but that box should have a big label "Press to Start" (or similar) with an arrow pointing to the button.

We've all been there, that's why we bought the labeling machine!

Perhaps the label should read "DONT PRESS THIS BUTTON!"

ROTFLMAO. Yes, that is a guaranteed way to get the button pressed.

Had a similar issue with a button. Many, many, many years ago had a support call saying the monitor wasn't working.

Went through the usual routine, "Is it plugged into the mains? Is the monitor switched on?".

After a while I wandered over to the next building to have a look, turned the monitor on to see what, if anything happens and lo and behold, it was working fine.

"oh, you didn't tell me I had to switch the TV on as well"

Like when a certain council were procuring racks for their shiny new servers. Rack to go into their data hall. Along with the several dozen other racks.

When I turned up the racks were present. Networking cables were present. Power? You never told us we'd need power.

Back in the late 90s I had to go on site to a hospital north of London to do some work on storage array used in a new X-ray system. The on-site engineer told me of the fun they had building a new server room for this equipment. They put the racks in, then realised there was no power to connect anything to. Took all equipment out and fix. Repeat - no networking. Repeat - no aircon. Months later they finally got all the services they needed installed, and then the aircon leaked and soaked everything,

Ha,

I had sort of the same experience a couple of decades back. Hardware management had been outsourced to a IT consultancy. My dedicated contact dropped me an email letting me know our shiny new server had been received, configured and commissioned and was now available for use, heck they even provided me the IP address they had allocated for it.

I emailed back asking to check the IP because I wasn't getting a ping back from the machine, "Oh, no you won't. The machine hasn't been networked!" It's a server! In a server room! You've allocated an IP address but not connected it to the network ... in what way is this available for use???

Pressing the big shiny red nuclear button might be too big a hurdle for the current crop of world leaders to jump.

That is probably a good thing .......

So long as you do not put a big label next to the button saying "DO NOT EVER, AND I MEAN EVER, PRESS THIS BUTTON".

To paraphrase PTerry - The glue on the label wouldn't even have chance to dry before the mushrooms started sprouting!

B-But label clearly says to (mumble ... mumble) PRESS THIS BUTTON"!

The design is really bad when it is not obvious and intuitive for the user that a button must be pressed.

This is basic interaction design. But I digress, not many machines or programs are actually designed to be used. One could almost say, they are not fit for purpose. Tell tale of bad design is when the user needs to bend to the machine's way.

One silver lining, maybe... you get to spend the night at a hotel at somebody else's expense ;-)

If I have to look in the manual (absolute last resort of course) it's a really bad design!

One of Apricot's IBM compatibles had the power switch on the back. It was a grey plastic rectangle with a slightly stepped outer edge, just the right size and shape to look like the cover over a 9-pin serial port or similar. I made very sure when I installed the machine that the customer staff knew exactly where it was.

More intuitive was an HP tower with the power button at the top (right next to the floppy eject button - a molly-guard was deployed on our in-house machine). We had a phone call from a customer late one afternoon, bearing in mind this was the days of hard power switches.

Customer : "How do i turn the computer off?"

Us: "Errm, press the same button as you did this morning!"

Customer: "Yes, I know that, but I've forgotten where it is!"

It takes a special kind to forget, in 8 hours, where a power button is when it's on the front of a tower system in the most obvious place possible!

It takes a special kind to forget, in 8 hours, where a power button is when it's on the front of a tower system

The kind for which the word "extinction event" is made for.

Part of the problem is that terms like "obvious" and "intuitive" are based on experience. If you have experience driving one type of car, it's obvious and intuitive how to drive another, despite minor differences in the control layout.

If you've never driven a car before, god help you if you try to drive it without instruction.

If you've never driven a car before, god help you if you try to drive it without instruction.

Most people alive today have grown up in and around cars to some degree. I suspect the majority of people would figure it out after a few minutes.

On the other hand, try asking someone to saddle a horse these days and see how far they get. I wouldn't have a clue where to begin.

Although it's been a few years, I can saddle a horse but I admit that I could not find the mechanism to open the door on a 'modern' car. My experience over the years has taught me how to get into 'older' cars by all sorts of tricks but now it takes my five-year old grandson to show me how to get into and out of a machine which should be the epitome of 'intuitive'.

Anyway, it's a good excuse to be chauffeured ------->

You are getting yourself chauffeured to the pub by your five-year old grandson?

Please consider a re-think.

All true. Actually, different cultures result in different designs.

That said, there are universal truths in design. You design for a target group which has a certain amount of knowledge. That you use; just like a driver's license. For example, there are prerequisites before you can use lab equipment.

However, the lab equipment must support the human process. All too often it is the human who has to support the machine's process. And that part is a design universal, regardless of culture or experience; design must support the human process.

