I design optics and I’ve seen a return request because they “couldn’t see the target” and included photos to show what they meant. The customer installed it backwards and didn’t bother trying the other way.
If it can be mounted both ways it should work both ways. 🤷♂️
I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.
I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.
My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on
Scripting.Dictionarywhich is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.
If you hear about it that much, why not make the script check for .NET before crashing?
It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.
Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.
90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.
If you have access to any kind of UX and UI folks, you automagicallly get a leg up on this, y’all. It is goddamn amazing.
Single dev on a personal project? Go find someone in the community who has an eye for design or hit up a design forum. Work has you on a project with only two other devs and limited resources? Ask for a favor from the UX team down the hall.
We are all tryna make good experiences out here. Let us avoid getting ‘teabagged.’
Basically you have to hide all choice behind a settings page. Think of a cattle chute that only let’s them go one direction to the bolt gun. Wait…
You’re calling this person stupid, but they’re 90% of the way to getting it right.
If only every technical problem was this easy to solve.
Hmm … Better pigeon hole clients into only using the teabag.
“Why can’t I put the label in the water?!”
Our legacy system always puts the label in the water and our clients rely on the faint cardboard flavor.
I write graphics software that almost seems intuitive, until you realize I gave it a split personality.
Even I forget about the split personality side of it.
“I’ll add this to our knowledge base and other people can assist now!”
“Hey So-and-so, it looks like you our are guru at this issue, can you take a look at these 4 users who mentioned the software in their ticket?”
I just need to make progress on my projects, stop giving me desktop tickets pls :)
I can be an idiot every once and a blue moon. Thank you to anyone who put literally everything a manual just in case someone is braindead and isn’t afraid to rtfm.
To be honest it’s just after I’ve spent 10 hours on something fairly complicated and new to me. I suddenly can’t think for myself anymore. It literally becomes a chore to do the simplest shit sometimes.
Honestly, if you read the manual you are very much not dumb
I do appreciate it, I know I’m no idiot.
To be honest, I kinda wish some projects came with API manuals. I understand it’s not a priority in an open source project with limited resources.
It would be nice to use a python based ml tool without passing commands through it via shell. People do it, I just don’t have the time or experience to analyze a complex project like ML voice synthesis.
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And that’s how an iPhone with an interface that even a toddler can figure out sold a few billion units.
At what cost, though? I thought the generations after the millennials would be more tech-literate. But after seeing Gen Zs around me at home and at work, things are just regressing.
Can’t really blame them either, it was our generation that dropped the ball in making sure they were more tech literate than us. Not that I have kids but still.
The modern electronic devices are far more railroaded than it was back in the day tho.
Want to download an application? There’s the App Store. No need to download random .exes from sketchy websites (and learn what a “computer virus” is the hard way)
Downloaded a picture? It’s instantly inside your gallery. Back then we needed to find a folder called “Download” or “My Documents” using something called the Explorer!
iPhone and Android made a lot of things dumber and easier to take in, but I feel like it had a detrimental effect on digital literacy.
A little. Hands on parenting is what they need. I made sure my baby brother is tech literate when my mom is 100 percent not. He just graduated highschool this year. Sure some of the blame is on tech but kids don’t know how to shit in a toilet either and parents make damn sure they learn as quickly as possible.
Want to download an application? There’s the App Store. No need to download random .exes from sketchy websites (and learn what a “computer virus” is the hard way)
We’ve had that for years, it used to just be called apt-get. Though I’ll admit a GUI software center is nice when I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for
Nah, our generation had to tinker with shit to get it working. Kids these days have it easy, which is good from a user perspective, but fails to train them how any of it actually works at a deeper level.
No one has to install a device driver anymore.
See my other comment.
Tldr: Parents make sure to teach their kids not to shit on the ground.
It was inevitable. We took a mishmash of things that kinda worked together with a patchwork of software and shoved it into a streamlined define with a custom made interface to tie it all together. One of those things pushes the user to learn more, and it’s not the finished and polished product.
As someone who’s used and uses both for work and isn’t a fanboy of either, sorry but apple does not have an easy to learn interface. It seems like every single choice they made was done to just be different from the alternative, more often than not to the detriment of the user. If they lock people in to how their ecosystem works low tech people can’t easily change.
If they lock people in to how their ecosystem works low tech people can’t easily change.
Other people can just mimic the iPhone interface. That’s basically what Android did.
The real difficulty of switching to another device from Apple is the multi-year contract that the phone companies try to get you on.
Back in 2012 apple won a UI patent and we know how those megacorps do. No idea to what extent but that sorta stops any big contenders on copying them. The multi year contracts are a meme from the past but it’s the same sort of people who aren’t techliterate enough to learn a new UI, that keep with the contracts.
The multi year contracts are a meme from the past
I don’t know if I’d can cell phone contacts a meme.
They sorta are, plenty of options for cheap quality untilited phone plans out there even with international included and very few people actually need a state of the art 1k phone to make payments on.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not policing how people should spend their money. All I’m saying is that plans are from the past and don’t need to exist, like faxes.
Carrier lockdowns seem to be an US only thing now.
if ( parameters.teaMass <= TEA_BAG_WEIGHT ) { return "Error: incorrect input. Check if tea bag was inserted correctly into water container." }#define TEA_BAG_WEIGHT 0And then a user starts adding weights to the label until it passes.
unlikely
Idiot proofing just results in a better class of idiot.
Speaking as a user (I’m not a programmer even if I’m often loafing around here):
Left is not “optimistic” but “assumptive” - blame the dev and the user.
Right is not “pessimistic” but “diligent” - blame the user.But the worst type doesn’t appear in this pic: they’d put a ball of chicken wire around the label so it’s physically impossible to put it in the hot water.
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We’re talking about the worst dev, right? “No, chrust me. I have a vizhun about how the tea bag should be.”
Incidentally it’s the same answer that he’d give to people annoyed who neither need nor want the chicken wire ball.
I’m not a programmer yet even if I’m often loafing around here
Fixed that for you…
Join us on the dark side. We have cookies.
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A proper engineer would make the tag absorbent and use the principle of capillarity to transfer the water to the bag (and the other way round once tea flavoured) to cover this case.
Users can’t avoid being stupid, but a proper engineer should be able to cover all cases.
So you’re saying it should wick the water from the cup to the table like an oil lantern. That seems like a good way to have half of your cup on the table.😂
If you get it to travel up the string, gravity will definitely do the rest. It seems like such a passive aggressive way to design a product and I’m all for it.
This assumes an infinite timeline and budget.
And also the existence of a perfectly insulative, yet durable and long-lasting sheath for the bag and string. I realise it’s just an analogy, and in cyberspace that sort of thing is trivial, but with real matter it’s beyond a pipe dream.
Well, no proper engineer will agree to less than that
No, that complicates things way too much. Simplicity in design is beauty. A real engineer would recognize the tag on the string not only as a point a confusion, but also a superfluous feature. Simply remove it. The end user will have to use a spoon supplied by themselves to remove the teabag, but thats their problem. At least there is actually tea in the cup at that point.
Loose leaf tea is peak design.
I disagree. The teabag is a welcome replacement to having to have yet another unitasker in the kitchen.
Or the pg tips approach: ‘d’ya know what? No more tag or thread for ya now you’ve got to fish and pinch the baggy out of your scolding tea ya wanker’.
Documentation be like:
For (literal string) place for i = T end of and rest unit 4
