Re:Is Firefox lying to users about viruses in downloads?
by xg15 on Wednesday July 04, 2018 @04:50PM
(#17459394)
I generally agree, though in this case, I'd agree with the yolo designer.
If I consulted Google Maps and it told me I'm with 48.25% likelihood at address A, with 39.81% likelihood at address B and with 11.94% at another location, what exactly am I to do with this information?
I think Google Maps actually shows a good design to communicate the uncertanity: They show the uncertanity as a blue circle of varying size. It's visual but (more importantly) gives you as a user the ability to reduce the uncertanity with their own information. E.g., if you know you're at an intersection and the circle covers only one, you now have a precise location.
In general, I'd say, it's important to know which context the information is used.
Designer: This label is required to say what store the user is at given his location.
Developer: the location sensor is imprecise. We could have 20m of precision or worse. The store location data is also known to be inaccurate and incomplete. We can provide top 10 candidate stores with their probabilities. The “top” one we return could be 95% likely or 35% likely. Your move!
Bad Designer: Too much numbers for my brain. We’ll just show the top result. YOLO!
Better designer: We could only show a result if it’s above a certain threshold. Or we could show top 3. Or maybe we need to talk about changing the requirement.
Better developer: There may be other signals and inputs we could use to help make the results more confident...