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If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
It doesn’t matter if a human can’t, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it
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
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.
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.
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
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.
“Gently slides back” 😂
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
It just means that they called their browser “the internet” right? Or am I missing something here?
It was an actual icon:
(found the image here https://mastodon.social/@benjedwards/11031604817437112)
I don’t remember what it did though. I think it wasn’t the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasn’t for dial up either, but my memory’s shit so I personally wouldn’t trust me on that
Edit: had to look this up, it was IE. I think I didn’t remember it because I never really used IE since I started off with NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape
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.
“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.
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”
Some cultures don’t use last names.
