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How Bad User Interfaces Can Ruin Lives
Lauren Weinstein writes: A couple of months ago, in "Seeking Anecdotes Regarding 'Older' Persons' Use of Web Services," I asked for stories and comments regarding experiences that older users have had with modern Web systems, with an emphasis on possible problems and frustrations. I purposely did not define "older" — with the result that responses arrived from users (or regarding users) self-identifying as ages ranging from their 30s to well into their 90s (suggesting that "older" is largely a point of view rather than an absolute). Before I began the survey I had some preconceived notions of how the results would appear. Some of these were proven correct, but overall the responses also contained many surprises, often both depressing and tragic in scope. The frustration of caregivers in these contexts was palpable. They'd teach an older user how to use a key service like Web-based mail to communicate with their loved ones, only to discover that a sudden UI change caused them to give up in frustration and not want to try again. When the caregiver isn't local the situation is even worse. While remote access software has proven a great boon in such situations, they're often too complex for the user to set up or fix by themselves when something goes wrong, remaining cut off until the caregiver is back in their physical presence.
I'd love interfaces that don't change every 2 weeks. Especially certain web browsers and desktop environments which seem to be plagued with such issues.
Perhaps Slashdot should take a cue from this article and stop messing around with the UI!
Hell, I'm not even 40 yet and I would like to see some of the websites I regularly use to stop changing UIs for the sake of change.
Progress I will accept it, but if I need to spend the better part of a morning trying to figure out how to do something that only took 3 clicks before the update, that's not progress in my book.
'without cognitive impairment'.
'cognitive impairment' is a hell of a lot more gradual than you think.
For someone using computers a lot, they're probably going to figure it out.
For someone not using computers a lot, and who have managed to do things by remembering exactly what to click - this is enormously fragile.
Issues from 'I might break it' -> 'I might put it in a mode I don't understand how to get out of'
Someone in this position may not be able to recover from an expanded list collapsing down to a tiny triangle on a mis-click, especially if this is a feature that they will never need.
Or icons changing from ones they know, or menus moving around.
I think a problem is the automatic assumption many young people make that the reason why an older person doesn't use something is because it's to complicated for someone older. I claim that this is largely false, and that the reason why older people don't use the technologies is because they suck, are intrusive, unreliable and fleeting.
Young people are less critical, and seldom think long term (and when they do, they think a year is long term).
Why should an old person learn to use (in rapid succession) CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Flicker, Pinterest, Instagram (and so on and so on), instead of his relatives putting a little effort into hand written letters and face time?
The user interface of the THERAC-25 had a great deal to do with allowing the massive radiation overdoses to happen. For instance, the machine allegedly reported an error that could mean EITHER "radiation dose too high" or "radiation dose too low" to an operator, while indicating an underdose. The operator repeatedly told the machine to deliver more radiation, not knowing that the machine was actually delivering a massive overdose to the victim (who later died).
http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/THERAC25.html
Having worked in user support and network administration for multiple industries, I can imagine the frustration for caregivers when even the remote support software is just too confusing for the user.
For instance, many of the most popular remote support services require the end user to jump through multiple hoops that may include surfing to a particular web address (which they invariably type into Google or Yahoo instead of the address bar), entering a series of digits they swear they typed correctly (but often haven't and are too stubborn to re-read what they typed), then watch the screen for browser interaction prompts (which may be reasonable-sized prominent pop-up dialogs, but are more often either a noticeable thin yellow bar at the top or bottom of the browser window, or even worse, a pop-up window that somehow ended up as a pop-under, even though that's not how it is supposed to be), then click only the buttons that answer in the affirmative. All of this assumes the user's browser even works correctly.
Some days, it seems that even the young-uns can't figure out how to allow a remote support session.
I do know there are a few less-complicated remote support products, but they are few and far between, do not seem to be popular enough to be in common use in these scenarios, and often have more security issues than the services I mention above.
Much of the remote support problem is the catch-22 of browser security. If you don't secure the browser more, the customer is at risk. If you do secure the browser more, the customer's experience is further complicated.
