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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.
Not adding enough coolant to prevent the web server from melting down due to the /. effect.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
http://www.asktog.com.nyud.net:8090/Bughouse/10Mos tPersistentBugs.html
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
He mentions that computers shut-off without any juice. Not surprising that computers do that. I don't think this is a design flaw, simply because there are things in existence, known as UPS's, that are there to buy you time to save and close everything.
AC comments get piped to
SOATYPICALSENTENCEWOULDREADLIKETHIS!
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!?!
#1-Removing power from a device that maintains his information on devices run by power (i.e. RAM)
#2-Thinking that computers do "magic", or at least should do to not have design flaws
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10- Making top ten list without having 10 things to list
...but you presumably knew you WANTED to remove it.
- open, Apple just keeps the behavior consistent: the user should know they're done using the volume (unmount it) before they unplug it. This has been the behavior for 20 years. And no, I'm not saying just because something has been some way for a long time that it needs to remain, but I just don't see the problem. Not allowing a device to be removed, or "nagging", probably saves a lot of people from fucking shit up before they've properly saved and/or dealt with items on a removable volume, instead of allowing things to be unplugged wholesale. If the user unplugs something at an inopportune moment or with open files, how is the computer supposed to be able to deal with it? Cache up the changes and not tell you? Or tell you that something was removed when it wasn't supposed to be and tell you (and keep that behavior consistent even when you "might be done with it"), like Mac OS does?
What if a user has an open file, and yanks the drive? How does Windows "gracefully" deal with that? Answer: it can't.
You can pull the drive on a Mac, too - the difference is that the Mac will say, hey, you should have unmounted this first...hope you saved everything. And instead of doing something like auto-unmounting-without-nagging-when-no-files-are
Design flaw #11
Using very large golden gradient shadowed GIFs each worth over 4K to represent the numbers 1 - 10 in a "Top Ten Persistent Design Flaws" webpage. It not only looks ugly, makes the website slower consuming more bandwidth, but it also takes away a good chunk of the left side of the page.
Cheers,
Adolfo
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....
It doesn't seem to include evil applications (or operating systems) that suddenly throw new windows on the screen to grab keyboard focus away from you just as you type something.
You lose your thread of thought AND the computer decides you said "OK" to "do you want to email your credit cards around the world" while you sit there wondering what just happened.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
On the ASCII sort "bug", he writes dates have to be reversed to sort correctly. No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly! ;-)
Duration: [in years]: seems like a thousand centuries ago...
Supplier: Tog
Alias: "I have no concept of the difference between objective and subjective usability complaints."
Product: Tog's parents.
Bug: Tog's perceptual abilities.
Class of error: Intellectualy density.
Principle: "My opinions are holy."
Proposed Fix: Zoloft
Discussion: Some of the things he lists as flaws in the Dock are things that I acutally like about the Dock. It's a very subjective thing. Some of the things he laments losing from Mac OS 9 were not the bee's knees he seems to imagine they were. He was just used to them, is all.
Bug first observed: Can't check the date on the original Dock whinefest because his site is slashdotted. It happened some time after Tog ceased to be relevant.
Observer: Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law
Bug reported to supplier: No. No point. You cannot argue with self-proclaimed learned wisemen.
Bug on list since: Whinefest first published.
--- Ban humanity.
Item 1; Power failure crashing
In my experience, this affected Macs much less in a brownout situation than PCs. The Macs (at the time, desktop G3 systems) stayed up after a power blink of 0.5 sec, losing no data. I think current Mac OS hardware is more robust in this area, but this is not really a fault of the computer or the OS. No power, no computer worky. Sorry.
Workaround in a mission-critical area: Buy an uninterruptable power supply, petition Apple to make a computer with very expensive (but non-volatile) flash RAM, or use an Apple laptop, which has its own battery that makes it resistant to brownouts and blackouts.
Issue 2: The Dock in Mac OS X.
Grousing. In the old Mac OS 9 days, there was a Dock analogue called the Launcher. It was ugly, and I rarely set it up for users, but it worked. Some people still use it for their Classic apps in OS X.
Workaround: Many, most third-party. Apple's interface, until OS X was icon-centric for launching apps, rather than menu-centric (in Windows Start menu). The Dock is no more perfect than the Start menu, but at least it provides a consistent launcher for common apps, instead of having the user search through folders for the right app icon to launch.
Better: Have installers ask user to add icon for applications to the Dock, which isn't done most of the time, forcing users to search about in the Applications folder.
Issue 3: Dimmed menus.
A bit of a grouse, but logical. Some OS X apps by third parties HAVE shown info in the greyed out menu as to why the option is not available. I believe it is more programming efficient to leave a greyed out menu than to attempt to hide it (affecting where and the order of menus on the menu bar from one moment to the next, which would confuse the hell out of me).
I believe Tog's thought, of adding a special option in a greyed-out menu as to why this command is dimmed, could be useful. Otherwise I think he is blowing the issue up. Of course, the more complex the app (especially with palettes and THEIR commands, the more weight his argument holds.
Issue Seven: Disk Drive Nazi.
