Bram Cohen ([info]bramcohen) wrote,
@ 2005-09-17 21:57:00
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Configuration Proximity
One thing which has irritated me for a long time about configuration of software programs is that the configuration UI is always nowhere near the thing it's configuring. Users waste a huge amount of time trying to figure out where the configuration UI is, and what in it corresponds to what they want to configure. If there were simply a 'configure this' button which was always visible and always took you to the right configuration option, everything would be much better.

Speaking of bad UI, it irritates me no end that smoke detectors signal low battery via a chirping. It's a superquick high-pitched noise, seemingly designed to provide as little audio location information as possible while maximizing the likelihood that it will wake you up repeatedly in the night every night from the time the batteries get low until the time they become completely dead because you couldn't find the thing. Smoke detectors have built-in lights, why can't they start flashing the light when the batteries get low? That would add no extra battery drain, and make it easy to find the smoke detector with low batteries.

To that end, why can't Motorola cell phones be programmed to either not chirp when their batteries are low, or at least not do it between 10pm and 10am? Why are these devices so important that they need to wake me up to attend to them at 3am? As a general rule, if end users want to smash something repeatedly with a sledgehammer, that's a sign of bad UI.

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[info]afree87
2005-09-18 05:23 am UTC (link)
A light can be ignored, but a chirp won't. Maybe it should have a built-in timer so it only chirps during business hours.

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[info]bramcohen
2005-09-18 05:46 am UTC (link)
Attempting to force the user to deal with it is useless if either the user can't find it or they throw it out a window when they do, both of which have been problems for some of my smoke detectors.

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[info]ctudball
2005-09-18 11:45 am UTC (link)
I find that I disable the smoke alarm in order to stop the beeping, and then compeletely forget about buying a new battery (I've had smoke detecotrs sit in a non-functional state for months for this reason). A flashing light would not only tell me which smoke detector requires my attention, but would also server as a non-intrusive reminder. I may not replace the battery in that same day, but eventually it would bug me just enough that I'd get around to it.

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[info]taleriaknt
2005-09-18 08:58 pm UTC (link)
Perhaps the solution to this would be to have it chirp more frequently. Maybe even more often as the batteries come closer to their death.

As far as general UI goes, I suspect that a large part of the problem is that many people (designing the things) don't know what other people want, and having made the thing themselves, they're familiar with it anyway, so they never need to worry about it. I find that people who don't need to actually use the thing tend to have the best insights into the interface.

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[info]net_worker
2005-10-18 06:49 pm UTC (link)
Solution: pull the battery out - hammer it evenly to activate stuck chemicals - but try to keep the original sizes to fit back in.
My worked years after that - enough time to get a replacement.

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[info]he_who_journals
2005-09-18 06:27 am UTC (link)
I think that generally UI should be interpreted as a static, lifeless shell between the user and the program. Oh, sure, it can move and glow and whatever else you want, but it should have perfectly well defined (that is, mathematically useful) relations that it enforces between the two layers. Contextual configuration would be trivial to offer.

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congig/ui habits
[info]maelorin
2005-09-18 07:04 am UTC (link)
the ui and config issues are kinda related.

things get grouped by function in most computer uis ... it has become almost traditional to lump configuration 'features' together.

there is not particular reason why config functions couldn't be associated with the thing they're configuring - nor indeed for there to be a separate function that allows you to manage configuration globally under one menu/interface/window/whatever.

just habit.

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[info]minorninth
2005-09-18 08:23 am UTC (link)
Mac OS X occasionally gets the configuration thing right. My hunch is that if they could figure out how, Apple's developers would make a lot more things work this way. Two examples:

1. An amazing number of things can be rearranged by command-dragging: tools in toolbars (e.g. in the Finder, Safari), special menus (the ones on the right side of your menu bar), columns (in Mail.app).

2. Right-clicking on Dock icons allows you to set preferences for that item. Right-clicking in the Dock dividing line lets you set global Dock preferences (not perfect and not "discoverable", but still better than forcing you to go an entirely separate place to find the prefs).

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[info]masterkill
2005-09-18 11:31 am UTC (link)
Being able to drag things around is a definite advance, but it leads to a situation where removing something is much more difficult than adding it. For example, if you decide you don't want the WiFi signal strength indicator in the menu bar you can cmd-drag it off, but if you want to put it back again there's no obvious way to do it.

