I need to get this off my chest:
Why did the rocket scientists who make Java, with their latest edition, decide to change the load of their question about security? For years, the pop-up has asked basically “if you do this, some unsafe shit might happen, but is that ok” and you click yes because you are a rebel and the unsafe shit never happens. Now, however, it asks “Would it bother you if some unsafe shit might possibly but most likely never will happen” and in order for it to function, you have to click “NO.” And because people are used to clicking “YES” for the past few years, I now have to calm down hundreds of panicked people who no longer can access things powered by Java.
GRUMBLE.
Punchy
Rocket scientists? I thought Starbucks made java….
Bill E Pilgrim
Push-polling.
It’s a plague.
jeffreyw
Dammit, thought you was going off about coffee.
cleek
they’re just making sure you’re paying attention
Just Dale
Perhaps because those rocket scientists now get their paychecks from Oracle, not Sun?
peach flavored shampoo
fixed
Poopyman
Please do not associate rocket scientists with that java shit. I don’t yet know whether it makes rocket scientists look worse, or java look worse, but as soon as I can figure that out I’ll let you know.
Signed,
An Ex-Rocket Scientist
Salt and freshly ground black people
If I remember correctly, signing certificates have more to do with companies like Thawte and less to do with the “makers of Java.”
BethanyAnne
Verbs! Buttons should have verbs, they do things. “Yes” and “No” are never the right choices for buttons. “Continue” and “Cancel” are very generic, but at least they are verbs. Gah!
Besides the basic contradiction of putting the wrong type of word on a button, “yes” and “no” assume that folk will take the time to read and understand the dialog box. Nagaahappen. People don’t behave that way.
/usability geek
Ugh
My lawn! Off of it!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Punchy:
Yes but they’re a subsidiary of Sun.
New: It’s a spam filter and a coffee filter!
scav
My favorite popup was the old mac one with the bomb where you had to agree that your computer had crashed. Talk about grinding your nose in it. . . . .
Florida Cynic
It would be helpful to know which security question Cole is complaining about. If it’s just the stupid certificate one, it can be made to go away permanently.
slag
@BethanyAnne: Seconded.
This new design doesn’t sound any better than the old design. Don’t know why they would make the change. It could be that they got a high error rate with the previous design and figured the solution would be to just flip the design not thinking their error rate will likely be just as high (if not higher, as it may be) after making the change. Typical developers.
cleek
@slag:
i’d be surprised if this didn’t come from marketing in response to a customer survey. no lowly developer at a company like Sun/Oracle could get away with making a change like that on his/her own.
Poopyman
@scav: ROFL! I remember trying to get around it, too. “No! No it didn’t! I refuse! NOOOooooo …..”
zzyzx
It could be a way of trying to make sure people are reading the message, but people never ever read the message.
Poopyman
@cleek:
… unless it were thrown into a release at the last minute by a Sun programmer on his way out the door ….
Bill E Pilgrim
If you think this is bad, BTW, you should see the language in software user interfaces that non-native speakers come up with.
Just be glad that someone is standing between you and them rewriting the English, that’s all I can say. And thank me. Truth? You can’t handle the the truth! Because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. They use words like “undoesing”, “rectificatory”, “queue crowdy, reduce loading”. We correct these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.
Roger Moore
@BethanyAnne:
That’s a great little rule; I’ll have to remember it. I guess somebody in web design must have been paying attention, because there at least the standard answers are verbs: “Submit” and “Reset”. Not much ambiguity about which button serves what function.
Pococurante
People who use Java like pain and agony.
Bill E Pilgrim
It’s worse when the FOX News app crashes and you get the message “Press YES if you want to continue and agree that the President is destroying our way of life”
Randy P
@BethanyAnne: Well, you’ve just invalidated all my “OK” popups on the software I’m working on. There goes half my life’s work.
Unless I choose to consider “OK” as a verb. Yeah, that’s it…
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Actually, I kind of like “queue crowdy”.
BethanyAnne
@Bill E Pilgrim: ha!
BethanyAnne
@Randy P: You’re welcome ;-)
slag
@cleek: Maybe. Different companies have different organizational structures. Of the large (very large) organizations I’ve been familiar with, an error message would easily have been within the purview of a development team. But Sun/Oracle is more old skool and is probably organized accordingly.
Could be that their support/services/sales/marketing/whatever organization brought the problem to the developers and the developers found an “easy fix” for the problem. Or the support/services/sales/marketing/whatever organization came up with the fix and brought it to the developers. Either way, it doesn’t sound (from what John is describing) like they put a ton of thought into it.