Not a problem, at least until removeable drives arrived.
The Mac OS has always been intelligent, preventing you as the user from accidentally ejecting or formatting a disk you are using, including network devices. This is a Good Thing. Compare this to the behavior in Windows, which will still allow you to eject media in use, causing All Kinds of Hell.
Workaround: His point seems more specific to USB and FireWire drives. Unless Apple creates a hardware lock that physically locks a device, preventing the thing from being removed, then there's not a lot to do there, except Apple making the OS more robust in screaming at people to tell the OS that the drive is to be disconnected before they physically remove it.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
My company actually does this as a marketing ploy. We add disabled items to our menus for options that don't even exist yet. When customers call to ask how to enable these options, we tell them that they need to buy a future upgrade.
It appears that everyone is guilty of having a framework. This guy, you, me, everyone. We think that what we experience in the world, and what we think about it, is all there is. We're all pretty small, even the wisest of us.
In this case, a Mac guy says the user is in charge, and thinks it's a law of nature.
Microsoft treats users as a renewable resource, to be used and reused as needed.
We Unix types, on the other hand, know that users are an unfortunate side effect.
sigs, as if you care.
Bug name: PDF
Duration: 10+?
Supplier: Adobe et al
Alias: Why-is-it-so-hard-to-write-decent-software?
Product: Various PDF viewers, primarily for Windows
Bugs: One: Acrobat kills Mozilla. Two: Hidden "check for updates?" box locks up IE.
Class of error: Poorly written software
Principle: Simple software shouldn't hog resources or kill other apps.
Discussion:
Why is it so hard to write a decent PDF reader? Preview for Mac is fast and doesn't crash anything. And yet Acrobat for Windows (and maybe for Mac--I haven't tried it) is slow, a resource hog, locks up Mozilla/Firefox until the file is done loading, hides its "check for updates" window (without a tab on the XP app bar), and locks up the PDF-viewing window in IE until the "check for updates" box is dealt with.
Power Failure Crash
This is due to the save file paradigm. Changes only get saved if you tell the computer to. People have long realized this is bad; this is why some programs have autosave. I am all for saving changes continuously - and forking a file if you want to have distinct versions.
The Macintosh Dock
I guess this is more of a personal thing. Personally, I think the Dock is great, although I prefer separate launch icons and open window icons (aligned at separate edges of the screen), a la NEXTSTEP. The Mac doc certainly kicks the Windows taskbar (and imitations') ass.
Mysteriously dimmed menu items
I don't necessarily agree these are bad. The alternatives are removing them (bad because menu structure changes), not disabling them (makes no sense - they are disabled because they aren't meaningful right now), or not dimming them (bad because you don't signal the action is unavailable).
The proposed fix is a good idea, though.
ASCII Sort
This issue has never affected me much. The alternative is is having lots of black magic exceptions to get items sorted the way humans might sort them. To me, it seems these exceptions are hard to deal with for machines, but for humans as well. I don't think it's worth the trouble.
What is good, though, is having proper metadata support, so that we can sort not just by filename, but also by author, project, modification time, etc. Add in a search function, and you don't even notice the asciibetical sorting anymore.
URL Naming Bug
Some browsers already convert spaces in URLs to '%20' or '+'. I think this is the way to go. I'm not sure if stripping spaces (as the author suggests) is a good idea. Does he mean to make "my birthday pictures" internally translate to "mybirthdaypictures"? Why? My filesystem can deal with spaces just fine. Perhaps stripping all spaces after the first (i.e. removing errorneous spaces) is a better option.
Let's you save me some work
So, not accepting multiple formats for the same data is bad. I have to ask why the multiple formats exist in the first place. If we're talking about SSN, library card number, etc. there's always an authority issuing these numbers. Why not use the same format they use, everywhere? If users want to be inconsistent, they must be prepared to deal with the consequences.
The Disk Drive Nazi
I, too, hate that machines don't let me have my device back. Linux and BSD (and probably other unices) can be particularly annoying in this respect. Someone once tripped over the USB cable of my webcam, unplugging it. Nothing but a reboot would let me kill the program (which was in uniterruptible sleep), reload the (confused) driver, plug the cam back in, and start streaming video again. Grrr. Isn't this what exceptions are for?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While we're administering the beatings for bad UI decisions, there's the pig-froker who dreamed up scroll bars that snap back to their original position if your mouse cursor gets too far away from them during a drag. What was the twisted thought process behind that decision? Oh, the user's forgotten they're using the slider, even though they're ACTIVELY HOLDING DOWN THE MOUSE BUTTON? We need to launch reprisals at them for not keeping the mouse cursor inside an invisible rectangle?
Its all part of MS's policy of torturing their users until they buy "intellimouses" with scroll wheels.
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
Example: A post of "Often it is difficult to figure out why certain options are dimmed and under what context they will become active. I don't see a better alternative though other than better documentation..." attached to a story containing the solution of "Make grayed-out objects clickable, revealing what has caused the object to be dimmed and what the user can do about it."
