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Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws
jlouderb writes "Bruce Tognazzini former human interface evangalist at Apple, and currently a principal at web design firm Neilsen Norman Group has begun cataloging the top ten design computing flaws that we just live with with, but shouldn't have to. Only seven are found at his article, and (not surprisingly) three are Mac related. My favorite: the mysteriously dimmed menu options. Why are those darned things grey anyway?"
...and some aren't.
Like the thing about disk removal. The only thing Windows handles being removed "gracefully" is a floppy (and I'd hardly say "gracefully", if you had a file open on the disk). And Mac OS could have done that, but the idea was to prevent the user from removing the disk until, say, its contents have been properly saved. So Windows let you remove a floppy. So what? What if you hadn't saved the file on it that you "meant" to? Then what? At least Mac OS enforced the proper order of operations, i.e., finish what you're doing with the disk first, then eject. To insinuate that Windows gracefully handles the unexpected removal of USB and/or FireWire external volumes is crap. Since Macs don't even have floppies anymore, and this argument doesn't apply to FireWire/USB volumes (though he implies that it does), this argument is somewhat moot.
And I can categorically say that his "computer not booting" story after he removed a FireWire drive is bullshit. If you remove the drive while it's asleep, yeah, it won't like that when it wakes up; usually, it will say a FireWire device has been removed before being unmounted. Worst case scenario would be rebooting the computer. But there is no way the computer just "wouldn't work" until the drive is plugged back in. That's just bollocks. Sounds like he had one bad/erratic experience that he thought was related to disk removal, and created this entire issue around it.
Other observations are kind of generic wishlists for the behavior of various features and functions. Some of them are frankly good ideas.
But when I read "Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" I just about lost my lunch.
http://www.asktog.com.nyud.net:8090/Bughouse/10Mos tPersistentBugs.html
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
How about combo boxes, that only show X number of items. and you have to scroll to see the last 3. Until recently, AutoCAD was one of the worst examples of this, with it's layers toolbar popup, that only showed 10 items and truncated them horizontally (even though most AutoCAD drawings have many more layers and they often have similar names, so they appear the same in the tiny list at the top of the screen).
Or how about non-resizable dialogs with a set number of items in a list which displays all of the items minus one. WTF!?!
I agree. That is one of the first things that I disable on a Win2000 box.
Right click on the Taskbar and open up Properties. Then uncheck the 'Use Personalized Menus' box to disable it.
Free XBox, PS2
Alas, this site is no longer updated, but it still serves as my very favorite "UI Hell" page...
e ring/iarchitect/index-1.htm
http://digilander.libero.it/chiediloapippo/Engine
Check out the hall of shame section, it's hilarious!
PS - this link is a mirror of the original site
This sig is in Spanish when you're not looking....
Um, hate to burst your bubble, but MS GUI does not recover smoothly from such events, unless one considers a BSOD smooth recovery. Since Windows 95, and still today in Windows XP, removing a CD or floppy from the drive before Windows is finished with it will result in the system hanging at best, and BSOD at worst. Not exactly what most people would consider smooth operation.
Neither Linux nor Apple nor Microsoft correctly address the problem of removable media:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Right, except "Personalized Menus" makes catastrophic changes aside from that one. such as no longer having personalized menus. It's like telling someone if they don't want any salt on their eggs to not have eggs to begin with.
Mirror dot
This also notably applies to Japanese and Chinese - typically the characters jusr run on and on. Any spaces added are typically a modern addition (I believe japanese newspapers space their words)
It would be trivial to have a small battery, on the DC side of the power supply instead of trying to hook up a UPS.
Trivial? Not really. Your power supply is probably at least 300 watts maximum output, right?
300 watts @ 12 volts = 25 amps. And that's assuming perfect efficiency (impossible).
You can get that from a lead acid battery, sure. You'll only quintuple the price of a power supply. Oh, and then there's the disposal issues and other environmental laws. Let's make that octuple.
Yeah, there's other batteries. No, almost none of them can be tossed, and they're all more expensive, too.
I've seen these supplies where the UPS is built in. They usually start at about $150 US...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I don't believe he suggested not dimming them, but that you can still click them if they're dimmed and they'll explain why they're dimmed. The issue isn't that dimming is useless (it's quite useful), but that it's sometimes a complete mystery as to why it is dimmed. Help files rarely address these issues too -- they explain what the menu item does when it's available but they often neglect to tell you why it might not be available to you right now.
Long ago, Balloon Help on the Mac did something like what he's suggesting. When you'd hover over a menu item it would pop up a balloon (tooltip) explaining what the item did. If you hovered over a dimmed item, it explained what the item did and also went on to explain why it was not available at the moment.
I don't believe that dimmed items are inherently confusing -- I know perfectly well why Firefox has dimmed my Cut and Copy commands right now -- it's because I don't have anything selected. On the other hand, I have no idea why Outlook Express has "Block Sender" (under the Message menu) dimmed while I've got a message selected in my Inbox. It'd be nice if I could easily find out ("This command is disabled because you don't have message filtering enabled" or "You must read the message first" or whatever the reason may be).
That's so you can abort a scroll, I suppose.
-mkb
AmigaOS handled it pretty well. If a disk was removed while in use you would get a dialog saying "You must replace volume DiskName in Drive 0!!!!". If you did it would complete the operation and everything was fine. If you hit cancel a few times it would give up, but then the application would start giving errors since the operation was aborted. This would also screw up the disk a bit requireing a long repair process when you next used it.
BTW AmigaOS mounts floppy disks as soon as they are inserted and automatically unmounts them on removal.
I might point out that YYYY-MM-DD, in addition to being easier to sort, IS THE ISO STANDARD FOR DATES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
So you people who still insist on MM/DD/YY, you are OLD AND BUSTED.
YYYY-MM-DD = NEW HOTNESS.
MM/DD/YY = OLD AND BUSTED.
I don't think you understand what the "Use Personalized Menus" option does. The only thing it does is automatically hide menu items that haven't been used in an arbitrary amount of time. Each user can still have their own set of menu items -- in fact, at my workplace, the "Use Personalized Menus" option has been disabled as part of the company's domain's group policy, and the only effect is that users are no longer confused by disappearing items.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
This works quite well in languages that have specific patterns (such as endings) based on the grammatical roles of the words used. Japanese, ancient Greek, and Latin are all examples of this. Spaces might help, but they aren't necessary to separate the verbs from the nouns. English, on the other hand, makes very few distinctions between kinds of words, so text without spaces appears tangled and obscures meaning.
Similarly, this is made easier to deal with when the sounds represented by the text are greater in number, so syllabaries and ideogrammatic systems work much better than alphabets without spaces. Alphabetic systems (Latin- and Greek- based, for instance) are much more legible with spaces as a result.