Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized that it's mostly that people are hitting the same bugs and don't notice.
I suspect I know why they do not notice. See below.
>it works well, etc., but when I open up the thing and try it, it's in a state where the thing only works if you do quite a few non-intuitive workarounds.
I suspect most people are so inept at navigating UI because even a good UI is not intuitive to them. A bad UI is equally not intuitive. They do not know it is a bug because everything is a bug to them.
I can use a novel UI and figure out where to find what I need to do very quickly. In my experience with lay people, they can use the software for a decade longer than me and still not understand some of the capabilities and navigate to utilize them as I can within a few minutes or small amount of research.
Shoutout to https://grumpy.website/. Love it.
by ghastmaster - I also think it's due to normalization of deviance, people are just used to it..
- You can't build a model, because everything will be changed with the next update, so, even if not consciously, people won't do it, why bother learning something that's not going to be of any use next time you use the application.
- because you basically don't know how anything works, it's a coin toss whether it's actually not working, or you're just "using it wrong".
- most things won't do the thing you expect of them consistently, so you don't expect anything of them.
Last night, I uploaaded some documents to my insurance company => modal:
- Title: "Files successfully uploaded"
- Text: "An unknown error occurred"
- Button: "Ok"
Thank you.
by dusted - I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.
After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.
I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.
I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.
Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.
- I'm with danluu on this, at least as far as the headline, and not actual details.
I run into 10 to 20 software bugs a day (feels like more). If it wasn't for the all the private data I'd leak I sometimes wish I could just put my phone and computer on screen capture for a week, with input data (keyboard/mouse/touchpad/screen) and then come back and post the 100 bugs I hit that week.
I've run into the MacOS one mentioned, getting a black screen on opening the lid. I've also run into iOS Camera app failing to open the camera. I've run into the iOS keyboard only using 80% of the width of the phone (all the keys smaller). No idea how to fix that. Closing the keyboard and re-opening does not. And killing the app, whatever app, is out because I'm in the middle of filling out a form and don't want to have to start over. I've had the phone's screen freeze quite often recently, no response to any finger presses. Locking and unlocking the phone recovers. This one is new (started happening 1-2 weeks ago)
Common/not-common. Any app that uses the phone camera to scan things (checks/ids) almost always fails in one way or another. Doesn't recognize the thing or times out like the only way they tested was in perfect conditions in their office and never tried with real users.
by socalgal2 - Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.by meling
- Responding to something from the linked Patreon post:
> Blackboard (as well as Epic and SharePoint) are classic examples of software where the user and the purchaser are different and the purchaser basically doesn’t care about the user, so you don’t expect the software to be good and it would be a bit of a surprised if the software didn’t deliver a bad user experience. But it was even more surprising to me that someone working on some of the most reviled software out there could think that the software was widely loved.
I worked briefly at Epic and the attitude there seemed to be more like "yes we know people hate Epic but they're wrong". :P People there didn't think Epic was widely liked!
(The explanations given were basically, 1. people hate Epic because their IT department configured it wrong, if they configured it in a more suitable manner they wouldn't have these problems, and, 2. it's not Epic per se that's the problem it's all EMR software, if you think Epic is bad you should see the competition, they're even worse. I'm not sure that second one is really such a good excuse, but, that was what I remember hearing.)
by Sniffnoy - I had to give up when the first example of a "bug" that the author could see, which others are blind to, was search results.
"In some cases, people sent me their actual search results. In every such case, the search results did not contain a good result that I could see"
Software that does not meet expectations, especially in a field like search, which is basically a long running war between SEO and search engines, is not a 'bug'. That's like saying there is 'bug blindness' in the publishing industry because when I pick up a random book, it sucks, even though others think it's fine. Sure, maybe something is wrong, could even be improved, but lets save the word 'bug' for something more specific.
by encomiast - I think there are two opposite causes here: either an overly-aligned or completely unaligned mental model.
For developers, bug-blindness tends to be because their mental model is so close to the system's model that both have the same blind spots, and the developer can't effectively think outside the system (the classic "QA walks into a bar, orders 0 beers, orders -1 beers, orders 0.999 beers" vs "customer walks into a bar, asks where the bathroom is, bar immediately bursts into flames").
On the other hand, a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
You can see this in the article: "Google Docs added some kind of delay such that the typing you do into the title box right after you open the doc gets overwritten". That's a developer forming a model of the system. The lay alternative is to simply learn that sometimes when you type in a box, the text appears. Other times, it doesn't. If it doesn't, you try again.
You don't need to understand the system if you abandon the assumption that the system was designed to be understood. And, in practice, the widespread plagues of shitty engineering, anti-features, and lack of respect for the user often combine to make that model the more information-theoretically optimal one.
In that sense, the very thing that makes us miserable is our perverse need to treat Google Docs as an engineered product rather than a cross between a djinn and a symbiotic fungus.
by sgentle