Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back
- Reference: 1652441106
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/13/something_for_the_weekend/
- Source link:
With that cheery note, our new project director sweeps out of the 10:00 stand-up meeting and away to… someplace or another, I don't know, wherever it is that project directors go. Project managers can be found everywhere, usually nearby a waste basket overflowing with disposable coffee cups, but project directors ? Who can say?
These project directors are a mystery. It's not a job title I'd come across before. They just swan in from time to time, managerial but polite and rather vague, then drift out again with a farewell motto such as "Do your best!" or " [1]You've all done very well! " like Young Mr Grace.
[2]
To be honest, I can't even remember the current guy's name. I'd been referring to the previous one as "Joe," as in "Cotton-Eyed Joe" (as in [3]"Where did you come from? Where did you go?" ), and I may as well continue until the next Joe replaces him. The rate that we go through these project directors, it feels like we're just prisoners in The Village and every week they announce a new Number Two. His office is probably in a big house at the top of a hill.
[4]
[5]
"Do your best!" indeed. This latest project director must have done his MBA in Japan where, according to popular culture, everyone tells each other to ganbatte as a kind of passive-aggressive implication that you've spent all your life goofing off until that moment.
As soon the new Number Two is out the room, our grizzled software testing chief hands out the morning's testing scripts and grunts: "Do your worst."
[6]
Software testing isn't really my bag but I had a gap in my fantastically busy schedule – about eight weeks – and was persuaded by an ex-colleague to join the testing team as they struggled to meet the looming Alpha deadline. It was only when I turned up on day one that what he meant by "looming" was that the deadline was still looming at them from the past as they'd missed it twice already.
UI design has come a long way since the last time I was contracted to help with user acceptability testing on a bespoke corporate media management system. For a start, we get to see diagrams of the user path so we no longer have to guess what's supposed to happen next before ticking the FAIL box.
Also, our conversations with the developers are very different now to those 10 years ago. Developers have to make things work and this used to take up all their time; the quality of user-facing messages tended to take a back seat. So back then, we'd run back and forth with printed screenshots of their bizarre alert messages and dialog instructions, asking pertinent questions such as "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?" or "Have you heard of full stops?" or "Are you on meth?"
[7]
These days, however, we hardly get to speak to the developers at all as they spend days at a time locked into deep meetings with UI designers to discuss whether YES should go on the left and NO on the right, or vice-versa.
The most fun we've had on this project was when someone renamed a few folders without asking and every single graphic and icon throughout the system vanished. OK, that's not particularly funny, but it was the next day when the culprit tried to cover his tracks by renaming them back again but got some of them the wrong way around. Every error message was stamped with a smiley emoticon, like it was taking the piss; every "Task completed successfully" message was accompanied by a skull and crossbones.
Well, it made me laugh. It's a dull job, OK?
Dialog messages seem a lot more graphicky and a lot less texty than a decade ago, and it's probably for the best. I still remember one message on a system I was UAT-ing that read as follows:
The link is no longer linked. To update your links, open the Links palette and select the unlinked link that you wish to relink to a new link.
The dude who'd written this marvel simply could not understand what I didn't like about it until I suggested he read it out aloud to the rest of the team, replacing each mention of "link" with "shwing!"
Updating the text in dialog messages in that kind of corporate system is easy: you just edit the text in a script file, refresh and it's done. I am told that this was not always the case. In the 1980s, an old school friend on whose floor I slept in my first two weeks in London was already working in tech in the City and told me a story of seemingly innocuous woe concerning a casually phrased error message.
One of her colleagues had coded the message – only ever to be seen with a crash resulting from an extremely unlikely sequence of unfortunate events – to read: "Whoa! Heavy shit!"
Sure enough, it did and the calls started coming in and they weren't friendly. The customer obviously wanted not only for the problem to be fixed, but also for the error message to be changed. This apparently required recompiling and reinstalling on-site, which is a bit more expensive than editing a script file and tapping Save.
[8]Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference
[9]Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?
[10]Robots are creepy. Why trust AIs that are even creepier?
