional role as "user agent" and allow me to override the bad decisions of designers, by setting toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets and editing chrome/userContent.css . But it would be convenient if more people used the default CSS like danluu.com .

Re: Bug Blindness

#260

Post by jodrellblank »

asddubs wrote: post #169
andyroid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I guess even with the physical buttons you had to just learn that triangle means play and twin towers means pause

I guess even without the physical buttons you had to just learn that "play" means "engage the appropriate technical machinery".

> "[play] The meaning "to cause (a recording) to reproduce what is on it" is by 1903, probably from the "make music" sense." - https://www.etymonline.com/word/play

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