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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?"
Tight security where it doesn't matter and sloppy security where it does.
Inexplicable configuration. This is broad a broad item and includes buried preference settings where you'd never think to look, default settings to most frustrating (think Word), system settings under inappropriate categories and items with more than one relevence only found under one.
Pop-Up windows which steal focus immediately from whatever task has focus (active rather than passive bulletins) Ever been typing something, and hit ENTER just as something pops up? Gee, what the heck was that about?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!
No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly! ;-)
;-)
Ah, someone else that agrees with me on that!
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the US) drive me completely batty. MM/DD/YY? No! That makes no sense. YYYY-MM-DD makes the meaning far more clear, and you can even extend it arbitrarily... YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-uu.
As an aside, how often do you have secretaries and public clerk type people (ie, the DMV) freak out on you because you write dates like that?
I often get "How long did you serve", since apparently the military (only some branches? no clue, just speculation) encourages that date format.
I have learned that any answer involving the phrase "lexical order" will only result in blank stares.
Some babies actually have to be taught to suckle, the nipple isn't that intuitive.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Mod parent post up, please. Sure computers aren't intuitive, but you're arguing semantics. As the parent post said, the fear is that you wipe out what's on the disk -- it's a justified fear, and no, it's not a little gripe. Any sane computer user coming from any other computer environment will be skeptical to even drag and hover a disk over the trash bin (in Mac OS X that will lead to a change in icon from trash to eject, but how would you ever really know that!). It's like saying, "oh just dangle the baby over the balcony. Don't worry, trust me, the instant you do that, the hands of God will come down and protect him. Then you can let him go so he can ."
Linux at home
Bug Name: Rebus icons
Duration: 15+ years
Supplier: Eudora, Rational (now part of IBM)
Alias: "Let's play a game - can you guess what this means?"
Product: Eudora mail reader, Atria/Rational/IBM ClearCase revision
control system.
Bug: Eudora: The 'check mail' icon has a picture of an envelope and a
"check" mark. ClearCase: The 'check in' icon has a picture of a
document, an arrow (in a direction arbitrarily ordained to be 'in') and
a "check" mark.
Notice the use of the "check" mark to imply the English word "check".
Not only is this going to be completely opaque to every non-English
speaker, it is very murky to about half of the world's English speaking
population also. "Check" is the American name for this mark, in British
(and Australian, New Zealand...) English it is a "tick" mark. It took me
two years before I realized why it was on Eudora's "check mail" button.
Discussion:
Icons are supposed to transcend language barriers - not to limit
themselves to one dialect. A related bug are the highly stylized icons
found on Swedish home appliances: circles, crosses, dotted arcs etc.
These are quite incomprehensible without a manual, which likely has been
lost. If they just wrote Swedish words, at least I can find a
Swedish/English dictionary in my local library.
Bug first observed: c1987, "Eudora" mail reader, c2000, Rational (now
IBM) ClearCase.
Bug reported to supplier: Reported to Rational c2000. They told me where
I could find the bitmap file for the icon so I could edit it myself.
---------------------
As an aside: I expect this one has long since been fixed. Macintosh,
c1990, in a shared computer room environment: You'd start using a
computer, and at some point the computer would demand that you insert
some floppy disk. Said disk belonged to the previous user of the
computer, who has left. The computer would refuse to do anything at all
until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I
knew of to this was a reboot.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Agreed. This has been a thorn in my side since AcroRd32.exe version 5. My solution is to always kill AcroRd32.exe after I've read the PDF. It's a pain in the ass, but it keeps my system sane. I tried Acrobat 6 for a brief time, but it sucked hard ass, so I quickly reverted back to 5.1 (because it sucks less).
.PDF, it won't work unless you click to a different tab (Try hitting F11 while reading a PDF for example).
I think FireFox would be very well suited to build it's own PDF viewer into the core code (or at least promote a module for Win32 users that ISN'T Adobe's).
Another big bug in Acrobat reader is that if you're in FireFox and try to issue a keyboard command while reading a
If the Mozilla foundation included sane PDF capability, it would end up in even BETTER perception of improved response. Uninformed users automatically make the psychological connection of "poor Acrobat PDF performance"+"IE"="poor IE performance".
I think it would be wise for the FireFox crew to capitalize on this because it would give the user an [even] better browser experience (on Win32).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
first project I ever worked on in my professional career - it was an early unit that had 32K of battery backed RAM to preserve the state of the system it was testing. For some strange reason the RAM contents were getting munged on powerdown - took me about an hour to figure out the machine was going flaky when it was shut off, so we put a comparator to drive the RST line - bingo, problem solved.
For the last ten years at least companies like MAXIM have been shipping zillions of WDT chips for use in embedded systems. They have all sorts of functionality and cost a dime. There's at least one in about every laptop. But because we have grown to expect our computers to be flaky and unreliable, there's no demand for robustness in desktop systems.
E=1/2CV^2
Most every PC power supply uses a switching convertor jsut like the one in a TV set (some even use the same control chips). They don't use bigass iron core transformers and they don't directly regulate to 12V or 5V or whatever - they use a DC bulk supply that is directly rectified from the AC line (yes, that's right, no transformer) and switch it down at high frequency (thus smaller transformers). A cheapass PC power supply might have (if you're lucky) 2x330uF of storage on this bulk supply - at 170VDC that's less than 10 joules, at 70% efficiency that's enough to drive 140W load maybe 50 mS.
All it would take to increase that to seconds is to add capacity to the bulk DC supply that's already part of every system. This would require getting larger caps to replace the cheap low value caps and a twenty cent varistor to limit inrush current so you don't blow the internal fuse simply by plugging it in.
They could even go to fullwave rectification on the input, use a 350VDC bulk supply instead of 170, and use 1/4th the capacity - a 2000uF/340VDC supply would have enough reserve to keep the entire system running a couple of seconds under "panic load." Stick a single 4700uF/450VDC cap in the "premium" power supply and you'd have a system that would be rock stable through just about anything.
The caps would cost $2-$5 instead of the twenty cent crap that's in there now; the sleep signal is already there, but no one uses it. Figure ten bucks to the end user and you have a system that will perform flawlessly through those little glitches and would have time enough to perform a proper shutdown on those rare glitches when the power didn't come back a second later.
Ten bucks. Maybe. But there's no demand for it because no one knows they could expect better at an equally reasonable price. Reviews don't even test for such basic functionality - no one has a clue, and the industry doesn't want you to know better because they would rather keep those pennies of profit themselves.
And BTW if you are feeling particularly sporty all it takes is a parts order and courage with a soldering iron. I've installed photoflash caps in TV sets to bolster the power supply and it works wonders - the cheapass Philips in my living room had this treatment and it's outlived two others and has a rock solid picture. My ancient HP Vectra firewall PC with the 233mhz cpu and the mighty 100W internal power supply coasts right through brownouts that caused my "better" desktop system to restart... that is, before I fixed it, too.