[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily

[Lionel Peterson]

User interfaces were vastly superior BEFORE UI design became a career, and
only became worse once we unleashed the unholy beast of design by committee on
the UI field.

Favorite UI oversight - I worked with a team concerting a mammoth telco switch
management package from mainframe code to sun workstations and Windows. As was
typical, the workstation code created a lock file once started, and would
delete it upon clean exit. If the file existed at startup, an alert was posted
and the user was instructed to delete a specific file at a specific location
before proceeding.

I challenged the programmer, asked him why it did that, he said to prevent the
user from running multiple instances. I said no, why that pop-up, when said he
gave the user the exact command and path to execute (cut and paste). I just
looked at him and said, why not put a button there to execute the rm command
you know you need to run? He just looked at me and said, I never thought of
it.

He was a very smart programmer, he was the proverbial 'what if he gets hit by
a bus' programmer on a piece of software that was used by every US telco (baby
bells ++) to manage every switch in their network, but he thought such a
response was appropriate for 'sophisticated' end users.

Ken

> On Oct 23, 2019, at 19:10, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net> wrote:
>
> Then why do we produce so many utterly fucking ATROCIOUS interfaces?