When a real user uses the app

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."

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:

🔥
😬

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you ever think "an actual human couldn't possibly click that fast", you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.

well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can

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.

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...

I once deleted system32.....That's when I began calling the shots.

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.

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.

The engineer in the joke should have ordered some Bobby Tables for dessert.

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

I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.

QA today seems to just be releasing software in whatever state and maybe fixing it later.

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.)

I'm so glad you can automate QA jobs

If they crashed the computer irrecoverably did they have to throw away the computer after?

this joke but 3d animated

Looks like someone asked ChatGPT, not their friend lol

“Human beings then do…”