Just Let Me Write Digits(gendx.dev) |
Just Let Me Write Digits(gendx.dev) |
This is one of my most hated categories of pet peeves, software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it. Computers exist to do the tedious stuff for us, if software makes us do tedious stuff for it that could be avoided with a bit more work on the software side then the software is wrong.
"Enterprise" software on Windows that "requires admin" has been a long time top subcategory here, where in literally 100% of cases I've ever dug in to in 20+ years of professional IT they could change a couple of default paths to point either within the user's private folders or a common user-accessible folder like ProgramData and solve it forever, but instead they tell people to give everyone local admin and people who don't know better actually listen to that idiocy while competent administrators are forced to fire up ProcMon and track down what it's doing so they can bodge around it by pushing out permissions changes or config changes through their management platform of choice.
Yes, exactly! It's like devloper doesn't understand that automating thibgs like this is the point of computers.
And then there are the ones that implement it as 6 separate boxes, and these are the only fields in the form that auto advance to the next field on input and also often break delete if you want to undo the previous digit.
X#X #X#
Where X is a letter and # is a digit.
The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling.
Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practically every input on the internet accepts spaces but has a max character limit. So if I paste it in with the spaces, it'll cut off the last 3 digits, making me go back, delete the spaces, and manually type in my last 3 digits that were removed.
Stupid, stupid, stupid software coders! Or possibly, a single coder somewhere long ago.
I'm not so surprised, given that you cannot write support tickets if the bug prevents you from registering...
Also, I don't think people have high hopes that a broken government website will ever get fixed.
I'm frequently astonished by how terrible and buggy modern software can get away with being and still survive. Working around bugs to accomplish what I need to accomplish is so normal to me now that I sometimes don't even notice how terrible the software is until I see someone less technically skilled than me try to use it.
If you have an issue with an open source software, you need to register on a website that is made for developers, that will try to sell you a git hosting service, write a bug following a technical format, and you are expected to given information in a reproducible way.
If you have an issue with a closed source freeware, you just use a contact form on their website or leave a comment on their blog or whatever.
The amount of friction to report a bug that FLOSS puts on users is absolutely insane. It's almost like it's trying to deny anyone who isn't a technical person from reporting problems they are having.
From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou...
That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou..., but from there, the trail runs dead.
Do you have a link?
That sounds... aggressively unergonomic. Are programmers not expected to frequently use numbers?
& [ { } ( = * ) + ] ! #
Having the luxury of the parens and frequent symbols (especially if you code Clojure or a Lisp) on the tippy-top row is awesome.
Plus, the numbers are also split by hand!
From middle-going-out:
Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468
Which lets you type numbers without looking for them by eye :)
It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must be an underlying reason I'm missing.
(saving you a click: AZERTY has digits on the shift key, and for some reason the JS is handling raw keys rather than processed characters)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957
Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided.
Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed and user hostile, but the well-designed ones tend to be fine. The ideal, based on real user research by gov.uk, appears to be to use 3 separate textboxes, instead of <input type="date">.
Very nice blog layout btw.
This is just a classic case of a developer situated firmly at the first peak of the Dunning Kruger graph.
- Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user)
- Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potentially an efficiency boost. This also correlates (again, just from my anecdotal experience) with the population that doesn’t have a password manager handling 2FA for them automatically…
- This is probably down to preference, but IMO it also feels faster somehow than a single input field with six digits, when it works properly (with the caveat that it feels much worse/slower if it doesn’t work)
- Now that everyone does it, you’re kinda forced to adopt it as well for recognizability.
But it’s an interesting question – we can’t ever imagine entering postal ZIP codes like that and yet that’s an area where it’d actually make more sense since there’s usually some notion of “more significant” digits at the start vs. end, so you could perhaps do some cool tricks with regard to pre-filtering state, city etc. names. Whereas OTP codes are (AFAIK) essentially fully random digits with no meaningful distinction.
Anecdotally, this seems to be the case on the majority of websites where I have to use such 2FA codes.
Fun fact: even the “send a free letter to santa” is compliant by making his postal code “H0H 0H0”
I'm not really sure how these get allocated, but looking through some of my payment recipients, Revolut is also lowish in this block with 04-00-67, but also with leading zeros, Santander has 09-01-32 and 09-01-33, co-op has 08-92-99, Nationwide has 07-01-16, 07-08-06, 07-19-86.
That looks to me almost like potentially a bank can get a sort code block as large as just the first 2 digits, e.g. Nationwide which has been around for a long time and all seem to start 07-. But that doesn't explain then why Monzo and Revolut are both in the 04-00- block.
EDIT: it seems that sort codes are assigned by pay.uk [1] and Wikipedia has a surprising amount of information [2]. Most interestingly, originally banks were 2 digits long, and so each bank had their own 2 digit prefix, and the single digit banks had a zero appended, so e.g. NatWest was originally Westminster (6) and became 60-. There's a whole load of 04- sort codes for "Utility Banks" [3] and Monzo seems to have been the second such bank (BFC is before it, but 04-00-01 is unlisted, so maybe Monzo was the third).
[1] https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/payment-systems/access-to...
One thing is really dislike about modern UI design is where you see a headline that seems kinda interesting but you don't click on it right away. Come back a bit later and it's just gone. There was some A/B testing on the headline and now it's completely different, probably now all clickbaity so I won't be inclined to check it out.
Crazy to add complexity like this.
PDF link in the box on the right.
> From middle-going-out:
> Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468
What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by side? Maybe 0 is more likely to appear so they want it on an index finger? It just seems unlikely that the next most common digit is 9, unless this was developed by people who set prices on items.
tl;dr: right hand even,, left hand odd,,, increasing from index to pinky. "Look ma, no eyes!"
You don't need a special keyboard layout for that. Any layout at all has the same feature.
> On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out.
Why not use the numpad?
I mean, if a basic authentication mechanism of a critical government website doesn't work with a keyboard layout, odds are incredibly likely that said keyboard layout is uncommon. Like not one of the developers, testers, stakeholders, or even other users had a problem -- and this isn't a problem you can just ignore -- so it probably isn't that big of a deal.
Is it a regrettable bug that made a poor assumption that breaks in special cases? Sure. Is it "Dunning-Kruger" (groan), or some demonstration of how stupid the developers are? Give me a break.
We don't really know that.
It may have been the first person able to complain - given you couldn't even file a support ticket without getting through this prompt!