6 ms·

Scott Adams on Bad Interfaces

42 points by dan_sim 17y ago

vinhboy 17y ago
Yup, I've had one of those light switch + disposal switch combo myself. Who thought that was a good idea?
- seldo 17y ago
  I lived in that house for 6 years and until the day I moved out was still turning on the damn light instead of the disposal.
  - sophacles 17y ago
    I don't get it. I've had that at several living places. The one closest to the sink is the disposal, the others are lights.
    - briancooley 17y ago
      It all depends on your electrician. Mine is exactly the opposite. I haven't thought about it much, but it occurs to me after reading that post that garbage disposers might best be operated with a footpedal.
      - anamax 17y ago
        I'd rather not have electrical connections on the floor near a sink. Yes, I know that the garbage disposal has power, but it's not at a local minima.
      - flogic 17y ago
        I'd rather the powered finger chipper wasn't that easily turned on. Personally I go for a switch with one of those nifty red covers.
      - sophacles 17y ago
        Why so much engineering? A footpedal introduces an element of accidental turning on why the hands are dangerously close to the blades. How about instead a labelmaker? Or a convention, say red switches mean garbage disposal, closest to the sink, etc. Mostly I think a big point here is why everyone thinks of the residential power switches as strictly for lights? The are other things I turn on with "light-switches". These include: ceiling fans, wall sockets, vent fans and all power to my garage. I have never thought of this as unexpected, and no guest at my house has ever complained that I should take the fans off of 'lights only' switches.
        briancooley 17y ago
        I wasn't so much interested in differentiating the switches as I was in eliminating the need to touch a switch using dirty hands, especially when I have been preparing raw meat. I usually end up washing my hands a half dozen times while preparing food just to avoid spreading bacteria to switches, faucets, and surfaces. I've had food poisoning a couple of times (from restaurants), so I might be a bit germophobic. :) Anyway, as several of you have pointed out, the possibilty of spurious activation is a real safety concern, so bad idea.
    - brlewis 17y ago
      That convention alone didn't keep my kids from accidentally turning on the disposal. I replaced the light switches with ones that glow when off, and left the disposal switch normal. Nobody has turned on the disposal by accident since.
- ambulatorybird 17y ago
  Why can't you just label the switches, though? A couple strips of paper and tape are all you need. (Of course, the fact that such a fix is necessary does confirm that something is wrong with the design.)
  - asolove 17y ago
    How often do you read a label before switching on a light? I work at a building that has a big panel of them, and I still just flip them on and off until it looks right rather than read the label. When it's a matter of handed-or-maimed, don't rely on a label!
  - shpxnvz 17y ago
    I wouldn't even say that it confirms a problem with the design, just that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have the thing labeled in the first place. If his sole reason for disliking this particular interface was that he couldn't remember which switch was which, I too am quite surprised that his first thought was to have a new countertop switch installed rather than stick a label on it or grab a sharpie.
  - nollidge 17y ago
    Or put a switch guard [1] on one of the two switches. I've done this in three spots in my house. The guard goes over the switch which is less used. [1] http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?jspStoreDir=hdus&catalogId=10053&productId=100628705&keyword=100628705&langId=-1 http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...
  - JacobAldridge 17y ago
    Tangential anecdote - someone in my office went label mad mid last year. I made the observation that anybody who needed a label to know that the only light switch in the meeting room was, indeed, the light switch for the meeting room, was too dumb to benefit from meeting with us anyway.
    - derefr 17y ago
      My kitchen has a switch on a little stub of a wall, the other side of which is part of the living room. The living-room-side switch controls the kitchen lights, and vice-versa. It makes sense when you realize that you can use them to do a sort of "airlock" process, turning on the light in the room ahead of you, entering it, then turning around and switching off the lights in the room behind you.
Deestan 17y ago
A lot of people seem to think using light switches for anything is a good idea. Popular sins off the top of my head: - Light switch used as apartment doorbell. Mine sits right beside the hall lightswitch. - Light switch used as door opener. Of course put right beside one of the hall's light switches. - Light switch used as control for the office-wide motorized blinds. Of course put right inbetween the other proper light switches used for controlling light.
- quantumhobbit 17y ago
  My grandfather's house has light switches for the lights in the garage, the doorbell, and the garage door opener. People have dented their cars, which were parked halfway into the garage, trying to ring the doorbell. There is now a sign posted with very detailed instructions.
mortenjorck 17y ago
I wonder if Adams has ever read Donald A. Norman's classic The Design of Everyday Things. He'd probably love it; this kind of critique is exactly what the book explores so well.
moron4hire 17y ago
I have one UI pet peeve: mousing over large screens. I look at it this way: when the Apple Macintosh made the mouse popular in 1984, it was with a 9 inch, 512x324 resolution display. I got started computing on a 17 inch, 640x480 resolution display, so not that much larger in terms of usable screen real estate. Now, I have two 22 inch, 1680x1050 resolution displays, one turned vertically. For comparison, I made this image http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?authkey=Gv1sRgCJqd-72OjOqvxAE&feat=directlink http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?... The red box in the middle is the old Macintosh display. It looks roughly 5 inches across the diagonal. Mousing interfaces haven't changed in any significant way in the last 30 years, but displays have grown astronomically in that time. If arguments against the mouse over text interfaces were contentious back-in-the-day, it's even worse now. My wrists can't take this anymore.
- Daniel_Newby 17y ago
  Crank up the mouse acceleration?
  - moron4hire 17y ago
    Then it becomes an issue to hit buttons. As the screen resolution grows, the percentage of the screen area that the button takes up shrinks. If you increase the speed of the mouse to compensate for the size of the screen, it makes hitting precise targets more difficult.
    - nomoresecrets 17y ago
      Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy. This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?
      - quantumhobbit 17y ago
edw519 17y ago
Bad design is everywhere... My old microwave oven had one control, a dial. Just put the food in and turn it. The whole dial represented 12 minutes, so just estimate how far to turn it. My new microwave has 22 buttons. I forget which is which. I have to turn on the lights and get my glasses. The previous owner installed vertical blinds on the double hung windows. Think about that. Impossible to have open windows without endless noise and movement. An office where I work is near an airport. They have a key card system that beeps with a successful swipe. So you can't hear the beep when an airplane is passing overhead (every 5 minutes) and have to wait until it's gone to get into the building. Another office has "gone green" and installed motion sensors everywhere to turn off lights not being used. Good luck finishing up in the restroom if you've been sitting too long. Some of my software asks "Save before exit?" whether I've changed anything or not. I got so tired of trying to remember if I had updated or only viewed, I just click "Yes" every time. Pointless. Every time the garbage truck drops the dumpster back down next door, 3 car alarms go off. No one ever responds, because they assume that it's a false alarm. Not that big a deal until the garbage truck shows up at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday. My TV remote has 33 buttons. So they're so small, you have to stop and look at it to hit "Mute" or "Last Channel", the only 2 buttons I ever use. Who designed this thing, a munchkin? The airports in Orlando, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Miami put the restaurants (not counting junk food) outside of security. So you have to wonder, "Do I have enough time to eat and then get through the line?" (Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Chicago Midway did it right.) The trunk release and gas cap release levers in my car are next to each other but not visible. It's hard to pull one without the other. Seems like my gas cap door is always open. A theater we went to the other night only had aisles on the sides with 50 seats in between. Do your really want that great seat in the center knowing you may have to climb over 25 people if you need the restroom before the movie is over? Intersections that gridlock because of traffic from the next light. Too many to mention. Microsoft Windows.
- dan_sim 17y ago
  > Microsoft Windows. hahaha! (I know I will be down-voted for that comment but I'm ready to risk 4 karma points to display my appreciation of that last point)
- amalcon 17y ago
jazzychad 17y ago
> Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick. I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses this "opposite of normal logic" trick in order to remember how things work sometimes.
- TheSOB88 17y ago
  If it were the way you think they should be, why would you be asking yourself that? Unless your last place was confusing and you're still confused from that.
jodrellblank 17y ago
As a counter anecdote, I have installed USB 3G mobile connection things. A few years ago, the software was so fussy that we broke a Windows install past our ability to fix it merely by installing in the wrong order. After install it needed to be run as an administrator then as a user, then configured with custom profiles choosing which kinds of devices you might have. It was a mess. Today I had to install the latest version and wasn't looking forward to it. Plugged the device in, it appeared as a USB stick with an installer. Ran the installer, ran the program - on first launch it quietly detected and installed some drivers and presented with a 'connect' button which ... worked. I wish there was some standard way I could give feedback to the development team for their excellent work and to the company management for encouraging (or at least, permitting and subsequently getting out of the way of) such improvement and customer focus.
- JoachimSchipper 17y ago
  Such "pretend to be a USB stick but not really" devices really suck everywhere except Windows, though. (They typically use fairly standard drivers in the end, but unless there is a specific entry to tell the kernel "this is really a ...", they are going to be seen as USB sticks instead.) In short, I'm not sure they deserve that much praise.
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    The bit I'm praising is nothing to do with how open the device or drivers are, it's how much the design of the interface and end user experience has improved (and the team who made that a priority and then worked on it). So much software gets changed or more cluttered as time progresses and it's really pleased me that this hasn't. If they could be open and still be like that, even better.
markpercival 17y ago
Read the following Scott Adams blog quotes: "I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day." "Lately I have been wondering whether online reviews should remain legal." "I can't help seeing world affairs as essentially a bunch of middle managers sitting around a rectangular table coming up with clever ways to convince the masses that turds are diamonds." "Humans are obsessed with their weight. I think a big part of that obsession is the simple fact that weight is easy to measure." "What the world needs is software that makes it easy for senior citizens to use e-mail." Now imagine them being read by an angry Andy Rooney. I'm just putting that out there.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  Seeing all of those disparate quites + Andy Rooney made me think of this: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1903619 http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1903619
mhb 17y ago
Product idea: A little plastic boot that slides onto a light switch to represent its true function. Like a Japanese eraser garbage can.
nodogbite 17y ago
Scott Adams turned into Andy Rooney.
Groxx 17y ago
My personal UI peeve is alarm clocks. When I want the sound to stop, I hit the off button as often as I hit snooze, often because the snooze button is smallish and stiff, and I still have to hunt for it amidst the other buttons. What I'd like: When the alarm is going off, any button should snooze. A later "off" button press (ie, a minute or so) should be what turns off the alarm. This way, a literal "whack" would silence the alarm, without fear of falling asleep after turning it off.
mickt 17y ago
My personal peeve is door handles. You know what I mean, you come to a door and you don't know if you should push or pull. It happens to me almost everyday at work when I'm deep in thought. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman, nicely sums up a lot of design problems. Even tho the book was written in 1990 or earlier, we're still facing many of the same design problems. Everything2 sums up the book nicely: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365 http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365

