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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#271

Post by DrewADesign »

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:…

It’s funny. The only people that regularly, seriously discuss skeuomorphism in software design are software developers. It was a big conversational topic among designers around the time Apple ditched the faux leather padding at the top of the calendar app. Developers started talking about it, I believe, because it’s an unusually concrete topic among typically abstract, nebulous, or artsy design conversations. Since then, there have been a zillion other big topics in the design world, and it’s largely considered a conceptual facet of design that’s just not very important. But developers, decades later, still discuss skeuomorphism in design like it’s one of the great important topics of the field. It’s not.

It would be like if smashing magazine put out an article in 2015 about everybody moving to a “microservices architecture” and then any time any kind of software development came up in a design forum, someone would awkwardly shoehorn the discussion into a framework of microservices vs monolithic applications. (Even better, when a developer would come along and try to give a more nuanced perspective, the designers would see themselves as the authority in the conversation because all the other designers around agreed with them.)

If you really want to dig into the nerdy conceptual side of icon design, triadic semiotics is the far more interesting rabbit hole to fall down.

Re: Bug Blindness

#272

Post by blep-arsh »

JimDabell wrote: post #101
Groxx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I'm guilty of dismissing useful messages sometimes, so I'm running a program, RetroClip for macOS, that records the last 30/60 seconds of screen capture into a ring buffer in RAM (with compression, but the CPU/GPU/power usage seems to be almost negligible). It writes out a file when you press a hotkey. Very helpful in these "wait, wtf did just happen" situations.

Re: Bug Blindness

#273

Post by steveBK123 »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #268
steveBK123 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sure software moves fast, but it also moves slow.

How many bad UX redesigns do major desktop/phone OSes need for their phone/text/mail/photos apps?

We're at least 30 years into email apps for example, and yet the UX changes year to year for.. reasons.

Re: Bug Blindness

#274

Post by jodrellblank »

moyix wrote: post #25

Parts of this reminded me pleasantly of one of my favorite John Regehr posts, "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs" https://blog.regehr.org/archives/861

"Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. All were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged."

- E.M Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909

http://emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=tms

Re: Bug Blindness

#275

Post by DrewADesign »

matkoniecz wrote: post #240
carlosjobim wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes, not always. It may result in power users losing some features.

Not necessarily. Interface design is a communication medium. A skilled designer can often communicate to multiple types of users solving different types of problems. When an interface is “dumbed down,” it’s usually because a non-designer was trying to ‘clean it up’ or make it pretty by removing what they didn’t need and ignoring what everybody else needs. It’s difficult, and that’s why it’s a distinct field with its own degrees and professional programs.

Re: Bug Blindness

#277

Post by miller637 »

JimDabell wrote: post #101
Groxx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Almost everyone has this popup dismissal reflex. People don't read them and click or tap them away instinctively. I think software creators should know this by now and stop using popups in their software.

Sometimes the reflex is so strong, it is extremely hard to stop it, even when you're aware of it. Something like that has happened to me once. There was some kind of password form, where it said DO NOT PRESS ENTER after typing the password. I pressed enter. It took me several attempts to get through it.

Re: Bug Blindness

#278

Post by mrob »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #270
mrob wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Middle mouse button is often mapped to "paste selection", which is dangerous to accidentally trigger. If the side buttons on a mouse are easy to trigger by accident it means they're positioned wrong. My mouse is shaped so that my thumb naturally rests slightly below the side buttons, and I have to raise it slightly to press them.

Re: Bug Blindness

#279

Post by ragall »

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.

That's trivially false. There's a large difference between products designed primarily to have a low learning curve, and products designed to maximize the efficiency of users that have been trained in its use.
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