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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#261

Post by ansgri »

nchmy wrote: post #210
meling wrote: post #64

Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

Indeed. It is unreadable without a Reader mode.

also reader on ios interprets it wrong as it picks up the first heading as the article’s title, and that makes me think that it could skip some content as it’s prone to do, so back to poorly readable layout I go.

Re: Bug Blindness

#262

Post by kmoser »

scottg489 wrote: post #17
kmoser wrote: post #16

> At times, I've tried to see if I can get a job somewhere where I just fix quality issues all day. This has never panned out, due to some combination of this not being a very high priority and it also not being a normal role that companies have a role for. I'm pretty sure dedicated QA roles are a thing at many companies.

Isn't the classic QA role typically about finding bugs not necessarily fixing them?

Ok, but who do you think fixes the bugs? There must be countless devs out there who are slaves to fixing Jira tickets all day, so I still don't understand OP's assertion that full-time bug fixer isn't a thing.

Re: Bug Blindness

#263

Post by nojs »

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…

> I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller).

Likely the one handed keyboard feature: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1mi7kjd/til_onehand...

Re: Bug Blindness

#264

Post by mixmastamyk »

mrob wrote: post #259
mixmastamyk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure, as I don't have any wasted screen space, due to the techniques mentioned above. On really bad sites I try reader view first, View/Page Style/No Style (on Firefox) second, and if that doesn't work I close the tab. Pretty rare though.

Re: Bug Blindness

#265

Post by DrewADesign »

steveBK123 wrote: post #245
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…

> there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that. Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble. People of varying intel…

The thing is that good interface design is basically invisible, so most people, developers notwithstanding, take it for granted. In the late 90s, there were entire books published on using popular email clients like Eudora, but a literal child can figure out how to use, say, fastmail entirely through feature self-discovery, and fastmail has more features!

I also think the ego stroking borne from disproportionately high labor demand has given many developers a serious case of main character syndrome.

Re: Bug Blindness

#266

Post by eru »

Xymist wrote: post #186
eru wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. In the 2010s Mathworks, the company that makes Matlab, had a policy that everyone started in frontline support. Including developers. (They probably still have thi…

The shaping isn't necessarily productive, though. My company has a policy wherein a the dev team are on a rota to assist the support team (and by extension clients) with technical queries. The net effect has been to make me hate customers with a passion usually reserved for opposing political regimes and childhood bullies.

Oh, I don't think MathWorks has a regular rota. As far as I remember, You do your duties when you join, and then you are free.

Re: Bug Blindness

#267

Post by thaumasiotes »

yorwba wrote: post #216
thaumasiotes wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Are you sure they don't represent drum memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drum_memory

I don't see much reason to think so, given that that's still what hard drives look like. I don't have any evidence for or against.

Re: Bug Blindness

#268

Post by HappMacDonald »

steveBK123 wrote: post #245
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…

> there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough The average IQ is 100, half of people are below that. Being surprised that customers may be of different intelligence is the kind of thing that comes out of people who have never had to work a retail/restaurant job in high school growing up. If someone has made it that far in life before finding this out, they've lived in a bubble. People of varying intel…

There exists a floor to how "idiot-proof" Motor vehicles are since they do require a skill test and a licensing protocol to legally operate that do weed out some number of humans not competent enough to operate them (and even beyond that insurance qualifications can weed out some more: crash or commit infractions too much and you lose and/or get priced out of your ability to legally drive). And rightly so due to the unique hazards that they pose: but for want of those things one may easily still have to try to support their software for users incapable of gainfully handling a motor vehicle.

Automobiles and the international road network have also had well over a century to standardize themselves over a glacially slowly changing set of expectations while we're writing drivers for 400GBE chipsets that only got invented last Tuesday and building agent management harnesses for styles of neural networks that literally weren't even a twinkle in the milk-man's eye yet as recently as fidget spinners being in style.

Re: Bug Blindness

#269

Post by nextaccountic »

fhars wrote: post #212
tim1994 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Padding is typically part of the hitbox, margin is not. What you are describing sounds like margin to me. Especially for Firefox since their UI is made with web tech. But besides being overly pedantic I agree with your general point. If their is a small gap between hitbox and edge of the screen it is very annoying. But the worst thing IMO is Windows 11 windows which you can grab by the titlebar but not the content ar…

Also, more than 90% of the title bar are active UI elements like menus and close buttons, and you have to guess which few pixels are actually inert enough to allow dragging.

Note I am not talking about the title bar (it's hidden here), I am talking about the bar where the address bar is (also back/forward/reload buttons and extension buttons)

Re: Bug Blindness

#270

Post by HappMacDonald »

mrob wrote: post #160
nextaccountic wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen "Back" is used so frequently that I consider any mouse lacking a side button for "back" to be incomplete. You don't need to put a high value on your time for upgrading your mouse to pay for itself within its service life.

On the other end of that spectrum I cannot _stand_ back button on the mouse and always disable the feature immediately because it is often too easy for me to click those fiddly side buttons without meaning to (either while grabbing or while re-adjusting my hand position on the mouse)

So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.

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