Been there done that. Software development is sometimes Social development as well.
Establishing secure connection
111–120 of 161 posts
Re: Establishing secure connection
#112Re: Establishing secure connection
#113Re: Establishing secure connection
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative is to add a duck, or something else gratuitously out of place.
Yet another case of rubber duck debugging FTW.
Nope, a reference to the duck in battle chess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law_of_triviality#Re... and #5 at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
Re: Establishing secure connection
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which pisses me off because I'm wondering what the heck is taking so long. If the vending machine can count a dollar instantly, why can't the ATM do it. On the other hand, whatever algorithm they're using for the handwriting recognition on checks is pretty amazing. I've deposited 100's of checks and I've only had to type an amount once.
A state of the art surely advanced by the USPS. Every time I scribble out an address in my awful handwriting I pause for a second to appreciate the USPS software that reads this and turns it into a barcode. Though to be fair I think all it has to do is decipher the zip code.
It's more complicated than that. The last line has to match two out of three (for example, city and ZIP), and then it can try to do some reverse analysis on what you've written for the address line. (Even that's an oversimplification; it's pretty darn impressive.)
The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their address.
If that's not bad enough, if you've ever had something arrive successfully, you expect the address that was used to work forever.
Re: Establishing secure connection
#116"Locksmith gets less tips and more price complaints for being faster"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007385 (807 days ago)
Re: Establishing secure connection
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "bad" in the sense of actually hurting people, but it is dishonest... it's a meaningless progress bar (not so terrible, Windows has us used to these), but the series of lies flitting on and off the page definitely isn't good . We all know banks aren't trustworthy, but that's what they should be, and their goal should be actual trustworthiness and not false, theatrical crap like this.
Or false, theatrical crap like building themselves massive stone buildings more suited for courthouses than branches and decking their interiors out with dark wood and brass? Banks are all about theatrics in the service of image. They depend upon it, in fact. A bank that loses trust is a bank in danger of a run.
Impressive buildings are theatrical but not at all false. They don't really have a veracity at all.
A throbber is theatrics. Fake progress messages are (excluding joke examples like in video games) a lie.
Re: Establishing secure connection
#118This is one of those things that is done by people going "We need our customers to 'feel secure'". I get the rationale, but is there actually any data that suggests this gives that actual feeling? That users "feel" more secure? Or are more trusting of the site? Or is this just cargo-cult UX? edit: I've seen this on too many financial apps to think it's an isolated incident. It's clearly a "thing" in financial apps (T…
I worked for a company that implemented a similar technique and it had positive results. The main features of one of their web based software products was a report generator. The report was quite complex and included a lot of calculations based hierarchical relationships of entities in the system. To build this report by hand would probably take hours, but the queries and calculations were all highly optimized and co…
This happens with old-fashioned customer support and technical troubleshooting, too. It seems to be the temporal equivalent of putting scrap metal in electronics to make them seem heavier and thus "more reliable". The more I hear about it, the more I believe it.
I ran into this while doing phone and ticket support back in the day and tried to get my coworkers to join me in an experiment but they refused. We could have learned so much. I wrote about it: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/14/difficulty/
Re: Establishing secure connection
#119I used to work for a major online tax software provider. I won't name them but I'm sure you can guess. Not sure if it's still there but right after you log in, there are some redirects that take you to the app servers hosting the product and you get the same type of loading image though no secure connections were being established.
Re: Establishing secure connection
#120This reminds me of something we had at my office about 15 years ago because people were complaining their workstations were slow. In reality, their workstations were just slow machines; standard issue box for most people was a 70MHz Sun SS-5. So we wrote a perl script that printed out a bunch of platitudes like these, while printing out an ASCII "progress bar." It had some randomly determined sleep() calls in there t…
That's brilliant. If I had a situation where I had to deal with non-technical people I'd implement this in a heartbeat.