42 points by dan_sim 17y ago

vinhboy 17y ago

Yup, I've had one of those light switch + disposal switch combo myself. Who thought that was a good idea?

seldo 17y ago
I lived in that house for 6 years and until the day I moved out was still turning on the damn light instead of the disposal.
- sophacles 17y ago
  I don't get it. I've had that at several living places. The one closest to the sink is the disposal, the others are lights.
  - briancooley 17y ago
    It all depends on your electrician. Mine is exactly the opposite. I haven't thought about it much, but it occurs to me after reading that post that garbage disposers might best be operated with a footpedal.
    - anamax 17y ago
      I'd rather not have electrical connections on the floor near a sink. Yes, I know that the garbage disposal has power, but it's not at a local minima.
    - flogic 17y ago
      I'd rather the powered finger chipper wasn't that easily turned on. Personally I go for a switch with one of those nifty red covers.
    - sophacles 17y ago
      Why so much engineering? A footpedal introduces an element of accidental turning on why the hands are dangerously close to the blades. How about instead a labelmaker? Or a convention, say red switches mean garbage disposal, closest to the sink, etc. Mostly I think a big point here is why everyone thinks of the residential power switches as strictly for lights? The are other things I turn on with "light-switches". These include: ceiling fans, wall sockets, vent fans and all power to my garage. I have never thought of this as unexpected, and no guest at my house has ever complained that I should take the fans off of 'lights only' switches.
      - briancooley 17y ago
        I wasn't so much interested in differentiating the switches as I was in eliminating the need to touch a switch using dirty hands, especially when I have been preparing raw meat. I usually end up washing my hands a half dozen times while preparing food just to avoid spreading bacteria to switches, faucets, and surfaces. I've had food poisoning a couple of times (from restaurants), so I might be a bit germophobic. :) Anyway, as several of you have pointed out, the possibilty of spurious activation is a real safety concern, so bad idea.
  - brlewis 17y ago
    That convention alone didn't keep my kids from accidentally turning on the disposal. I replaced the light switches with ones that glow when off, and left the disposal switch normal. Nobody has turned on the disposal by accident since.
ambulatorybird 17y ago
Why can't you just label the switches, though? A couple strips of paper and tape are all you need. (Of course, the fact that such a fix is necessary does confirm that something is wrong with the design.)
- asolove 17y ago
  How often do you read a label before switching on a light? I work at a building that has a big panel of them, and I still just flip them on and off until it looks right rather than read the label. When it's a matter of handed-or-maimed, don't rely on a label!
- shpxnvz 17y ago
  I wouldn't even say that it confirms a problem with the design, just that it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have the thing labeled in the first place. If his sole reason for disliking this particular interface was that he couldn't remember which switch was which, I too am quite surprised that his first thought was to have a new countertop switch installed rather than stick a label on it or grab a sharpie.
- nollidge 17y ago
  Or put a switch guard [1] on one of the two switches. I've done this in three spots in my house. The guard goes over the switch which is less used. [1] http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?jspStoreDir=hdus&catalogId=10053&productId=100628705&keyword=100628705&langId=-1 http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDi...
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  Tangential anecdote - someone in my office went label mad mid last year. I made the observation that anybody who needed a label to know that the only light switch in the meeting room was, indeed, the light switch for the meeting room, was too dumb to benefit from meeting with us anyway.
  - derefr 17y ago
    My kitchen has a switch on a little stub of a wall, the other side of which is part of the living room. The living-room-side switch controls the kitchen lights, and vice-versa. It makes sense when you realize that you can use them to do a sort of "airlock" process, turning on the light in the room ahead of you, entering it, then turning around and switching off the lights in the room behind you.