There are those who would say "just educate the user". These are the people who do not understand their fellow humans and the limitations different types of learner and different generational barriers.
So, what about writing down instructions ahead of time? That gets into what the original post discussed; The interface will inevitably change, either for the browser or for the remote support service.
I'm not saying I think there is a fix. I don't. I do think it is something that might could be solved if the industry becomes more aware of the Human Interface Design problem it has.
What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?
Don't know about the Therac, but I've read of a number of cases where poor user interfaces resulted in warnings being ignored and medicine being given improperly. Presumably in order to 'protect' themselves the company had every little possibility throw a warning, to the point that they didn't have a 'I really mean it this time!' warning. Stuff like administering around 50 times the intended dose of an antibiotic to a person.
I don't read AC A human right
I was working as a developer when the news of the Therac 25 problems broke, so I remember it well. You actually have it backwards; it wasn't bad UI design at all.
The thing is mere functional testing of the user interface would not have revealed the flaw in the system. What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.
If the UI was bad from a design standpoint the fundamental system engineering flaws of the system might never have been revealed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
According to wikipedia, that had software problems that ended up killing people What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?
The original post was about bad user interfaces causing harm to people. Changes breaking the user experience was only one of the issues.
In Therac's case the bug WAS primarily in the user interface:
- Due to a race condition, if a button happened to be pressed at the wrong moment and the menu filled out in a particular order, the device would configure the electron beam for x-ray generation rather than electron beam generation (high electron beam current, no scanning) but not position the target, flattening filter, collimator, or ion-chamber x-ray sensor in the beamway, resulting in a configuration that irradiated the patient with beta radiation, rather than x-rays, at 100x a normal dose.)
- The machine DID detect that there was a problem. But it reported it as "MALFUNCTION nn" - where nn was a number from 1 to 64 and not explained in the manual. If the operator entered "P" (proceed), it would then go ahead and operate in the improper mode anyhow.
Both the second part and most of the first part sound like user interface problem to me.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.
Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?
It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Especially if computers are not your life, but something you want to - say - weekly - write letters on.
Once you drop the frequency you're doing something, learning gets lots harder, even for the young.
What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.
Which is still to some extent a UI issue.
But the literal "killer" is what happened next:
1) The machine detected that it had screwed up.
2) But the UI reported this by a cryptic error message: "MALFUNCTION nn" - where the 1 = nn = 64 error codes not only weren't explanatory, but weren't even included in the manual.
3) And if the operator hit "P" (for "proceed") the machine would GO AHEAD AND OPERATE in the known-to-be-broken mode, giving the patient a fatal (high-power, not-swept-around) electrons rather than a 100x weaker flood of x-rays, with NO FURTHER INDICATION that something is still wrong (unless you count the patient sometimes screaming and running out of the room.)
If 2) and 3) aren't user interface problems, what is?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
strong. I don't want to say "failing" just very poor memory and the like caused by very poor health. One case is a man who was in the tech industry years ago, but that doesn't mean that as his mind was harmed by the effects of illness he could continue to make sense of Google's ever changing interface. He didn't have a problem with mail so much (he used thunderbird, so that interface wasn't changing), but he couldn't navigate Google's changing phone service interfaces. Combine that with poor eyesite and problems with phone drivers that occasionally have to reload ... and there would be days when he had no phone service until someone came by and fixed his computer.
Keep in mind that there are people (once again the same man) who at times find simply dialing a phone too hard. Maybe they're too slow for hospital phone that gives you 20 seconds of dial tone then gives up, or worse gives you 20 seconds but no audio cue like a dialtone.
For such people you need interfaces designed differently than ones for average customers. You need interfaces that NEVER change. You need interfaces that have no time-outs. You need interfaces that force modal interactions rather than assuming that the user will NOTICE something.
