5 ms·

A good UI should be able to help, especially in critical situations. I imagine Amazon will consider something like this: > The dosage you ordered is an order o

A good UI should be able to help, especially in critical situations. I imagine Amazon will consider something like this: > The dosage you ordered is an order of magnitude greater than the dosage most commonly ordered for this medicine. Continue? y/n

chrisseaton 10y ago
But that still allows you to make a mistake - by pressing y when that's the wrong thing to do.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  There's a balance to be struck. I'd say number of hoops you have to jump through to do something should scale with the potential impact of an operation. That said, the only way to completely prevent mistakes is to make the tool unable to do anything at all. (Or to encode every possible meaning of the word "mistake" in your software. If you could do that, you would probably get a Nobel prize for it.)
  - vocatus_gate 10y ago
    In a program I wrote I make the user manually type "I AGREE" (case-sensitive) in a prompt before continuing, just to avoid situations where people just tap "y" a bunch of times.
    - Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Habituation is a powerful thing: a safety-critical program used in the 90s had a similar, hard-coded safety prompt (<10 uppercase ASCII characters). Within a few weeks, all elevated permission users had the combination committed to muscle memory and would bang it out without hesitation, just by reflex: "Warning: please confirm these potentially unsaf-" "IAGREE!"
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        It's indeed a real problem. Hell, I myself am habituated to logins and passwords for frequently used dialog boxes, and so just two days ago I tried to log in on my work's JIRA account using test credentials for an app we're developing... For securing very dangerous commands, I'd recommend asking the user to retype a phrase composed of random words, or maybe a random 8-character hexadecimal number - something that's different every time, so can't be memorized.
        askmike 10y ago
        I think that even if someone can't memorize the exact characters, they'll memorize the task of having to type over the characters. Better would be to never ask for confirmation except in the worst of worst cases.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        That's what I meant in my original comment when I wrote that "number of hoops you have to jump through to do something should scale with the potential impact of an operation". Harmless operations - no confirmation. Something that could mess up your work - y-or-n-p confirmation. Something that could fuck up the whole infrastructure - you'd better get ready to retype a mix of "I DO UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M JUST ABOUT TO DO" and some random hashes.
        saganus 10y ago
        Not sure if even that would work. I've almost deleted my heroku production server even though you need to type (or copy paste....ahem...) the full server name (e.g. thawing-temple-23345). I think the reason was that because in my mind I was 100% sure this was the right server, when the confirmation came up I didn't stopped to look if indeed this was the correct one so I mechanically started to type the name of the server and just a second before I clicked ok, I had this genius idea to double check.... Oh boy... My heart dropped to the floor when I realized what was I about to do. You could say that indeed Heroku's system of avoiding errors worked correctly.... However the confirmation dialog wasn't what made me stop... Instead it was my past-self's experience screaming at me and remembering me that ONE time where I did fucked up a production server years ago (it cost the company a full day of customers' bids... Imagine the shame of calling all the winning bidders and asking them what price did they end up bidding to win....) My point is, maybe no number of confirmation dialogs however complex they are, will stop mistakes if the operator is fixed on doing X. If you are working in a semi-autopilot mode because you obviously are very smart and careful (ahem..) you will just do whatever the dialog asks you to do without actually thinking what you are doing. What, then, will make you stop and verify? My only guess is that experience is the only way. I.e. only when you seriously fuck up you learn that no matter how many safety systems or complex confirmation dialogs there are you still need to double and triple check each character you typed, lest you want to go through that bad experience again....
  - Atheros 10y ago
    We're assuming that the software in question is even aware of the potential impact. It might not have that information.
- brianpan 10y ago
  This prevents fat-finger mistakes. You could go further and try to prevent cat-on-the-keyboard mistakes, which is maybe what you're describing (solve this math equation to prove you are a human who is sufficiently not inebriated). Or even further and prevent malicious, trench-coat wearing, pointy-nosed trouble-makers. The point is, yes, it is possible. That's what good design does.

chrisseaton 10y ago

But that still allows you to make a mistake - by pressing y when that's the wrong thing to do.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
There's a balance to be struck. I'd say number of hoops you have to jump through to do something should scale with the potential impact of an operation. That said, the only way to completely prevent mistakes is to make the tool unable to do anything at all. (Or to encode every possible meaning of the word "mistake" in your software. If you could do that, you would probably get a Nobel prize for it.)
- vocatus_gate 10y ago
  In a program I wrote I make the user manually type "I AGREE" (case-sensitive) in a prompt before continuing, just to avoid situations where people just tap "y" a bunch of times.
  - Piskvorrr 10y ago
    Habituation is a powerful thing: a safety-critical program used in the 90s had a similar, hard-coded safety prompt (<10 uppercase ASCII characters). Within a few weeks, all elevated permission users had the combination committed to muscle memory and would bang it out without hesitation, just by reflex: "Warning: please confirm these potentially unsaf-" "IAGREE!"
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      It's indeed a real problem. Hell, I myself am habituated to logins and passwords for frequently used dialog boxes, and so just two days ago I tried to log in on my work's JIRA account using test credentials for an app we're developing... For securing very dangerous commands, I'd recommend asking the user to retype a phrase composed of random words, or maybe a random 8-character hexadecimal number - something that's different every time, so can't be memorized.
      - askmike 10y ago
        I think that even if someone can't memorize the exact characters, they'll memorize the task of having to type over the characters. Better would be to never ask for confirmation except in the worst of worst cases.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        That's what I meant in my original comment when I wrote that "number of hoops you have to jump through to do something should scale with the potential impact of an operation". Harmless operations - no confirmation. Something that could mess up your work - y-or-n-p confirmation. Something that could fuck up the whole infrastructure - you'd better get ready to retype a mix of "I DO UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M JUST ABOUT TO DO" and some random hashes.
        saganus 10y ago
        Not sure if even that would work. I've almost deleted my heroku production server even though you need to type (or copy paste....ahem...) the full server name (e.g. thawing-temple-23345). I think the reason was that because in my mind I was 100% sure this was the right server, when the confirmation came up I didn't stopped to look if indeed this was the correct one so I mechanically started to type the name of the server and just a second before I clicked ok, I had this genius idea to double check.... Oh boy... My heart dropped to the floor when I realized what was I about to do. You could say that indeed Heroku's system of avoiding errors worked correctly.... However the confirmation dialog wasn't what made me stop... Instead it was my past-self's experience screaming at me and remembering me that ONE time where I did fucked up a production server years ago (it cost the company a full day of customers' bids... Imagine the shame of calling all the winning bidders and asking them what price did they end up bidding to win....) My point is, maybe no number of confirmation dialogs however complex they are, will stop mistakes if the operator is fixed on doing X. If you are working in a semi-autopilot mode because you obviously are very smart and careful (ahem..) you will just do whatever the dialog asks you to do without actually thinking what you are doing. What, then, will make you stop and verify? My only guess is that experience is the only way. I.e. only when you seriously fuck up you learn that no matter how many safety systems or complex confirmation dialogs there are you still need to double and triple check each character you typed, lest you want to go through that bad experience again....
- Atheros 10y ago
  We're assuming that the software in question is even aware of the potential impact. It might not have that information.
brianpan 10y ago
This prevents fat-finger mistakes. You could go further and try to prevent cat-on-the-keyboard mistakes, which is maybe what you're describing (solve this math equation to prove you are a human who is sufficiently not inebriated). Or even further and prevent malicious, trench-coat wearing, pointy-nosed trouble-makers. The point is, yes, it is possible. That's what good design does.