[11]When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue
Not that it's a panacea, mind. There was one particularly wordy and annoying confirmation message on a system I was user-testing that read:
This will effect all the files in the current location. Do you wish to continue?
I popped round to the devs' room and asked them to change "effect" to "affect." Tap-tippity-tap, all done. Hurrah.
The following week they'd updated something unrelated and gave us a new x.x.x.1 release to test. Only by chance did I stumble upon that confirmation message. The spelling had reverted from "affect" to "effect." I took it round and asked for it to be corrected; tappity-tappity, fixed again. Thanks, bye.
It happened the following week as well. And indeed, with every minor release, it seemed the current dialog scripts would be routinely wiped and reverted to those written a year earlier, evidently by an illiterate 14-year-old on work experience. After requesting the word to be corrected on 11 occasions, I sneaked into the development team room early one morning before they got in and used the biggest dry marker I could find to write on their whiteboard in gigantic letters:
AFFECT = VERB
EFFECT = NOUN
Of course, I had to hang around all day and all evening so I could sneak back in at night when they'd gone home so I could amend it as follows:
AFFECT = VERB
EFFECT = NOUN (YES it CAN be a VERB but ONLY if you are LORD FUCKING GRANTHAM)
A few years after I left that project, I went back to see some mates still working there. For old times' sake, I leaned over a shoulder and clicked a few buttons. Sure enough, that message had reverted yet again to "effect." Since then, I refer to the place as Downton Abbey.
So much has changed since then, that's for certain. Right, back to work. A click here and tap here… oh no, that can't be right. Better cancel it. A confirmation message appears on my screen:
"Would you like to cancel?"
Below it are two buttons:
OK
…and…
CANCEL
Oh well, I can see at least someone has done their worst – literally. Where's that extra-large dry marker?
[12]Youtube Video
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He has seen plenty of funny error message screenshots shared on the internet. He has also read the [13]WikiHow page on "How to make a fake error message in Windows." More at [14]Autosave is for Wimps and [15]@alidabbs .
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[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/06/switch_off_the_mic/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/something_for_the_weekend/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/something_for_the_weekend/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/16/something_for_the_weekend/
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Re: They announce a new Number Two
Does the old one leave in a rocket capsule?
Re: They announce a new Number Two
There's a point in the Slough House books where the boss names the IT guy as his 'Number two'. It's some time before the colloquiaism is explained to the devastated recipient.
Oh. My. God.
Young Mr Grace ?
Number Two ?
What is this cornucopia of references that people under 30 have no chance of understanding ?
Not to mention the rest of the article.
A resounding thumbs up for a brilliant end of the week.
Re: Oh. My. God.
Don't forget the original MS-DOS classic: "Keyboard not found. Press f1 to continue."
Re: Oh. My. God.
This is as good as the routine to send a message to the printer that the printer is offline.
Re: Oh. My. God.
I can understand that one, at least. The computer is absolutely unable to do anything about a hardware error, so it tells you about it. Then waits for input indicating that the error has been fixed. Admittedly, it could have been made more coherent by phrasing it "Keyboard not found. Fix it, then press f1 to continue".
On a complete tangent, this was the first error I ever diagnosed and fixed. I was 8 or so years old, and my dad started discreetly unplugging the keyboard from the computer in an attempt to stop me and my brother from playing Doom on his computer after school before he got home. It worked... the first time. Then it kind of backfired, because I usually remembered to unplug the keyboard again before he got home :D
Re: Oh. My. God.
That was the PC BIOS, not the OS
Re: Oh. My. God.
Absolutely, I haven't seen the word "schwing" written down anyway since that 90's throwback film night I attended about a decade ago.
Seeing it now means I can't stop giggling
Re: Oh. My. God.
Yup - Dabbsy is Austin Powers, and I claim my £5.
Groovy baby, yeah man.
Re: Oh. My. God.
Then you will want to [1]watch this .
[1] https://youtu.be/szkgylvDYA4
Re: Oh. My. God.
Indeed, when I read the dialogue back in my head with shwing in place, I read it in Garths voice.
Nice work my friend!
Party on!
Re: Oh. My. God.