Deestan 17y ago

A lot of people seem to think using light switches for anything is a good idea. Popular sins off the top of my head: - Light switch used as apartment doorbell. Mine sits right beside the hall lightswitch. - Light switch used as door opener. Of course put right beside one of the hall's light switches. - Light switch used as control for the office-wide motorized blinds. Of course put right inbetween the other proper light switches used for controlling light.

quantumhobbit 17y ago
My grandfather's house has light switches for the lights in the garage, the doorbell, and the garage door opener. People have dented their cars, which were parked halfway into the garage, trying to ring the doorbell. There is now a sign posted with very detailed instructions.

mortenjorck 17y ago

I wonder if Adams has ever read Donald A. Norman's classic The Design of Everyday Things. He'd probably love it; this kind of critique is exactly what the book explores so well.

moron4hire 17y ago

I have one UI pet peeve: mousing over large screens. I look at it this way: when the Apple Macintosh made the mouse popular in 1984, it was with a 9 inch, 512x324 resolution display. I got started computing on a 17 inch, 640x480 resolution display, so not that much larger in terms of usable screen real estate. Now, I have two 22 inch, 1680x1050 resolution displays, one turned vertically. For comparison, I made this image http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?authkey=Gv1sRgCJqd-72OjOqvxAE&feat=directlink http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/thOvKDvamA7iCeQLCdyGIw?... The red box in the middle is the old Macintosh display. It looks roughly 5 inches across the diagonal. Mousing interfaces haven't changed in any significant way in the last 30 years, but displays have grown astronomically in that time. If arguments against the mouse over text interfaces were contentious back-in-the-day, it's even worse now. My wrists can't take this anymore.

Daniel_Newby 17y ago
Crank up the mouse acceleration?
- moron4hire 17y ago
  Then it becomes an issue to hit buttons. As the screen resolution grows, the percentage of the screen area that the button takes up shrinks. If you increase the speed of the mouse to compensate for the size of the screen, it makes hitting precise targets more difficult.
  - nomoresecrets 17y ago
    Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy. This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?
    - quantumhobbit 17y ago

edw519 17y ago

Bad design is everywhere... My old microwave oven had one control, a dial. Just put the food in and turn it. The whole dial represented 12 minutes, so just estimate how far to turn it. My new microwave has 22 buttons. I forget which is which. I have to turn on the lights and get my glasses. The previous owner installed vertical blinds on the double hung windows. Think about that. Impossible to have open windows without endless noise and movement. An office where I work is near an airport. They have a key card system that beeps with a successful swipe. So you can't hear the beep when an airplane is passing overhead (every 5 minutes) and have to wait until it's gone to get into the building. Another office has "gone green" and installed motion sensors everywhere to turn off lights not being used. Good luck finishing up in the restroom if you've been sitting too long. Some of my software asks "Save before exit?" whether I've changed anything or not. I got so tired of trying to remember if I had updated or only viewed, I just click "Yes" every time. Pointless. Every time the garbage truck drops the dumpster back down next door, 3 car alarms go off. No one ever responds, because they assume that it's a false alarm. Not that big a deal until the garbage truck shows up at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday. My TV remote has 33 buttons. So they're so small, you have to stop and look at it to hit "Mute" or "Last Channel", the only 2 buttons I ever use. Who designed this thing, a munchkin? The airports in Orlando, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Miami put the restaurants (not counting junk food) outside of security. So you have to wonder, "Do I have enough time to eat and then get through the line?" (Pittsburgh, Tampa, and Chicago Midway did it right.) The trunk release and gas cap release levers in my car are next to each other but not visible. It's hard to pull one without the other. Seems like my gas cap door is always open. A theater we went to the other night only had aisles on the sides with 50 seats in between. Do your really want that great seat in the center knowing you may have to climb over 25 people if you need the restroom before the movie is over? Intersections that gridlock because of traffic from the next light. Too many to mention. Microsoft Windows.