First Noticed: 1996
Proposed Solution: Require the user to read the article. This could be implemented in a number of ways: either the referring home page to the message board should BE the article, or a page between the story and the article should contain some sort of code permitting posting. Or a mod of "-9999999, RTFA" should be added.
Kinda ironic the article brakes almost as many usability rules as it points out:
1) No alt tags - you've used images to number your list, yet no alternative text for blind users (or those with images off), this is a very well established as bad usability
2) Confusing title - you say top 10, but don't actually have 10 items on your list, an important aspect of usability is clarity, which your title lacks.
3) Consistency - you've divided each item into sub-sections, yet the sub-sections are inconsistent with from one item on the list to the next. If a sub-section is not applicable, I suggest you add, for instance: "History: N/A," this will save readers scrolling back and forth for a section they might believe to have missed
4) No submission form - You provide an option for people to submit suggestions for your list, yet fail to provide a basic HTML form for them to do this, instead you opt to let them do the work.
There are more, but I'll stop here, since I expect this to be modded down anyway. I hope you see the irony.
There are a lot of Windows apps guilty of this. Outlook is terrible. Start it, its splash screen steals focus...switch back to something else while it's loading, then it steals focus to paint its main window...go back to that other thing...and it steals focus again when its done loading all the components inside the main window.
But, to be fair, many X apps do the same crap. Here's one thing about X-Windows (or Gnome maybe) that drives me nuts: Let's say I have four workspaces...I like to use workspace one for Internet-related activities, workspace two is development-related activities, workspace three is productivity-app hell, and workspace four is terminals. Now, let's say I go to workspace one and launch Mozilla...(really any app will do), then, while it's loading, I switch back to workspace two to continue debugging an app while Mozilla loads...then, BING! Mozilla pops on workspace two. Why won't an app stay on the workspace it was originally launched from? Does it have to follow me to the current active workspace?
I would think any app should be smart enough to do two things: (1) know where it is when it's launched and stay there; and, (2) know if it loses focus during start up and NOT re-take it. How hard could that be?
Ignoring his confusion between Design Flaws and Bugs...
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
2) The Macintosh Dock
-- "It's not that the Dock sucks so much as a productivity tool as it is that Apple threw away so many more powerful, useful objects in its favor." So it works, but there were better options in his opinion? You'd be hard pressed to find anything that couldn't be described in this way.
3) Mysteriously dimmed menu items
-- I can see the point of wanting them to say why, but it is very short sighted to say the message must be exact. A much better solution is that in Help, every menu option should be searchable and explain exactly when it can be used and how. (Though I miss the Apple Help Balloons. Heck, now that I think about it I think they worked and could explain disabled Menu Options but no one bothered to fill them out.)
4) ASCII Sort
-- This is a consistent extension of alphabetic sorts, and will likely never change in standard file system listings. The example of iTunes is a specific application with a specific data set, and any application should organize data as appropriate for the use. Part of the point of iTunes IS to organize files in a way that makes sense for what they are, whereas the operating system must treat all file names equally and not make assumptions about what they represent.
5) URL Naming Bug
-- Correct history: filenames didn't have spaces because the early command line parsers separated tokens by spaces. Even today, command line parsers need help either by quoting the entire name or escaping the spaces. (The Apple II worked because the parser was even simpler; every command was only one word and everything afterwards named the object to be acted upon.) The problem with the proposed fix is that the only place spaces are not allowed is in the machine address part; spaces are allowed willy nilly in the directory portion as per the server's setup. There is no consistent way to know whether spaces in that portion should be dropped. While the browser could be written to automatically remove spaces in the first portion doing so in the directory portion would be disastrous for many web sights. Having it do both would seem to be a blatant inconsistency.
6) Let's you save me some work
-- This is actually reasonable, and as a programmer it's a pet peeve of mine that the computer should do the work. It's not always possible though, and sometimes compromises must be made. I prefer if the field only wants numbers it would say so and prevent numbers from being typed without beeping or anything. I think it's a good compromise between getting a clean entry and not interfering with the user, since any spaces/dashes would just be ignored.
7) The Disk Drive Nazi
-- This was a feature. It prevented floppy or system corruption. (The System was on a floppy and could otherwise be ejected.) OS X is much more dynamic in recovering from these incidents, having to deal with USB, Firewire, and Network drives. The incident with the Powerbook described is most likely the result of using a non-Apple drive with a bad driver. Booting from an emergency CD would eliminate. Given the author's history it's even possible he was using OS 9, increasing the likelihood of a driver problem.
8) 9) 10)
Apparently, he's counting in base 7.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I had the same problem once; it vexed me for two days until I just pressed the return key at the password prompt.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
"The option should just be removed from the menu altogether. Sure, that would lead to users getting confused..."
No, if you really want to confuse the user, simply create the menu dynamically, picking 6 items apparently at random to put on the menu. Microsoft can't be wrong here, they have user-interface guidelines and everything. After a few seconds, when the user has had time to read most of the menu items, change them again, this time picking 12 items at random.
If you can, use two columns, and put an animation in so that the menu takes half a second to appear.
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.
I thought you just right cli... oh, wait. WTF is wrong with this mouse?
!hoD
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.