One of the hardest things in computer science: saving a single setting on a user's profile. As seen here:
- Twitter's "see latest Tweets" that always reverts to Twitters random ... ahem ... algorithmic timeline.
- Youtube's autoplay that always reverts to On.
The reason? Saving the settings that people want ever so slightly reduces engagement metrics. And businesses don't like when those metrics go down.
New no-touchbar Macbooks have a dedicated 🌐 key for switching keyboard layouts. Nice! Apple finally acknowledged people might use more than one language!
What’s that? Oh, it shows a HUGE second-and-a-half long popup right in the center of your screen? Nevermind then.
Like, it literally takes 1.5 seconds to disappear. LITERALLY. And it’s very huge.
Why, Apple, WHY? How often do you think people switch layouts? All the time! Sometimes multiple times in a single sentence!!! And no, we don’t want to take a pause in the middle of our writing to enjoy your very slick-looking popup for the freaking 1.5 seconds.
This is unacceptable.
Searching for a PDF
After my previous experience with Steam [1] I accidentally closed the app. I opened it again... And now it tells me to stream all games, even those compatible with my system.
Do not assume you know better than your user.
Yes, Steam. "Install" means "Start remote play".
You could at least tell me *why* you don't want to install some games and insist on running them remotely.
This is NewRelic, a website to monitor your infrastructure: your servers, your clusters, your message queues, your everything.
By default the show you graphs and charts and issues for some date range. Usually from the past 30 minutes.
And yet. Instead of immediately showing "30 minutes" they show "Default".
They already know what the default is. The person looking at all this may not know or remember what the default is. Their old UI would show the actual date range.
And yet, some product manager looked at it and said: nope we're being too useful, we need to hide information from people.
And don't get me started on the 12-hour clock with AM/PM that can't be changed to 24 hours "because there's not enough demand to do this".
All these unnecessary things require *more* engineering effort to design and code than *not* doing them.
Do not intercept native browser scroll. Never. Nobody can get it right. No, not even you. Not even Apple.
An irony: this message appeared when I tried to turn off the computer
Subsystem collecting debug data: I have nothing.
Subsystem reporting errors: let’s report it anyway!
Talk. To. Each. Other. Before. Bothering. User.
Thanks Martin Macko for the picture
- Not everything needs an icon
- Icons should be different enough to work