In my spare time I pay visit to local elders and from them I have heard plenty of horrible anecdotes of how a change, no matter how minuscule that might be, might have a detrimental effect to some of the users - especially the elders
For example - for years there was a service whereby the older people can call up, and a human operator will answer. If the older people needs something that service would try to find people / resources to help out
That went on many years without problems and many elders, especially those staying alone, rely on the service
Then suddenly someone decide to save some money by installing an auto attendant, where callers must listen to some options and then dial a particular number for a particular task
For young people there should be no problem - but for older people where many have problem listening, and hand-eye coordination ability are no longer 'sharp', that auto attendant thing puts off many of the elderly
Couple with it the audio script that was badly scripted (long-winded and without clear roadmap), and was read by someone with a very lousy accent
Many of the elders have told me that they stopped calling that service because to them 'it's a torture'
In short - a UI change, no matter how minor it might seem, may whack some severe blows to users whose ability are not as sharp as others
The interfaces do suck. I can help out my mother, not because I'm smarter, but because I've learned to deal with the idiocy that's out there and understand some of the obtuse terms being used. I deal with crappy stuff all day long, she doesn't.
Most recent example: her email lost her address book and send buttons. Basically that toolbar vanished. Don't know how it happened, probably some obscure key sequence she hit by mistake. So I have to go to the menu (this being Thunderbird it hasn't yet removed menus in the asinine way that Firefox did), find the way to change the view, look at which toolbars are active, click on "message" in my guess that these buttons were on the message toolbar and not the mail toolbar. Not hard but completely obtuse to someone not versed in how UIs are done.
Next problem in the same phone call: it wasn't showing all her email. 15 unread messages that it didn't seem to display or download. This one had me stumped actually for a bit. Turns out she had accidentally clicked on one of the filtering buttons at the top of the list. It is not at all obvious what has happened, or what these buttons do. But click on one and it only shows messages that match its filter (she had clicked the one to show only messages from those in her address book). Now if there should be ANY menu bar that should have to option to be disabled, it is that completely optional one, not the one containing the button to let you send a message.
To really make this hard, Mozilla is changing their UI all the time, without warning, without consulting with users, with devs thinking they know what's best for the entire world. Leave the UI alone, and stop being actively hostile to the user.
Thankfully, I've got TeamViewer which makes remote control easy. I recommend it. You need the other end to have broadband though or it'd be too slow.
Don't forget visual impairment. They may be depending on the splat looking thing next to the red thing being the send button. Move it and good luck.
I still don't know how to use Word. Luckily I don't have to. But I've dealt with enough user interfaces that I can muddle my way through them and eventually get something done. Occasionally I get something so screwed up that I can't recover (or I never even learn that there's a shortcut bar so never notice that it's missing). I've learned to think about all the stupid ways that stuff could be done. I switch between different UIs and operating systems all the time.
A key point though which distinguishes me from a senior citizen who can't figure out computers, is that I experiment. My mother is always worried about clicking on something unfamiliar, because she thinks that it may screw stuff up and it will be a big headache to try to sort it out. WHICH IS TRUE, because it does screw things up! Her mouse clicks aren't always accurate so she does click on the wrong things sometimes and it's a mess (I have this happen to me when I'm forced to use a touchpad on a laptop and end up accidentally clicking while trying to drag). So computers have taught her to beware of doing the wrong thing or she will be sorry! Computers are punishing the users and creating negative reinforcement.
Users are being conditioned to not experiment, but at the same time the interfaces are changing every few months!
I think every software team that creates a UI needs to hire a few 80 year olds for the QA group.
Well, part of every crap interface is some techy geek thinking it is not the fault of the UI. So consider this the "tech geek says it ain't a UI problem" part of the problem.
It's not just computers. Plastic measuring cups have their sizes in raised plastic numbers, almost impossible to see. Packages, even for staple foods, are really hard to open. Printed instructions are in really small font. And on and on.
I wish there was a culture of designers taking their work home to their mothers and grandmothers to see how their stuff operates in the real world. Also, every CEO should be required to call in to their company's telephone support system, use the menu, and listen to the hold music -- over their cell phones while they drive (or are driven ) to work. (Not to mention legislators being required to go to the DMV, etc., etc.) Things would change real fast...