Bill E Pilgrim
@slag:
In my experience the fact that the support/services/sales/marketing/whatever (SSSMW) all contribute to the language is exactly why its such a disaster sometimes.
It’s like Hollywood, where you have the same problem. I think it was Dan Castellaneta who said that the reason the first few seasons especially of the Simpsons were so genuinely funny and brilliant was because Brooks the producer refused to allow “notes” from anyone, and just let creative people write it. Nearly everything else you see isn’t actually written by someone, but a bastardized version of what someone wrote after everyone in the company gets to add their little input.
slag
@Bill E Pilgrim: Also true. I think it depends. Sometimes good design comes from constraints (or “contributions”, if you prefer). Other times good design is hampered by constraints. The only consistent factor I’ve found in what differentiates good design and bad design is how high a premium an organization places on the design. If a lot of people are working really hard to make the best product possible rather than working really hard to protect their own little fiefdoms, then different contributions coming from different perspectives can add a lot of value.
(Also, after saying that, I have to admit that Barack Obama’s MUP shtick makes more and more sense to me every single day. Tribalism really is the death of us. Too bad it’s never going to change.)
catclub
@BethanyAnne:
What do you mean people don’t read?
If you write “Don’t push this button or bad things will happen.”
Most will the push the button.
See: Adams, D., “Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe”
See! I read Douglas Adams.
Also, if you put a sign that says ‘Wet Paint” on a bench they will touch the bench, but if you tell them the Universe was created in 7 days they will accept that without proof.
Bill E Pilgrim
@slag:
You know, that seems logical but from what I’ve seen it can be a complete disaster even with the best intentions, just from too many involved. I’ve seen things go utterly in circles, with terms changed and edited by everyone getting their two cents, and it ends up right back where it started, or far worse. And everyone involved seemed entirely genuine in thinking that they had a good idea, not really protecting anything. Which is another issue I know about too.
It’s just a bad use of the wisdom of crowds principle, in my opinion. For some things, that’s a very good strategy. For others, it really is the worst.
I don’t mean to single out marketing or sales by the way, it’s just as much a problem if six different developers, a writing team, and two editors are involved. Too many cooks, basically.
Perfect Tommy
I recently had a EULA click-through for a well known program ( Nero? Java?) that offered two choices (paraphrasing):
Yes I agree to the terms and want to install Bing toolbar
No
I clicked No and the installation continued anyway.
LarsThorwald
Jon lovitz said it best:
“Ha ha ha heh. Heh heh heh. Ha heh heh. Hey, heh, you know what? If I had your job I’d kill myself.”
Sarcastro
It’s the history eraser button you fool!
twiffer
ugh. negative logic is too be avoided. particularly on msgbox pop-ups.
Sentient Puddle
@catclub: People do read. They just don’t read “no,” “not,” “don’t,” and all the negative words of that sort.
Joey Maloney
Remember those commercials for the consulting firm (CDW?) – “I clicked on that link, just like you told me not to!”
Ed Marshall
@31 It’s a Java update and you have to uncheck the box that says “I want the bing toolbar”. It’s pretty sleazy.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Apparently you have never hung around computer programmers, John. These are the people who make things like that happen, and create mod filters that can’t tell sociaIism from ciaIis, and so forth. And think they know fucking everything, and cannot be told that they don’t.
I can say this stuff with a clear conscience since I was one for 20 years. Heh.
Who but a computer programmer could design a software thing that asks you the same question ten times a day for ten years, which you answer the same way every time, and never learns your answer and just does what you want and leaves you the fuck alone? Or a thing that routinely asks you to confirm that you want to do routine things that present relatively little risk? Are you sure you want to do that? YES I AM FUCKING SURE THAT’S WHY I CLICKED ON IT YOU MORON. JUST AS I HAVE BEEN SURE THE LAST 500 TIMES YOU ASKED ME THAT.
Grumble, indeed. ( voice of Hank Hill) I tell you what, when I switched gears from development to administration in my career, I saw things in a whole new headshaking light. The difference between dev and admin is, dev says “Hey, it worked when I wrote it.” Admin says “Yeah, but I have to make it work every day and night and weekend for the next 5 years, 24 hours a day by 365, and unlike you, I could get fired when it doesn’t work.” So we see things differently.
Ahhh, I am so glad I retired.
Evinfuilt
@Poopyman:
I’m sure it wasn’t the programmers anyways. I new manager probably told them to change it, and thus, John Cole’s life is ruined, but I’m sure a bunch of people are also happy (since they couldn’t read and kept hitting the wrong button, which is now the right button.)
justcorbly
Java is a thing created to solve a problem its creators thought was going to happen in the future, thereby making them all rich. The problem did happen, we all muddled through anyway, and Java is still here being very annoying.
