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Bug Blindness

danluu.com

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Re: Bug Blindness

#281

Post by ragall »

XRG wrote: post #85

From the article: “For well over a decade, the reliability data that exists (and I think this is backed up by the anecdotal experience that mechanics who work on Volvos have) is that Volvo reliability is mediocre to poor, but of course Volvo forums are full of people who insist that Volvos are among the most reliable cars and that the data are all wrong.” The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people…

A mistake that both Dan and the forum users made, was to discuss averages instead of reliability for certain platforms and/or engine types. Most manufacturers have models with wildly different reliability.

Re: Bug Blindness

#282

Post by Tepix »

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I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated.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.

The designers' job is good usability. Limiting line length is important, humans cannot deal well with extremely long lines of text. This is not a matter of taste.

Re: Bug Blindness

#283

Post by Tepix »

lmm wrote: post #182
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I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated.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 for example? It doesn't achieve a reasonable readable font size which was presumably the goal. Your padding won't be the right size for all screens either. (And personally I hate excessive line height). > respect the browser's default font size The browser's defaults are also bad. But they shouldn't be. The browser is in a position to actually fix this; the webdev isn't.

> The browser's defaults are also bad.

What's bad about them? There is a sensible default and users (in particular those with poor eyesight) will adjust them to their needs.

Ignoring this default is presumptuous.

Re: Bug Blindness

#284

Post by hibbelig »

roelschroeven wrote: post #229
hibbelig wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the browser windows narrow is a bad suggestion. Because most websites have some sort of navigation bar on the left and another bar on the right, so we need a wide enough window to get enough of the main text (width). There are very few websites without those columns.

Surely between the browser window too wide (where the text lines are too long) and the browser window too narrow (where side bars are hidden) there exists a width that is exactly to your liking.

The point is that most websites have sidebars, but this one doesn't.

Let's say my preferred text width is 10 units. Due to sidebars, most websites require a browser window width of 20 units to show me 10 units of main text.

Then I visit this person's website and get text 20 units wide and it's very uncomfortable to read.

The text width I like doesn't change but the browser window width I need does change, and I don't want to change it when navigating around, to be honest.

I guess I could use the browser functionality to inject my own CSS rules for specific websites, then I could change the single-column no-max-width websites to show me a sensible text width.

But I also suppose that I'm not alone with this preference. I believe there have been studies about a suitable line length that is easy to read, and this is reflected in printed media. So those websites ask everyone to make such changes. That doesn't seem right.

Re: Bug Blindness

#285

Post by carlosjobim »

ragall wrote: post #279
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.

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.

The only products which should have any mandatory learning curve are products which actually allow an expert to do something out of the ordinarily, which simply could not be done with an easy to use product. Such as some musical instruments.

Otherwise, you can most of the time make a product which can be easy to use for novices while retaining maximum efficiency for experts.

Re: Bug Blindness

#286

Post by mrob »

Tepix wrote: post #282
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.

The designers' job is good usability. Limiting line length is important, humans cannot deal well with extremely long lines of text. This is not a matter of taste.

There is no objective definition of "extremely long". Whatever value you choose will be incorrect for some readers. Therefore the correct place to set it is in the web browser's preferences (or the window manager if you prefer).

Re: Bug Blindness

#287

Post by ragall »

carlosjobim wrote: post #285
ragall wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only products which should have any mandatory learning curve are products which actually allow an expert to do something out of the ordinarily, which simply could not be done with an easy to use product. Such as some musical instruments. Otherwise, you can most of the time make a product which can be easy to use for novices while retaining maximum efficiency for experts.

Compare a professional trader's UI to something consumer-grade like Robinhood, or analytics UIs designed for marketers (exposing only a few cute graphs with a handful of predefined parameters) to the dashboards used in physics labs, or simple graphics programs vs. Blenders.

Maximum efficiency for experts requires removing information that would be distracting and redundant for them, but essential for novices to understand the working model of the program, so you're pretty much wrong.

Re: Bug Blindness

#288

Post by inigyou »

swiftcoder wrote: post #75
hypfer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here. 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 makes for bette…

> 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…

How did people learn the UX of a book, or a tape deck? When I was a child, sometimes I was fascinated by the fact the tape deck buttons couldn't be pressed in certain combinations, like the record button that forcibly presses play, and the fact rewind and fastforward would latch until you pressed another button. But I didn't know what half of them did.

Re: Bug Blindness

#289

Post by inigyou »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #257
andyroid wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Play, rewind and FF icons were referring to the physical movement of tape past the play head, back when you could see the tape. Don't know what pause came from. Maybe there was a pair of felt pads that would press the tape on either side of the head to keep it tensioned while preventing movement?

Re: Bug Blindness

#290

Post by inigyou »

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…

Fixing this would require whole-system thinking. The corners of a window are nothing special. The corners of a screen are special, and exploiting that requires thinking about the screen, even though as an application developer, your responsibility stops at the window.
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