Normally, i could agree but as far as the article says, there was sufficient training for the users. the call on the airport is also described as having the question wether the button was pressed in it, so no excuse there.

I can relate that a new, shiny, horrifically technical blackbox is not something everyone would confidently touch as i have seen this tech allergic approach often enough but as the story is told, there really is no excuse for the prospective user left.

You dont even need to go high tech. I had the case of a landlord, completely helpless because a main circuit breaker was tripped. Inexperience was the issue here, he did not dare to press the lever above the tripping point, fearing the mechanical resistance might lead to a broken lever if he pressed too hard.

Dont mock him, he did everything right. Tried to assess and remedy the situation as good as he could and call for help before risking to do damage.

Inscription issues however, were not to blame.

If you have an enormous budget you can design something for a specific use, order tooling for manufacture and a year or two later have something ready that does the job without any help from the user. In the real world, delivery must be this month or the customer will go elsewhere. If you divide NRE costs by even a whole hundred customers they will put the phone down as soon as you mention the price. The only practical solution for a small market is to adapt what is mass produced, available and cheap. That will inevitably lead to compromises in usability - and even more so in the '80s when 3d printers did not grow on trees and a smart phone app was slightly less practical than a whole major Amazon data centre.

The label printer mentioned above is a good solution. An instruction card is pushing your luck and a whole 4 page user manual is going too far. On top of that, you have to deal with computer illiteracy. Here is an example from the '90s: the customer had bought an external hard disk and successfully plugged it in. He was calling and asking politely why his floppy disks where not loading and saving faster as a result. For '80s, you are looking for things more like "remove floppy disk 1 and insert disk 2". Missing out the first part of those instructions would lead to technical support calls - but the user could easily get to disk 4 before calling.

Even worse is the modern fad for printers to have a sole single unlabelled button. On/Off? Formfeed? Cancel? WTH does it do?

How about:

"An error has occurred. Press 'OK' to restart"

We had a high-profile customer making a transition from their own internal world-wide network to a more commercial T-carrier based system. The company I worked for supplied the necessary gear to interface between $TELCO and their own equipment. This wasn't pre-Internet, but it was before the general use of the Internet for routing internal traffic around the world, so all their WAN links were supplied by one $TELCO or another. Call it mid 1980s.

Our customer service got a phone call from the customer allowing as to how one of their offices in Sydney, Australia refused to see the rest of the world. Customer service called me (the primary TAC Engineer for the customer), and I eyeballed it. Digging into the network, I could see that a loopback switch in the Sydney office was thrown, it would need to be flipped back to connect their LAN to their WAN. I informed customer service, and figured that was the end of it. Until about two hours later when my Boss wandered in and asked what I knew about Sydney being down. I blinked three or four times to reboot (kernel hacking again, probably) and told him I had located the cause and informed our guys as to the fix, and then got on with putting out fires elsewhere.

He replied that apparently the dude in charge of the Sydney office didn't like the answer, had called his Boss, who called his Boss, who called the director of the Australian branch, who called the owner of our company, who was informed by our CS guys that I was responsible, and so now my Boss had been put in charge of fixing it. He wasn't happy. So using my TAC access, I showed him the "fault". He expressed disbelief. And called the owner down to my office. The owner (the engineer who founded the company, and a real tech, not just a suit) also expressed disbelief. I believe his actual words were "What the fuck are those useless fucks doing?" ...

ANYway, he called the director of the Australian branch (just a suit, apparently), who got all shouty and demanded an immediate fix, now, or we'd lose the entire contract if he had anything to say about it. Our owner tried to calm him down, but the dude wasn't having any of it ... so to make a long(er) story short(er), he promised to "put his best man on it" ... and I got sent to Sydney on the next flight. Out of San Francisco. First Class. At very short notice. To flip a switch. With invoice in hand, to be presented personally to the Director in Oz. I honestly thought he was going to take a swing at me when he read it ... it was a tick over $20,000 ... in mid-1980s dollars. Broken down in glorious detail. To flip a switch.

But wait ... it gets better! When I was at the airport heading home (having been in Australia for maybe 2 hours total), I got called to the proverbial White Courtesy Phone[0]. Seems a different branch of the very same company had a similar problem, this time in a satellite office outside Boca Raton, Florida. I called my Boss and asked something like "WTF‽‽‽". He tiredly allowed as to how he personally had checked, and indeed it was the exact same issue. Our owner had asked if I wouldn't mind doing the hono(u)rs ... a completely different Director had called and threatened him in a similar manner to the first. So instead of taking the long east-bound flight home six hours later, I had to take an immediate West-bound flight, changing planes in Jakarta and London, to Florida. Arriving somewhat cranky & disheveled in Boca, I was rather pleased with the similar result (one switch, and out), except I didn't feel physically threatened after the Director read the invoice. This one just went white and slumped in his chair. I excused myself.