dan_sim 17y ago
> Microsoft Windows. hahaha! (I know I will be down-voted for that comment but I'm ready to risk 4 karma points to display my appreciation of that last point)
amalcon 17y ago

jazzychad 17y ago

> Were the switches ordered the way I thought they should be, and that was my memory trick, or were they ordered the opposite of how I would have done it, and THAT was my memory trick. I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses this "opposite of normal logic" trick in order to remember how things work sometimes.

TheSOB88 17y ago
If it were the way you think they should be, why would you be asking yourself that? Unless your last place was confusing and you're still confused from that.

jodrellblank 17y ago

As a counter anecdote, I have installed USB 3G mobile connection things. A few years ago, the software was so fussy that we broke a Windows install past our ability to fix it merely by installing in the wrong order. After install it needed to be run as an administrator then as a user, then configured with custom profiles choosing which kinds of devices you might have. It was a mess. Today I had to install the latest version and wasn't looking forward to it. Plugged the device in, it appeared as a USB stick with an installer. Ran the installer, ran the program - on first launch it quietly detected and installed some drivers and presented with a 'connect' button which ... worked. I wish there was some standard way I could give feedback to the development team for their excellent work and to the company management for encouraging (or at least, permitting and subsequently getting out of the way of) such improvement and customer focus.

JoachimSchipper 17y ago
Such "pretend to be a USB stick but not really" devices really suck everywhere except Windows, though. (They typically use fairly standard drivers in the end, but unless there is a specific entry to tell the kernel "this is really a ...", they are going to be seen as USB sticks instead.) In short, I'm not sure they deserve that much praise.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  The bit I'm praising is nothing to do with how open the device or drivers are, it's how much the design of the interface and end user experience has improved (and the team who made that a priority and then worked on it). So much software gets changed or more cluttered as time progresses and it's really pleased me that this hasn't. If they could be open and still be like that, even better.

markpercival 17y ago

Read the following Scott Adams blog quotes: "I can't get past the fact that it's sitting there wasting energy while its only function is to confuse me up to three dozen times per day." "Lately I have been wondering whether online reviews should remain legal." "I can't help seeing world affairs as essentially a bunch of middle managers sitting around a rectangular table coming up with clever ways to convince the masses that turds are diamonds." "Humans are obsessed with their weight. I think a big part of that obsession is the simple fact that weight is easy to measure." "What the world needs is software that makes it easy for senior citizens to use e-mail." Now imagine them being read by an angry Andy Rooney. I'm just putting that out there.

steveklabnik 17y ago
Seeing all of those disparate quites + Andy Rooney made me think of this: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1903619 http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1903619

mhb 17y ago

Product idea: A little plastic boot that slides onto a light switch to represent its true function. Like a Japanese eraser garbage can.

nodogbite 17y ago

Scott Adams turned into Andy Rooney.

Groxx 17y ago

My personal UI peeve is alarm clocks. When I want the sound to stop, I hit the off button as often as I hit snooze, often because the snooze button is smallish and stiff, and I still have to hunt for it amidst the other buttons. What I'd like: When the alarm is going off, any button should snooze. A later "off" button press (ie, a minute or so) should be what turns off the alarm. This way, a literal "whack" would silence the alarm, without fear of falling asleep after turning it off.

mickt 17y ago

My personal peeve is door handles. You know what I mean, you come to a door and you don't know if you should push or pull. It happens to me almost everyday at work when I'm deep in thought. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman, nicely sums up a lot of design problems. Even tho the book was written in 1990 or earlier, we're still facing many of the same design problems. Everything2 sums up the book nicely: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365 http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=140365