How are users supposed to learn if they never fall down? For many users, being faced with “safety” features just creates more workaround. Confirming, clarifying, and checking every operation, as most applications these days do, is intended to protect users from accidents. The result is similar to what many people find after putting training wheels on a child’s bicycle: the vehicle is more cumbersome and the child never learns to ride it properly.
Whilst this guy has some legitimate complaints, it all seems fairly trivial to me, particularly what he suggests.
Now, I’m not entirely sure what software he’s using, but on OS X, I haven’t come across a situation where there isn’t a “Yes to All” or “Don’t tell me again” button when I need one.
Edited 2005-11-28 23:53
the thing isnt so much that the yes to all is there, but that it may apply for more then you bargained for.
basicly “yes to all” is similar in effect to the rm -f option…
ok, so you can build a seperate yes to all for diffrent classes of files, system, write protected and so on. but that just leads to more dialogs and more likely that the user misses the fact that the second or third was for a diffrent class of files that he was not aware would be effected by the command given (by gui or cli)…
i have had my fair share of o shit moments. last time was when i was trying to fix a problem with my firefox profile and missed the fact that windows copys when transfering between partitions, but moves within the same partition. this lead me to delete the test profile in the belife that it was only a copy of my main profile, oops…
similar, when a user gets so used to clicking yes to the scurity warning dialog on a web page, the likelyhood is that he will click yes automaticaly to a warning he should have clicked no to…
basicly its a variant on the old “wolf wolf” story…
Should we remove all traffic lights too? Road signs? Warnings?
Not all, but most of them.
Here is an observation I made for myself:
I grew up in Austria in a small town (15000 people), which had not a single traffic light (the city is structured in a wy that makes this possible).
There are pedestrian crossings all over the place and in Austria pedestrians who want to cross a street have priority over people who come in a car. It is absolotely usual in that city that you walk across the street without even looking if a car approaches, because if one approaches you are sure it will stop (I did so for 25 years of my life and never had to regret it).
When I got my driving license and sometimes drove through the city I became used to notice the pedestrians. I stopped at the slightest hint of somebody wanting to cross. Of course this makes the traffic MORE fluid, because people usually don’t wait for you to completely stop, but step on the street as soon as they see that you saw them. That takes half the time for a pedestrian to cross your lane, so you might not need to stop.
Fast forward: I now live in a city ten times as large with many traffic lights, and the few pedestrian crossings without a traffic light are totally ignored by the drivers. You really risk your life if you step onto the street without waiting for the car to stop.
At first I stopped at every pedestrian crossing where someone wanted to cross (you have to, by law), but they did not step onto the street until I completely stopped the car, even if they saw that I had seen them.
This made me learn the unwritten rule of the traffic in this city: Don’t stop at a pedestrian crossing unless forced to, because you will loose time for doing it.
If this city had only the absolutely necessary traffic lights, people would not be so dependent on them. So my conclusion is: tTraffic lights are necessary at SOME crossings, but should be avoided werever possible. Roundabouts are a very elegant solution.
I don’t feel this way about training wheels. Putting training wheels on my bike made me feel more comfortable about getting on the bike, then when I felt confident with riding and steering it was easier to transition to riding without them.
The point remains that the training wheels have to come off at some point or the bike does not work the way it should. You have not learned how to ride the bike until those wheels are off. His example of rm -i and rm -f is that if the wheels are on, someone who has learned the system and knows how it is supposed to behave will actually be much more likely to make a mistake when deleting a list of 20 files because he is now forced to use a much more unsafe command to do something quickly.
So did that joe cheek guy ever give up the Lycoris source code yet? Or are we still waiting on that?
The author’s whinging is nothing short of his inability to deal with his own laziness. In the case of rm, well if you want to make sure that it deletes all the files without prompting use “rm -f”! If you are not specific about what you want the computer to do, don’t complain about the results. Damn, it just like filling out a cheque and forgetting to sign it, and then bitching about no one wanting to take the cheque. Get a life!