It's a new Dabbs column!
[1]We are not worthy! We are not worthy!
[1] https://youtu.be/BolCC10F2t8?t=147
Golden Path Specifications
This all comes down to the fact that specifications only ever specify what software should do when it succeeds (the "golden path"), and never, ever, lay out the requirements on how to handle error conditions, exceptions, and so forth. There might be a whole team of UI designers arguing about whether the main screen font should be 9.5 or 10pt and exactly what shade of corporate blue it should be, but they never spare a second's thought to specifying the wording of error messages.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that most developers aren't English Language graduates, or technical authors, but they are being asked to write simple, concise, yet useful and meaningful messages, and to spend time doing so which has not been budgeted for. Because it hasn't been put on the spec.
If they have been taught well, a good developer knows that a useful UI message should contain three things: what happened, what this means, and what the user can do about it. A canny developer also knows that the same message should be written to a log file, because the user will ignore it. A developer who has had proper paranoia drilled into them will also add a stack trace to that log file (but not the message box, no need to scare the user with terms like "Illegal Operation"!)
The solution to this is to employ BAs who can both liaise with users and also understand the software inside and out, so that the mythical complete specification gets written in the first place. Of course, such beings are far too busy off fighting supervillains to do a day-job that pays a BA's salary.
Re: Golden Path Specifications
Not BAs, BScs, in psychology.
Re: Golden Path Specifications
what happened, what this means, and what the user can do about it
Frequently, the "what happened" will actually mean nothing to the end user, will not be related to what the user has done and be beyond the user's means to correct.
A certain online banking system will, in these circumstances, give the user an error code and a phone number to call to report it. If you phone the number, they don't ask for the error code and don't want it if you offer it. And, of course, if you want someone to assist you with the failed transaction, they can't do it unless you're registered for telephone banking - in which case they still have to pass you on to another team. It's not just the developers producing the right message, there has to be a support chain to make use of it.
And, as we all know, the only real thought that goes into user support is how to reduce its cost.
Re: Golden Path Specifications
Often, from the user's perspective, the "what happened" part doesn't need to be more than "something went wrong".
For example, a bad error message might be:
ERROR 1234 occurred - TRANSACTION FAILED CATASTROPHICALLY.
Line 43 COMMIT TRANSACTION Stack Trace: ...
Retry/Abort/Cancel?
A better message might be:
A problem occurred when saving the record.
No changes were saved.
Please try saving again.
If this problem persists, please contact support by clicking here.
(with the "here" part being a link that will post a full error log to a support portal, or provide details of a support helpdesk / number, how to send an appropriate error log, etc.)
Standup
I've just started a new contract where they don't call them standups, they call them drumbeats. It was bad enough when "town halls" started to be a thing.
I think all this naming malarkey might be starting to effect my mental health. ;-)
Re: Standup
Colleagues of mine keep getting called into Scrums (which thankfully so far I've avoided).
I keep asking which one of them is the Hooker, but for some reason they tend to get offended by that?
Re: Standup
Next time, ask who's going to put the ball in.
Re: Standup
Or just ask if they've got funny shaped balls?
Re: Standup
And who's going to get it out...
Mine's the one... well, it's a bit obvious...
Re: Standup
It would surprise me not one jot to hear a "scrum-master" use an analogy of taking the ball and running with it.
There are error messages and there are error messages:
https://multicians.org/hodie-natus-est.html
Well yes, but that was a primitive text-only 1970s system.
These days you could have that error message sung to you in polyphonic choral 5.1 audio, with an accompanying Moment Of Divine Intervention rendered on the screen.
The error would be just as impenetrable but would look amazing .
Progress.
[1]May the developer who never messed an UI throw the first stone
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9FzVhw8_bY
Effect/affect
Affect can also be a noun. Ask any psychologist.
"Whoa! Heavy shit!"
Was that linked back to Number 2 ?
Effect as a verb
Absolutely effect can be a verb, as in "to effect a change", ie, put a change into effect
Re: Effect as a verb
As I think I mentioned in my column. But only a posho or someone showing off on LinkedIn would use "effect" as a verb these days, and there is no real-world use for it in a UI Just imagine a word processor with a Search/Replace dialog that instead of having a REPLACE button had one that read EFFECT THE REPLACEMENT. Like I said, Lord effing Grantham.
