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Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for UI designer
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hunter2_ 3y ago> luckily it predates AI by several years Is this referring to predating the recent LLM hype? Why would that be relevant? It certainly doesn't predate AI in the looser sense.
- stanleydrew 3y agoIt's a joke, don't think about it too much.
- codeflo 3y agoThe actual constraint here is that every additional button costs 0.1 cents extra in production. Whatever great UI scheme you come up with, if there’s a ridiculously contrived way to do it with one button less, that’s what will be chosen.
- Macha 3y agoLikewise, text means region-specific models, so symbols it is.
- schiffern 3y agoTwo points for never calling it "Daylight Savings Time." It's actually incredible how common this error is in everyday speech. I blame The Bloodhound Gang, personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k
- scraptor 3y agoThe traditional solution is to get your time by radio from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77 or your regional equivalent. It might take up to 24 hours to update but it will always be correct and requires no manual interaction whatsoever.
- fsckboy 3y ago> It might take up to 24 hours to update but it will always be correct sounds like it might be incorrect only(!) for 24 hours at a time, with "how many times" being the wildcard.
- scraptor 3y agoIt will be incorrect whenever the time changes, so twice a year and maybe once more if you expect your microwave to adjust for leap seconds. Depending on the device it will also lose track of time if it looses power but in that case it should know to resync immediately.
- Tempest1981 3y agoCan WWVB also be used? And does it have the same issue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB
- felipeerias 3y agoJapan uses a similar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JJY Most typical home clocks will use this signal to set themselves up automatically, which is made easier by the fact that Japan does not have daylight saving time.
- r0m4n0 3y agoI think a good interview test would be “design the buttons for a microwave” and see if they think about the fact that it displays time and needs to be changed every six months. These are the types of things a software engineer would be figuring out and it helps when the designs account for edge cases without them having to drive for this type of solution
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dduugg 3y agoDoesn't it seem like a reasonable answer in this age could be to do away with the time function of a microwave altogether?
- resoluteteeth 3y agoPeople often complain about designers making changes to websites/software that simplify the ui and display less information for the sake of improving clarity, but I do think that it might be the right answer here. Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024? I usually will just turn off the clock where possible now and just use my phone for time. Having no clock isn't a problem but having a clock showing the wrong time is a problem.
- KineticLensman 3y ago> Do people really want a clock on every kitchen appliance in 2024? As someone who doesn't wear a watch and doesn't use my phone while cooking, I find the clocks invaluable. The oven clock usefully shows the time when the microwave clock is counting down.
- saurik 3y agoYou can also just get a dedicated clock, and then it will always show the time no matter what your appliances are doing, and you only ever have to do upkeep on the time and maybe-battery of the one time piece.
- gbromios 3y agothe irony of pontificating on UI with a bunch of random mouse pointers jiggling all over the article I'm trying to read...
- irongeek 3y agoYeah, I left the page 10 seconds in.
- sss111 3y agoisn't it supposed to be other people reading the article?
- cwillu 3y agoA convoluted means of making mouse cursors randomly jiggle all over the screen is still a means of making mouse cursors that jiggle randomly all over the screen.
- eep_social 3y agoNot an issue on mobile!
- fsckboy 3y agowhat are all those stray mouse cursors on the screen? is it supposed to be an absurdist critique of user experience? or is it just screwed up JS/CSS interpretation that's supposed to be doing something for me? I don't much like the minimal button interfaces that abound today (bluetooth could do so much more if they gave it some interface at all, how about just httpd?) but I do enjoy solving the puzzles of how to reset the time, etc. It usually turns out to be simple, just obscure.
- mpeg 3y agoIt's other visitors online at the same time, your mouse pointer is sent via websockets every few seconds and received by all other online visitors. I agree it's very distracting
- Cloudef 3y agoDark Souls of websites
- gpvos 3y agoIt's the mouse cursors of everyone who is currently viewing the page.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- switch007 3y agoDeveloper/Designer: so about the time adjustment. Product Manager: I'll stop you there. Thanks for your input but we don't need it for MVP as it's an infrequently used feature and having spoken to stakeholders [they didn't] and customers [they didn't], they both told me they didn't rank the clock function as important. (PM proceeds in the rest of the meeting to question every comment and opinion the developer has as if taking part in a PhD defence, while offering zero evidence of their own assertions)
- collingreen 3y agoThis hit brutally hard. I wasn't ready for this on an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y agoViolence.