Jethro(on his pad): Mabel, that damn nurse is trying to get me to look up and speak out loud again. I don't know why, it hurts my neck to raise it, you're deaf as a post anyway, and I know your puss hasn't changed since the last time I saw it, except maybe to get another wrinkle.
Mabel(on her pad): Yeah, I don't know why they can't let us send IMs. But maybe you better make an effort. Didn't you say they threatened to turn off the network if we didn't all talk sometime? I don't know what I'd do without the IM network.
Jethro: Don't worry about that. I had my grandson bring in my old equipment last time he visited. These pads are running on IPv4 over 802.11b on a plug-in router I've got hidden in the closet. No one in the current generation will even know where to look.
First, this survey was not mainly about grandmothers. They had "ages ranging from their 30s to well into their 90s," and "a vast number of responses involved highly skilled, technologically-savvy individuals -- often engineers themselves."
The overwhelming complaints were of:
- "low-contrast interfaces and fonts, gray fonts on gray backgrounds"
- "Hidden menus. Obscure interface elements (e.g., tiny upside-down arrows). Interface and menu elements that only appear if you've moused over a particular location on the display. Interface elements that are so small or ephemeral that they can be a challenge to click even if you still have the motor skills of youth."
- "the sudden change of an icon from a wrench to a gear, or a change in a commonly used icon's position"
A race condition in the software and counter overflows are not "Bad User Interfaces". They are software defects.
In the case of Therac25, the bugs were triggered by a sequence of keystrokes that the UI programmer did not expect. The deaths were the result of a cascade of errors. The programmer was incompetent, and never should have been writing critical code. After the fatalities, the code was reviewed by experts, and they were horrified that such a mangled mess of spaghetti was controlling a lethal machine. The code was never reviewed by anyone, and there was no testing by anyone trained on QA, and no third party testing at all. Most importantly, the radiation shield and trigger were under full software control, with no mechanical interlocks. Even after the first reported deaths, they continued to insist that the software could not possibly be at fault, when an experienced engineer would consider a software bug to be the mostly likely explanation.
If you regard staying in touch with your family as a "chore", just say so--but don't use the medium as an excuse.
When you and they are oceans apart, having something that your mom, dad, or kid physically touched/made/wrote/sent can mean quite a lot to some of us.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You've exactly described my mother's experience with computers. She's been like this for years. Since her 40s. She just memorizes sequence of actions and if anything's changed she is stuck. I don't know what the issue is, as she's smart otherwise. After two years of computer use I realized she still didn't even know about copy and paste. It's taken me about two or three years to get her to use that functionality and she's still not competent with it. I'd love to know why this is so hard for her.
soylentnews.org
The whole point of this subject is no the fuck it doesn't.
Now options may possibly need to be offered as an option to those who might choose them. The rest of us want the gas pedal to stay in the same place in every car on the planet.
User interfaces are not computer games. They are a means to control something, and with the advent of the internet, probably something not even imagined by the UI designer. Would you advocate having a bunch of graphics arts students come in the factory and move the controls on industrial machine tools in their "industrial design" class every Thursday? Leaving the controls in a random position, and omitting the odd "emergency stop" button?
No, if it works, don't fix it
There is no reason why new user interfaces should not be designed, or old ones improved, but no way on earth that this should ever happen to an existing user other than at his explicit request. EVER!!!!!!!!! and it needs a review and automatic undo facility like when you change the screen resolution and if you don't confirm (cos you can't read the message, or find the undo button because it is in blue and on a blue background) it undoes by itself.
If you employ UI designers, you should realise these people make a living from fucking with UIs, and need to be restrained - quite possibly in a padded cell for their own protection.
Signed
Somone who was exposed to Unity and Lollipop.
It's an entirely social problem. People believe that it's acceptable and even endearing to be willfully ignorant of and incompetent with technology. It's the equivalent of people deciding that not knowing how to read is acceptable if you have green eyes and then going "aw shucks" whenever they have to read something.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."