Back to the airport, and home to California. Still First Class. Four+ days on the road, literally once around the world, no hotel rooms, not a single proper meal, showering in airports, just to flip two switches. Such was the life of a field engineer. Tell that to kids these days ...

[0] This was in the halcyon days before ubiquitous cell phone, and I had left my DynaTAC at home ... it not only wouldn't have worked in Oz, it probably would have been confiscated at the airport.

I used to work for a compay that sold conveyancing systems running on the Pick Operating System. We had an urgent call from one of the clients to say the terminals were working, but the main console wasn't. I rushed over, walked in the office and said "You've moved that", pointing at the box and console. The client said, "We were really careful when we moved it. The console is connected but it won't display anything. I slid the brightness control on the monitor to the middle position and presto - it lit up. We decided not to charge them for a service call....

Years ago we had a similar problem. There was a problem with the call recorder in a remote site and the only solution was to reboot it. Now the guy on site wasn’t technical and in the same rack was the primary mpls router for the site.

So a plan was formed we asked him to take a photograph of the rack and email it down to us.

This done we edited the photo and highlighted exactly which device needed to be restarted, we then sent the picture back and told him to print it out (the site had colour printers so it should have been ok)

He does this gets to the rack and (well you have probably guessed) flicks the wrong switch and brings down a call centre of 400 agents for the next 5 minutes until all the phones had resynced and they could start taking calls again….

Oh well…..

A lifetime ago - my first role out of university - I was working for a startup-sized company (ie: me, the boss and the secretary) making HR software. In fact, I had been employed specifically to build what the boss had envisaged as the company's flagship product: a system for managing an organisation's training records.

Now this was around the time that the NHS had finally had enough of waiting for the long-promised, organisation-wide, "manage everything" system, and in desperation were starting to look elsewehere. And since we were cheap (trying to get a toehold in the market) we ended up with several hospitals on the books. And since this was the era of desktop applications, I typically had to go down and do the installations and setup.

So one afternoon at about 4:00pm, I get a call from a hospital that I had been at a week or so previously to install a system upgrade that included a huge summary report that they had specifically requested and I had demoed to them at the time. "The new report doesn't work!" the voice wails from the other end of the line, "we need you to come out and take a look!"

I ask them to read out the error message they're seeing - no dice: "I'm not at my desk, can you please just come out and take a look?"

After about five minutes, the boss intervenes - surprise, surprise, I'm going to take a look. Except that since the hospital in question is over two hours drive away: no problem, the boss gets me a hotel room so I can be on-site first thing in the morning. So I've driven out to the hotel and had a nice evening out.

9:00am the next morning, I'm on site bright and early - right, let's take a look at this error! The manager who had called in the problem takes me up to the HR office and back to the computer I had been at mere days before when I'd showed her the report. I fire everything up, kick off the report and - lo and behold - an alert pops up!

"That's the error!" says the HR manager, pointing at the screen.

It was all I could do not to laugh hysterically. The alert in question was the same one that I had demoed to her when I installed the update:

"This report scans all historical records and may take some time to run. Proceed? [OK] [Cancel]"

/headdesk

I once had a user with a "non-standard issue" monitor(graphic designer). It had a finicky power button, with a LED light. Problem was you could press the button, and it would change color amber, green, but the monitor would sometimes stay dark for up to a minute before lighting up, or you could fiddle with the button and it would turn amber, green, display on in a few seconds Then when you would hit the power button to shut it off, it would go to amber, green, and display on again... and sometimes stay dark until you had left the room.

I've had assignments where all my advice was assiduously ignored, despite incidents occurring that my advice could have prevented.. Some folks hate to change, even when they're sinking.

We had a brand new HR system for entering end of year results. As there was no save button I assumed it was autosaved.

I submitted my results, and my boss came back and said it was empty.... so I redid it ( well... I wrote it in a file and cut and pasted it).

I submitted it. My boss came back saying it was still empty.

I phoned the help desk. They said "It is really easy ... just press the save button". "What save button said I...".

"If you make the window full screen, you get a full set of buttons"

As my window was always small (to reflect its importance) I did not get the buttons.

The person in charge of the app asked me for feedback on the tool... and I gave it ( over 50 comments before I got bored)

For example

- if you press the help button - it clears your entry field.

- What does this icon of a dog's face mean, why isn't there a hover text to tell me.

- The colours used are hard to read (especially if you are colour blind)

- The fonts are not good for people with dyslexia.

I didn't hear from the person again.