Rick Taylor
My current pet peeve is with Firefox on my mac. When I try to shut it down, usually it will pop up a dialogue box telling me there’s an unresponsive script that might hurt performance and do I want to stop it? And it hangs there until I answer. And of course my answer is YES, YOU BLOODY IDIOT, I JUST ASKED YOU to SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN SO THAT WOULD INCLUDE THAT UNRESPONSIVE SCRIPT!
slag
@Bill E Pilgrim: You make good points. And based on them, my argument evolves to place an added emphasis on organizational structure. What you’re describing sounds like process problems. If people are genuinely interested in making a good product, then they should be able to articulate exactly Why they made the suggestions they made. And there needs to be some process in place for prioritizing different areas of concern.
That said, maybe the whole idea behind different perspectives is overrated. And by that I mean, maybe the diversity of perspective needs to be within a very small range of variability. The companies I think of who employ “design by committee” successfully tend to hire people from diverse backgrounds but also have a very firm set of shared principles (beyond just “designing a good product”).
So, I guess this was all just a really long way of saying, once again: You make good points. /ramble
Bill H
Well, as a programmer myself, I’m presently fighting with a client who wants the instructions on how to use the form displayed on the form itself. I cannot convince her that after using the form 500 times and being thoroughly familiar with how to use it, the user is going to be thoroughly sick and tired of looking at the fucking instructions. I’m trying to persuade her to maybe give them a way to turn the instructions off, but she’s afraid that if they do that they will forget how to use the form. I’m serious.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Bill H:
I know you are, I hear ya.
Chuck
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
The computer programmer would like to code an option to remember your preferences. His desire gets OVERRIDDEN by management who wants to “ensure a consistent user experience”.
And frankly the suits do have a point, because computers are still incredibly dumb, and when they decide they know what you really wanted and go ahead and do it, that’s when the support lines light up with “why the hell did it do this without asking me?”. I’ve been on both ends of this, and I’ve even gotten to see the consequences of my own “Do What I Mean” UI decisions come back to bite me when a user who isn’t me uses my app.
One of the better design maxims is “don’t ask for permission, just make things undoable”. But until we get a timeline slider or undo palette for every operation the system does, that ain’t gonna happen either.
As for Java, I really hope people are smart enough to not confuse a virtual machine and language with the boneheaded UI things someone put into a plugin. I never have these problems, but then again not one line of Java I’ve written in the last 5 years has ever had a GUI.
MobiusKlein
That’s your ‘intemperate rant’? I give it a 4.1 on the rant scale.
No swears, no ultimatums, or comparisons to Nazis or Microsoft. But I repeat myself.
I express rants like that in my spare time. I expect better from a Cole rant.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Chuck:
I hear that too. You are talking about what I call misManagement. Most non-IT managers have no idea on earth what technology can really do for them, or do best. Most of the ones I knew were still stuck in the “take the old paper system and recreate it on the computer” mode of automation thinking. Argh.
Lee
@Bill H:
Dear FSM please convince her otherwise.
You also might want to point out to her that if the form needs that much instruction to be permanently displayed that maybe the form is a bit too difficult to use.
For forms send off a request for data (e.g. please give me the detail of the P.O.) I always use “Fetch” as the text on the submit button.
Lee
Ooops forgot to comment about the thread :)
On my home PC I made the decision not to load java on it. So far it has 2+ years and I still have not loaded it.
Yeah sometimes it sucks. But I ask myself “Do I really need to watch that Chimp smelling his finger again?” and when the answer is “no”, I don’t load java.
Bill E Pilgrim
@slag: As do you.
By the way this one, raised by John, seems easy: When conventions get established, suddenly throwing a change up and confusing everyone is a bad idea.
We’re all just inventing this whole new world of software and the Internet and etc as we go, but conventions do get established and respecting them is one of the few things that makes it all easier.
I was looking at a magazine site the other day, can’t remember which one, in which all of the comments are in italics. Which just from sheer force of habit, to anyone who’s been online for a while, looks like a quoted comment, not the comment itself.
So with an entire comments page in italics, your brain keeps just automatically trying to figure out where the quote starts or stops, except that there isn’t one.
SiubhanDuinne
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Clever you! I see what you did there.
Martin
Almost nobody in the computer industry designs any more. Apple does. Google does. Small operators do. But the big companies have run so far down the hole of squeezing margins to get the cheapest stuff out there that they aren’t willing to pay for design. Sun, being on life support for years, gave up on any meaningful design effort ages ago.