- ryandrake 3y agoDeveloper: Uh, OK then This is also why our software is so bad. Developers have no backbone and won't push back against this stuff.
- switch007 3y agoI disagree. You speak up, then the PM gets defensive, it escalates, your boss steps in and tries to defuse but ultimately agrees with the PM. So now the choice is to do what the PM decides or quit and join another company with the same set up... It's the man, man.
- whatindaheck 3y ago> This is also why our software is so bad. Developers have no backbone and won't push back against this stuff. Maybe. But I’d argue it’s more likely that people run out of energy. Or I’d rather save my energy for my personal time. PMs win unless you’re in an engineer-first company. If the hierarchy is structured to favor decisions made by those who can barely operate a microwave, why put the energy into “pushing back”?
- maxyurk 3y agoOMG the dark mode button
- hyperman1 3y agoMy bike speedometer is the worst for this. It has 3 buttons. Each one can be pressed short, medium (>3 seconds), or long (>5 seconds). Every action changes something on the display, but god knows what all the icons mean. Most actions are statefull, with a surprisingly deep menu structure. If you do the wrong thing, e.g. press long instead of medium, something surprising happens, and you're in hell finding the way back to the main menu and try again. Easy option is waiting 2 minutes until it returns by itself. It has a gigaton of functions, but I only need 3: speed to not drive too fast, time to know if I'll arrive on time, km driven to know if I need maintenance. All other stuff in there is unused. At this point, I've given up. In winter, I add an hour. I know the clock is 2 minutes off and I subtract them myself. If I have to spellunk in the dark dungeons of the menu structure again, I might accidentally drop a hammer on the thing. Apart from that, it's a great speedometer. The worst is knowing I am the official techie and watch DST fixer for half my extended family, and no other clock has thwarted me so severely, ever...
- grzeshru 3y agoMy car has a button explicitly for DST on/off in the clock menu. It’s braindead dumb, has no concept of DST and all it does is +/- 1 the hour. I’ve yet to come across a more elegant solution save for an OS that is network aware doing it, but that comes with its own troubles.
- LambdaComplex 3y agoYep, my car (a Mazda) has that feature as well. Of course, this is the same car that has physical buttons that were specifically designed to be recognizable via feel so that you can use them without looking at them. It seems like Mazda actually cares about UX!
- xboxnolifes 3y agoWhy even have a dst button at that point. Just change the clock time. Assuming both feature are implemented equally well, it should be nearly equally easy to do.
- netsharc 3y agoThis weekend was the timezone change ("Standard Time" to "Summer Time" in most of Europe), I remember working with https://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ https://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ and wondering how it would depict events if you want to use local time (and have the timezone change during the day), in theory when switching to summer time it would have to show a 23 hour day, and for standard time a 25 hour day. I wonder how Google's timeline widget handles it too, on Google Calendar if I try to create an event on March 31, 2:00 AM CET, it will jump to March 31, 3:00 AM CEST. If I create an event starting at 1 AM and ending at 2 AM, it will change the ending to 3 AM (since 1 second after 1:59:59 CET is 3:00 AM CEST). When trying to change the end time, it would show a dropdown with 2:00 (1 hour), 2:30 (1.5 hours), which are incorrect since these times "don't exist". The next option is 3:00 (2 hours), which is also wrong because on March 31st, it took the clock that honored "local time" 1 hour to go from 1 AM to 3AM.
- karmakaze 3y agoThe way I wish it worked is the first part of setting the time let you go up or down 1 hour per tap. Having to go up 23 to go down 1 because you missed by going past is annoying.
- Spiridonov1977 3y agoThe best clock setting UI was (and still is? don't know) in my first car, BMW E46 — just 1 knob. Turning left or right to decrease or increase time. Keeping on the extreme left or right position to increase the speed of changes. To set any time in 10-15 seconds. Super
- bigcojosh 3y agoI like this too. If a knob is too obtrusive/expensive, could do the same with two buttons. One button for forward and one for back. Make them sensitive enough that it's likely that a casual press will visibly scroll multiple minutes, but not too sensitive to prevent setting a specific minute with a quick tap.
- yowzadave 3y agoI thought this article was going to be about the ambiguous name, "Daylight Saving Time"--it's not at all obvious from the name which setting is "Daylight Saving Time" and which is "Standard Time", to the point that it's a common crossword puzzle answer to choose either "EDT" or "EST."