221–230 of 284 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people are saying that a warning would have helped. Remember that warning functions are easy to ignore. Never use a warning when you mean undo. http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning
I don't know whether armchair usability trivia helps here. Not every system deals with ephemeral web drivel; some systems interact with the real world and have impact.
Human factors grew out of the need to build safe and error-resistant weaponry in World War II. Poor attention to human factors and user interface design was a factor in the Three Mile Island disaster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_factors#In_aviation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Huma...
With respect, to call this armchair usability and to imply that some users are just stupid is to completely misunderstand what usability is.
Firstly, firing the intern doesn't make sense - it was a mistake waiting to happen and he just happened to do it at the wrong time. Secondly, the punishment meted out should be: 1. Proportional to the degree of carelessness (in this case not that much since he accidentally hit a wrong key adjacent to the right one, didn't mow down anybody while driving drunk) 2. Inversely proportional to the likelihood of the error (…
He's used a longer version of that story to view this as a management lesson – it's definitely not just “blame the intern”: http://globis.jp/774-2
Count to ten article:
> I, naturally, felt terrible and was, appropriately, fired.
Honesty Wins article:
> But, naturally, that day was my last day of work at the American Embassy. But, not because I was fired; although, I might have been fired if that day didn’t just happen to be the last scheduled day of my summer internship.
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The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
The worst unix disaster I ever saw happened to one of my co-workers. He was working on a client machine, logged in as root because he needed to compile and install some complicated software. As he was working, he did an ls -l /bin and copy-pasted it to a text editor so he could make sure everything was installed correctly. Unfortunately, after returning to his console, he accidentally hit paste. Most of /bin was actu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
The worst unix disaster I ever saw happened to one of my co-workers. He was working on a client machine, logged in as root because he needed to compile and install some complicated software. As he was working, he did an ls -l /bin and copy-pasted it to a text editor so he could make sure everything was installed correctly. Unfortunately, after returning to his console, he accidentally hit paste. Most of /bin was actu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
Also, the situation where somebody has to be fired. I imagine that someone wanted someone's head, so whose head should it have been? They guy who wrote the system couldn't be fired, he was in a different company. And maybe a macro has been assigned to that key, so it wasn't his fault anyway.
Unfortunately, most small companies have no-one who fills that role, or if they do, it's the same person who both has the power to fire others, and is unwilling to entertain the notion that they themselves are at fault.
>And let’s hope that there is no stupid 23-year-old with his finger on an important keyboard in this information chain. No. This is something you would read in Design of Everyday Things where Don Norman would totally shame the the engineers who made that system. Software shouldn't be designed with the assumption that no one makes errors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…
The worst unix disaster I ever saw happened to one of my co-workers. He was working on a client machine, logged in as root because he needed to compile and install some complicated software. As he was working, he did an ls -l /bin and copy-pasted it to a text editor so he could make sure everything was installed correctly. Unfortunately, after returning to his console, he accidentally hit paste. Most of /bin was actu…