In this particular case the problem (the asymmetry of create/delete) could be somewhat alleviated if you got some sort of configuration box if you, say, control clicked on the menu bar, but it's not always possible. For example, IE will pop up a warning when you visit a page with a combination of secure and insecure content. The warning contains a "never warn me about this again" checkbox that you can check, but once checked, how do you get the warning back? There's certainly no "obvious" place to put it. (I don't know if it actually is possible to get these warnings back.)

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[info]jrronimo
2005-09-18 01:30 pm UTC (link)
I program my motorola to not chirp all the time: "Power off". :)

I know, I know, this is not a real solution. It would be much better if there could be set a Home/Personal/Quiet Time range from 10pm to 10am in your case. But getting a new feature in a phone from Motorola? Preposterous.

You'll have more fun modifying the phone's hex yourself.

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[info]hoyhoy
2005-09-18 03:26 pm UTC (link)
Speaking of UI's, does it annoy anyone that iTunes doesn't allow the normal Windows Explorer shortcut keys? Say, if I highlight a file, then reorder the tunes, the selection is moved to the top of the sorted list instead of being retained. Also, <Home>, <End>, <Shift>+<Home>, <Shift>+<End> don't work as they normally do in Explorer.

The phone low battery indicators are particularly annoying too. My Sony Ericsson does the same thing, usually at like 3 A.M. during the work week. Sony phone make hoyhoy MAD, hoyhoy smash phone! GRRRRRRRR!

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[info]xixs
2005-09-18 03:51 pm UTC (link)
One thing I have noticed, which is in a way related to this, is the (natural) tendency for QA to be more concerned with the simplicity of testing something than if the thing is good or bad design.

For the cellphone only making a noise during acceptable hours, you can look at the code and go yup, that'll probably work but from the point of view of actual QA someone needs to sit and watch the thing and make sure that it really only happens at the required times. So you now need to not only get a battery to run down to test it but also to get a battery to run down at different times.

To give you an example I've personally encountered of bad interface/design pushed back at you essentially from QA. Take a gameboy advance multiplayer game. The user situation here is going to be two kids sitting next to each other with a cable connecting their two units. If by mistake they manage to pull this cable out. The suggested behaviour is not to allow them to continue if they plug it back in. In fact its considered preferable to force a soft reset before continuing.

You can see exactly this pulling cable out forces a reset behaviour in mariokart, the flagship multiplayer game. A game that supports 4 kids all attached to each other by cables, I can picture that going horribly wrong almost instantly.

I'm not actually QA bashing, the blame could also be attributed elsewhere. I'm just pointing out easy it is for sensible design wants to be perverted by the pressure of the production process.

You did ask why, after all :)

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Agreed
[info]mattbamberger
2005-09-19 08:47 pm UTC (link)
My smoke detectors are hard-wired (ie, they get AC power as well as having batteries), but they still exhibit the same annoying behavior of issuing a brief unfindable chirp every 15 minutes.

Speaking of which, some years ago, I had a tonic-clonic seizure out of the blue. Sleep deprivation is strongly associated with seizures, and it happens that at the time, I had a 5 month-old baby who wasn't sleeping well. It also happens that the night before the seizure, I was up for way too long trying to locate and silence a chirping smoke detector.

I'm not saying that bad UI broke my arm and prevented me from driving for 6 months, but...

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Configuration UI and chirping doodads
[info]pixelcort
2005-09-23 06:05 am UTC (link)
You are correct, having configuration options intertwined in the UI can help, however it does occasionally pose a problem when said options are rarely modified. If that's the case (they're rarely modified), then these configuration UI elements merely submit clutter to the UI areas that the user commonly uses.

For example, a Configure toolbar item in a toolbar, which would probably rarely if ever be used, sits there and clutters the UI.

As for chirping doodads, one of ours at my work just started and it's really starting to tick me off. I can't stand consistent beeping noises, either.

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cell phone low battery chirping...
[info]spoo_k_pryme
2005-09-26 02:55 pm UTC (link)
i colelct cell phones, and have found that any make and model i have collected chirps when the battery gets too low.

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