Slashdot Mirror
Computing Pet Peeves?
Matthaeus asks: "I'm a 3rd-year CS student who will most likely be writing end-user applications after graduation. Naturally, I would like my apps to sell well, so I want to minimize user annoyance as much as possible. In an effort to improve my coding skills, what are Slashdot readers' biggest pet peeves when it comes to software? For example, my largest pet peeve is when a program steals the focus from another program while I'm typing. Maybe other software developers could take notice of this discussion also."
How could you watch pr0n if both of your hands were on the keyboard? Answer me that!?
You know better than your users. Include lots of wizards and bots to guide them. Don't allow them to disable them--it's for their own good.
If your program had been doing something in the background and was minimized or covered, be sure and let the user know it's finished by popping up! If this can be accomplished while the user is in mid sentence in a document or an IM, so much the better. The user paid good money for your application--you should be letting him know he got his money's worth!
When performing processor intensive operations, don't waste cycles telling the user what's going on. To an astute user, the wait cursor is more than sufficient--if he has so little faith in you that he thinks your application is locked up, fie on him.
Never repaint the screen while performing processor intensive operations--once again, performing repaints requested by the operating system interferes with the arduous task at hand for the application.
If your application is a game, be sure and use keys that are near the hotkeys for the operating system. For example, an ideal Windows game would use Alt for fire and Tab for missiles. Other combinations are left as an exercise for the reader.
If you write more than one application, be sure that the as few keyboard shortcuts as possible are the same between applications. Even better: take an innocuous, commonly used keyboard shortcut in one of your apps, and make it do something potentially dangerous in the other. For example, our alumni at Microsoft wrote Word to use Ctrl-Enter for a page break. In Outlook, when typing a message, this sends it immediately. If a user was typing a rant to his boss, he should have thought of that before putting venom in his draft email!
If yours is a web application, be sure the "Back" button never operates.
If a user fills out a form and it doesn't pass your rigorous validation checks, return him to the form and ensure that none of the entries he typed are filled in. If he made a mistake in the one you caught, who knows what other mistakes are in there? Can't be too careful!
When validating a form, once you catch an error, report it and make the user fill it out again. There's no value in pointing out all the failed edits, since you're going to clear the form for him anyway, right?
Next week's lesson: Desigining effective product upgrade notification dialogs.