Seriously, this is why the computing world is so rapidly segregating again with Apple driving the mobile space as Microsoft dominated the desktop space in the previous generation.
Bill E Pilgrim
@SiubhanDuinne: You know that’s actually why the word soçialism is verboten, right?
It’s an anti-spam filter, not a political correctness filter.
Took me a while before I read that somewhere.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Martin:
Completely agree. Virtually the only ones who really do, at least among large companies.
slag
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Agreed. But on the flip side, there’s the tension between convention and progress. Sure, the old design works better for people who are used to it, but what about new users? What if a new design would work better for them. Something that more accurately fits their untrained mental model of how the software should work not just how it has worked. That concern doesn’t seem to apply in this case because it sounds like the change they made wouldn’t necessarily do much for new users either. So in this situation, sticking with convention probably would have been a better choice (based on John’s description, that is).
But I remember back in the day when all hyperlinks were supposed to be blue and underlined. Personally, I’m happier with the unconventional new order in that particular case.
Bill H
It’s actually not. She wants things like for the field labelled “Name” to have instructions that say “Type in the person’s name here, and be sure to spell it correctly” and similarly abstruse directions.
slag
@Martin: So freakin true.
But honestly, I have major issue with Google design (at least in how their products fit–or don’t fit–together) and Apple is slowly getting on my bad side (How many software updates does a person really need in a week?). Every day I wonder if this will be the day I start using Cuneiform on stone tablets as my preferred means of communication and production.
slippy
@scav: No my favorite one is “An unexpected error has occurred.”
I want it to continue: “Had this been an expected error, you would still be as fucked, but you would know what had happened, as opposed to this case, where you have no clue and no hope.”
Maude
I can’t update Java on Windows Xp machines.
I click install and windows pops up a message about the software not being whatever. It won’t install.
Anyone know why?
twiffer
@ChockFullO’Nuts: heh. i’m currently in “production management”, so i feel that pain. at least 3 business critical apps are certain to go down the monday after any given release weekend.
BethanyAnne
@Bill H: Suggest some testing. Five users maybe; 15 minutes or so. See if anyone is confused.
bago
@Maude: “Whatever” might be a clue.
Martin
@slag: Google’s design is a little haphazard (as is Apple’s), but there’s generally good work going on there.
As for the software update issue, I hate to break the bad news, but the Mac is a back-burner platform now – in part because of the complexity of the platform and the suboptimal foundation on which it was built. I still think it’s the best desktop platform out there, but when I compare the ease-of-use and general bulletproofness of the iPhone/iPad platform, it’s clear what Apple wants its products to look like, and Mac OS X isn’t it. I don’t know how that’ll get sorted out, but ultimately it’s going to. By comparison, Microsoft has been working furiously on Windows and making progress, but holy fuck are they dumping a shitload of money and energy into solving problems that just shouldn’t be problems, and I don’t think they have even a concept of how to bring it up to the kind of standard being set on Apple’s mobile side. I’m not even sure Apple knows how to replicate that on the desktop.
But if you want to see where Apple’s focus is, it’s all mobile right now.
Martin
@BethanyAnne: The correct solution is to explain to the client that typing in a name correctly ought to be a basic expectation of employment. The solution to the problem will be found in the performance evaluation, not in superfluous instructions.
twiffer
@Martin: when i was in dev, i had to occassionally handle tier 3 tech support calls(by virtue of being the youngest on the team). the inability of people to understand basic instructions should not be underestimated. i’ve had to explain to people that policy values changed overnight, because it was a variable product and that is how they work. or the reason they couldn’t run calculations on an illustration is because they hadn’t downloaded any policy data. remarkable.
that said, i agree with you. it should be understood that names should be spelt correctly. they won’t always, but that will happen. putting instructions that say “spell the name correctly” won’t help the idiots and will piss off the rest.
licensed to kill time
__
It might, however, result in an awful lot of people named “Correctly” on the form.
russell
You all are missing the obvious.
On many architectures, it’s faster to compare to zero (false or “No”) than to compare to one (true or “Yes”).
So every time the user clicks “No” instead of “Yes”, a femtosecond or two is saved.
These things add up over time.
Whatever developer put this change in place deserves a bonus!!
D-Chance.
I thought this was a follow-up to the previous coffee when you started discussion java…
Hob
@licensed to kill time: Shirley you jest.
licensed to kill time
@Hob: Shirley, I do not. signed, Mr. Correctly.