Shame On UI

A quick primer on error handling:

1. Explain the problem.
2. Allow for a way to undo a mistake.
3. Provide enough information to take an informed course of action.

Sigh, @Microsoft. I should have known you'd hurt me again.

"Use an LLM", they said. "It will be great at inference problems". @GoogleGemini.

This may seem trivial, but is intensely anti-human.

• First of all, why do you have to tell me what to do?
• Why don't you just explain and deal with the issue for me once I try to modify or save the document?
• Why I do need to "click" if I'm using a keyboard or touchscreen?
• Why isn't the word "Duplicate" itself the action button?
• Even worse, depending on the width of the window, the "Duplicate" button could be way off on the right, making it even harder to find.

DOC files are like a forever chemical that we'll never get over.

Thanks, Microsoft Word.

Medical equipment interfaces are interesting because one can safely assume the users are trained medical personnel and not the public. However, there's still a very strong incentive to make them intuitive and accessible as people's lives can be on the line.

Presumably they chose an abundance of soft keys here to allow for as much flexibility as possible, but I find the whole thing rather vexing:

• There's separate icons for battery and AC power (why?)
• There's a dedicated and differently colored button to silence the machine (why not an icon?)
• A very generic circular button labeled "System on" seems like the entirely wrong modality (a "⏻" flip switch could have sufficed)
• The large, italicized ">Battery Runtime = 5.0 Hours" is a very strange way to convey that information

Surely there are many other factors at play that led to these design decisions, and there's probably plenty to learn from being a fly on the wall at the software department of a huge medical conglomerate like BD, but come on. Can't we do better?

When you say way too much and not enough at the same time.

At least tell somebody why they should bother signing up, @sugarfish.

Meta post: The site has migrated to our own host since Twitter (sic) has become too much of a cesspool for this blog to be credibly hosted on it. And it's not like its UI was ever good.

So here we are.

Hope to see you around. 👋

I wonder how long it will take for companies to realize that running infrastructure on @Windows is almost always the wrong answer. @ElectrifyAm

The "Click here" anti-pattern still runs rampant. How about some descriptive links, @MyGlendale?

What's really being asked here?

"Question marks are fine, but exclamation points go too far. And carets. We're not savages." - @USAGov