Do not have critical dialogue boxes that need a single, consistent key press to cancel. We knew that 35 years or so back!

The small software house I worked for required a random character response to be used for anything vaguely important, and an "Are you sure?" verification with another random character for anything that could do permanent damage.

Lets be fair. We are going back to Windows 98 which is only just out of the stone age of GUI design. In addition the software may well have been written on one of the early Visual XXX by MS which was really very limited. He was working with the tools that he had available then, not the tools that we have available now. You can't really blame him for that.

This is "On Call". It's all about who you can blame.

It's quite unfair to refer to users as 'tools'.

An 'undo' is better than an 'are you sure?'

[1]https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

[1] https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

undo the drive being full?

: )

Yeah I’m e watched someone cancel a dialogue box because it annoyed them. In one case this was an important one about whether the user wished to run a particular report. This automatically popped up after changes were made to the database. It showed if your changes were correct in an easy to read way. If you didn’t do it you wouldn’t know what if anything was wrong.

After running, the dialogue appeared again asking if you wanted to run it again. In the same morning I saw a full hard drive because the same report was being run over and over. Someone had placed the edge of a file where it hit the enter key. As soon as the report was running it asked about running again and the enter key signalled yes.

Far too common. So common, in fact, that I'm not sure we can just blame users and forget about it. UX design paradigms need to acknowledge and address this problem.

At some point, I switched my industrial automation software from showing system message boxes, to showing custom-made message boxes that look substantially different from system message boxes. It's not a perfect solution, but the number of support calls decreased noticeably.

I used to insist on a red background for any non-normal information the user should actually read, and the random letters for input.

However, the coloured pencils department said that it did not fit their company template. Luckily I was already leaving when the head of IT and MD started backing the UX team.

My coding background is in scientific analysis software; keeping a log of every action taken is vital to the users.

Early on in my coding, I began making sure this log was visible on the screen (as well as being saved). Any data file being created would get a log entry, along with any errors or warnings.

A listbox object, together with a simple function to timestamp messages, is the minimum you need

Our software would return a code equivalent to "disk full".

Programmers would check for errors they were expecting, and ignore the others ( including disk full)

We fixed this by setting an internal flag when we detected this, and every half hour put out a message on the system log (managed by automation) saying disk full. (Without this half hour, the operators could have had 1000 messages a second).

When customers reported this message to our corporate help desk asking what the operators should do. The answer was "go and talk to the programmers".

The programmers were education on the use of an "else" statement.

Suddenly lots of erratic problems disappeared.

One time, a user phoned up to say that Windows was behaving wierdly, and dialogs would flash up then disappear. Being rather confused by this, I went to have a look. Sure enough, every dialog that appeared just flashed on screen briefly.

After a few minutes of looking for a cause on Windows (slightly hampered by the fact that every time I opened a dialog, it closed, I happened to glance at the keyboard. There was a book resting on the edge of the keyboard, just lightly pressing the Escape key..

A colleague had similar issues, which we eventually tracked down to the old, replaced keyboard still plugged in and shoved down the side of the tower

Back in the days of terminals with limited input buffers it was a lot easier.

User phones, "My computer* is beeping constantly!"

Response, "Take the file off the edge of the keyboard!"

User, "How did you know that?"

Support, "Magic**!"

*yes, they were terminals to us but computers to the users.

**Never reveal your secrets!

I've had literally this:

User phones up.

> "Hi, it's ___ from ___"

< "Hi ___, it sounds like you've got something resting on your keyboard"

> "What? Oh yeah! But I wanted to ask you about ..."

< "It'll work now"

Yes, the distinctive beeping gave it away.

.... for an internal application that had a splash screen with the usual "If you are not authorised...." type statement on it. The Escape key was used to exit this form, and it was even known as the 'escape screen'.

Managlement decided that they wanted to be able to 'post' system messages to this form to inform users of upcoming (or recent) changes or events.

I suggested changing colours, random keys to exit the form, and even a 'thought for the day' to make users stop and look at the form. But manglement knew better, and the posted messages were displayed below the standard message .... in standard colours .... with the standard escape to exit.

The number of user enquiries about 'What has changed?' did not drop at all.

All I ever gained from it was the extra w**k of having to maintain the posted messages.

Back in the days of character terminals we used MOTD to broadcast a message at logon reminding users to log off. This ended with This includes you $NameOfMostRecentOffenderWe'dHadToLogOut It was remarkably effective. Eventually we had to remove that bit because the last name had been there so long.

How did you persuade the BBC to broadcast the offending usernames on Match of the Day?

It's easy. Some of us knew where the bodies were buried.

"This new PC won't save my files to disk."

"What's the error message?"

"Look sonny, I always save my files to Disk. Drive 'A'. I know what I am doing. The PC is faulty."

"OK, but what is the error message."

"Well, it says 'No disk' but there is. I've run diagnostics."

"Drive A or Drive B?"

".......I've fixed it now."

Your networks sucks! Were the words out of the visitors mouth... back in the days of Win98 I couldn't imagine what they meant? The visitor sat at a PC, proceeded to insert his floppy with the needed work, and it mounted, we could open the folder he needed, but when he clicked on the file, we got that cool flashlight searching animation...? Upon closer inspection, all of the icons in the folder were shortcuts to the docs on his home PC!! LOL. He couldn't fathom why it would open the files on his home computer, and not on ours... Luckily he had other folders on the floppy with documents, I was able to show him the difference between a document icon and a SHORTCUT icon. He was a visitor to that company for the next 20 years, and never mentioned the network again!

Our accountant complained to me that her PC headset wasn't working properly so I went down to investigate.

as soon as she plugged the headset in (analogue 3.5mm jack plug), a dialog popped up which will be familiar to many dell users asking whether the device plugged in was headphones, microphone or headset. She immediately pressed escape. "Did you read that?" I asked "No" she replied, "Stupid annoying message comes up every time I plug it in"

I wonder if the solution to this would be to check if the problem is fixed, redisplay the dialog if it isn't, check once more, if still not fixed display a dialog with a fixed time of, say 15 seconds, check again and if not close down the machine, which the fixed time dialog will have warned about.

drive full - i overestimated the user . classic mistake.

I thought it was going to be that the csv data and/or layout had changed format, something users thrust upon me regularly. Today was day one of a new methodology "name a csv file with date in *this* format"

No format specified - they can use whatever format they want as long as its consistent - a big ask and unlikely to work long term , i agree

Today was day 1:

file arrives no date at all.