Re: Effect as a verb
Ah, I took that as an accent thing, like sex being what coal comes in
Re: Effect as a verb
Ears, ears. (Prince Charles accent)
Re: Effect as a verb
In New Zealand it is the number after five.
Re: Effect as a verb
You've reminded me of a story I heard years and years ago. My memory wants to say it was originally related by Alan Bennett, the playwright, but I could be mistaken.
Anyway, very young AB, or whoever, was due to perform in the school end-of-term play. His mother (working class) spoke to the teacher (posh) and got told in cut-glass tones what costume was needed for the child. Ma worked hard all week stitching and stuffing and sewing and cutting, and made the - unusual - costume for her son. It was a green Brassica sphere, with leaves and a stalk.
Gets to school on the day of the play, son waddling awkwardly, as wide as he is tall, and the teacher sees the costume.
"No, Mrs Bennett! I said a sprite !"
Re: Effect as a verb
> For old times' sake, I leaned over a shoulder and clicked a few buttons. Sure enough, that message had reverted yet again to "effect."
So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to effect a permanent change.
Re: Effect as a verb
"So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to effect a permanent change."
--> "So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to change it.".
Re: Effect as a verb
I see what you did there, but to wear my pedant's hat, effecting a change and changing something are semantically different. Of course, most people using the former probably actually mean the latter, but there is a different implication of agency between the two, on the one hand, being the agency that makes something happen, but not necessarily doing it yourself, and on the other, being the one that actually does the thing.
For example, my boss's boss's boss effects lots of software changes, but, thankfully, doesn't change any code himself.
Sod's law
The sweary error message that can never happen, yeah, that happens almost immediately when the user gets the software.
Re: Sod's law
I don's know who Sod is but he/she/it was an optimist.
Re: Sod's law
Not sweary, but I once used an error message "The trousers of Uncle Vanya are particularly gloomy. Call me."
It didn't pop up very often, but I always got called when it did.
[ae].*tive
To be affectionately effective you need to affect the effect effectively.
Re: [ae].*tive
...and also if you need to be abortive with your expletive.
Re: [ae].*tive
affirmative
Error messages have sometimes improved a bit
It used to be "FILE NOT FOUND" (or for the really old: 2). Unless told to do otherwise Python3 actually tells you which file was not found. Perhaps in a few more decades software will also tell you where the file was not found so you can put it in the right place. (Or possibly RTFantasticM until you find how to tell the software to look in the directory where the file actually is.)
Re: Error messages have sometimes improved a bit
Just say PEBKAC . It is the reason for all our suffering.
Heh, confirmation dialogs. At $newJob they gave me a Windows laptop that's so locked down I can't install the tools I need to develop with it. So I'm using my personal Linux machine, but thanks to Teams on Linux[1] not having video or screen sharing I still have to use the laptop for meetings.
So yesterday I'm on a call, and a dialog box pops up in the lower right of the screen. Says I need to reboot for "critical updates", and the only way to close the dialog box is to click the sole "OK" button. Cue a spontaneous reboot in the middle of my call.
This and other Windows usability issues makes me wonder how people put up with this crap. Perhaps if you've only eaten sh*t sandwiches your whole life you think they taste nice and can't imagine anything better?
[1] Apparently it did at some point and then MS removed the functionality in an update!?!
+++ REINSTALL UNIVERSE +++ REDO FROM START +++
I really would like to see an error message like that when testing code
+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR +++
would also be nice
Re: +++ REINSTALL UNIVERSE +++ REDO FROM START +++
...or at the other extreme,
"Everything's reet copacetic."
Re: +++ REINSTALL UNIVERSE +++ REDO FROM START +++
But who is REDO and where is START?
Ethnicity
A customer told me that it was obvious that I was English - I’d used the word "Please" in too many of my dialogue boxes…
They announce a new Number Two
Hopefully not with the phrase: Whoa! Heavy shit! .