When a real user uses the app
When a real user uses the app
208 comments
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One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans."
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Lmao, yeah.... You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won't get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
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A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
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I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
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I've seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn't be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn't require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
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The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It's in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
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Retired gif or inspired gif
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Yes.
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One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was "it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it's spreading."
Turns out the rendering engine couldn't handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning "hair on fire" it broke things:
🔥 😬
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Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays... because that's when this user actually used the application
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Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥 😳
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Before that we had ‽:-)
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User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I'm talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
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I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
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The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, "this is what I think of this computer" is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn't like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows.... Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like "this computer is trash" and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
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Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
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I think it's more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I'm guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that's what their brain told them to do.
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"okay... What happens if I do this?"
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As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
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I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of "page crashes if the user doesn't have a last name"
"Why wouldn't they have a last name??"
"No idea, but 372 users in the DB don't, and 20 of them were created this month so it's not an old problem"
"incoherent muttering and cursing"
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Some cultures don't use last names.
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It's pretty common https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononym
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UPDATE User SET Last name='Solo' WHERE LastName='';
You can thank Disney for that one.
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As a user, I sometimes do everything I can to see what breaks a system. (Often unintentionally)
Then, I don't do those this things.
(Learning permissions on Linux was a great way to destroy a system. Eg "sudo chown -R user:user /" didn't work as I first thought)
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“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.
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I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
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Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that's not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
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I'm not a fighter pilot, but when I think "ejection", can't imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn't have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
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My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn't have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn't need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they'd just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn't estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that "pulling back" is slightly pulling towards the pilot's body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
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The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
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Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it's still equally as baffling!
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Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
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There was actually a german ad about this quite some time ago: a grandma did this, then called her grandson "i think i just deleted the internet".
How the ad continued? No clue.
What it was advertising? No clue.
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That's a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we're all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I'm going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I'm seeing a lot of "it's technically possible" but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I'm still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz's contact info? We could always just ask him.
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I've seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the "Empty Trash" command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I'm not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn't be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn't cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
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Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
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Seconded.
I've read most of folklore.org and do not recall any such story. In fact, how do you even "drag the computer to the waste basket" as the first/only icon would be the System floppy and afaik they've never had / still don't have a "computer icon". 🤔
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I'm not even an Apple fan but folklore.org sounds fascinating. I love retro computing history! :D Thanks for sharing that!
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The original Macintosh had the OS on a floppy disk. So there wasn't a "Computer" on the desktop. And if you dragged the Macintosh OS disk to the trash it would just eject it so you could put in another disk. (Unless you were lucky enough to have an external floppy drive.)
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well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
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I can imagine thinking it's be funny in the early stages where things wouldn't really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn't actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
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no you're getting it confused with the crash can
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If you ever think "an actual human couldn't possibly click that fast", you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
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It doesn't matter if a human can't, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it
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I promise you I have done exactly that, i had an auto clicker bound to my space bar and was to lazy to click and would just hold the space bar down when I knew that I was going to click a bunch of gui buttons.(which I though wouldnt be problem) Quickly learned some programs don't like it at all. Lol
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Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there's a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I'll find it.
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Me and dumb compact design blueprints on Dyson Sphere Program. I've had to tear parts of builds down an embarrassing amount of times to get unstuck because of the way hitboxes on refactionators and a few other buildings work in close proximity.
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Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.
It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.
I always remember that when I'm working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we're not thinking of...
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I once deleted system32.....That's when I began calling the shots.
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When I started working in the late 90s early 00s, every company had their own It-department. These days it's just some consultant or subscription to another company offering their consultants to do specific tasks.
This thread reminds me of why having an IT department makes good sense financially - today.
You can add up all the salaries, equipment and training costs and it'll still be cheaper than wasting time and money in meetings with consultants trying to either explain the task or moan about pricing.
Shit doesn't work, because they aren't paid to make shit work.
I can make code that works for me and I can make code that works for you. The price is different, but you also need to know what you actually want it to do, and I don't know how much money you are willing to sacrifice for us both fumbling around in that equation.
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"Look how much
money we can saveproductivity we can eliminate by outsourcing IT!" -
One could, indeed, argue that consulting firms make their bread and butter by not having things work but fixed temporarily.
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I hadn’t heard the Mac story before. I wonder if it’s legit, as I don’t think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5” floppy drive.
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This story is a lie.
There's no "computer icon". Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can't be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
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i mean, this story sounds like it's from pre-release testing, or maybe a trade show demo showing a pre-release build. it not working this way in the release version just makes sense, and doesn't mean this is a fake story.
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The story seems to be referencing the first time apple had regular people try it which may have been in a focus group or at some kind of publicity event. If this did happen I'm sure they made safeguards against it before selling it
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I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn't even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns on, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
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Not necessarily -- the story might have described a beta version of the OS, in which these interactions worked differently.
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The engineer in the joke should have ordered some Bobby Tables for dessert.
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QA today seems to just be releasing software in whatever state and maybe fixing it later.
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QA in large companies seems to be first to get outsourced or at best, contacted into temp positions. First to get mixed, too. It's the "skill-less labor" of the tech world.
In other words, blame the idiots in charge for not really investing in QA lol
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Our QA manager is one of the founders of our company, so the work his team does is amazing. Doesn't take away I get a heart attack any time I get a message from him...
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Oh I am. Blaming the end users still buying buggy shit too.
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"Users will let us know if something is really broken, then we'll see if it's worth fixing"
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I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.
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The problem there is that you have to know exactly what you've done to mess it up in order to fix the bug, and when I fuck up my system, I usually have no idea what I did.
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You could just blame the devs for incomplete logging.
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I work in QA, my colleague is exactly this guy. Breaks everything without even trying. Doesn't even have much of an IT background, but man he's good at breaking things.
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It can be a good job if you go for a lead position. Then you're designing tests basically.
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I'm a good enough software engineer that this isn't true. I bet I get paid a lot more than you. 😎
(The above statement is not a truthful statement.)
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If they crashed the computer irrecoverably did they have to throw away the computer after?
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Yes I believe they dragged it to the wastebasket
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Thanks for the clarification - it makes sense now.
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They then used an even larger mouse to drag the actual computer to the garbage bin.
The garbage bin then caught fire.
This is the origin of the dumpster fire meme.
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A capybara or was it a smaller mouse then that?
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Looks like someone asked ChatGPT, not their friend lol
“Human beings then do…”
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That seems like a perfectly normal phrase...
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YES I TOO BELIEVE IT TO BE A COMPLETELY NORMAL PHRASE USED BY US AVERAGE HUMANS ALL THE TIME
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Especially in context, where it’s contrasting QA testers and ‘normal’ people.
It would probably take longer to prompt ChatGPT to write this than it would to just write it. It’s two short paragraphs.
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Perfectly cromulent, even.
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People speak weird all the time, and LLMs are trained on people. Some aren't native speakers, some just like to omit verbs, nouns, or tenses when it seems obvious and they want to be expedient, some just do it for fun or laziness (see, l33t speak and or early texting, typos).
LLMs are trained on human input, so of course it on occasion uses our bad habits. Thinking like your comment suggests is what gets people who really wrote their own stuff in trouble, because people think they can identify stuff like this more than they actually can.
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You do agree that it’s a weird way of saying it though, which is all I was making fun of. It’s similar verbiage an AI would use. I get it, but lighten up lol
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208 comments