News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly. Parent comment

Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by ryandrake on Friday February 16, 2024 @04:25PM (#39403170)
Even as an end user, I hate when my computer seems to be trying to hide something from me. Even if I can't do anything about it, I want to know it's happening. Don't worry, Microsoft. I'm a grown-up and can handle the bad news. If I'm a layman, maybe I just dismiss the dialog and try again. But if I'm a little more of a power user, maybe I'll look up the error message and see if I can start diagnosing or helping.

If you swallow the error message, I'll have zero idea that something is even going wrong! And almost just as bad: if you put up one of those useless infantilizing "oopsie doopsie computer made a poopsie" error messages, I still won't know what went wrong AND I'm being treated like a moron.

I worked for a software company once where our software basically crashed every 2-3 hours of continuous use due to a huge backlog of technical debt, memory leaks, and years of rushing. My manager's solution to this was not to fix the bugs--it was to build a separate "launcher" process that would detect that the application crashed, eat the error messages, and silently re-launch it hoping the user doesn't notice. Way to treat your users with respect...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least... by Arainach on Friday February 16, 2024 @05:53PM (#39404097)
There is no error message here - more often than not it's a straight up crash. No HRESULT, no popup, just NullPointerException, straight to jail.

In many cases like this, crashes like this are in app startup, so it's not like you learn not to hit a certain button - it's just that the app doesn't work, an awful UX.

As called out in the article, there are (and always should be) APIs like "IsPrintingEnabled" so that forward-thinking apps can show better UX. These practices aren't for those apps, they're for everyone else.

Also, if your app preserves state well enough that a keep-alive daemon can restore after a crash and the user doesn't notice, that is ABSOLUTELY an improvement in UX over just crashing. Sure, you should still fix the bugs, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

[ Parent | on HN ]