Computers can come pretty close to ultimate flexibility. With the added bonus that they can also guide and hint. Done something wrong? Tell the user, but don’t force them. Unless it is critical I suppose, but alot of the time things that are forced aren’t even necessarily critical.
I had a large discussion with my friend when I was redesigning the UI for a booking system as to whether it should allow incomplete bookings, but just flag them up so you know that they are incomplete, and not include them in any calculations. His very good point was that if you leave a booking, come back to it, the customer is no longer there to give you the rest of the details. My point was that the user should be able to multitask slightly, correct details etc. in other places and come back, instead of being forced into completing the form.
I ended up with forcing a complete booking, as it would require slightly less training. The latter only circumnavigated a very small problem whilst creating larger ones.
Well another reason download estimates are bad is that most download managers ignore guidelines #1 and #4.
If the computer remembered previous downloads, it could frame the current download against historical data. Then it can use common sense to let you know that downloading a 10MB file over a broadband connection will not take 23 days.
Jeff Atwood Wrote:
You don’t want to see the data rate-- you want to see how long it will take the transfer to complete.
Eg, “3 hours remaining” is more informative to the user than “transfer rate is currently 3.21 bytes per second, 232,111 of 45,782,100 bytes transferred”.
No, I want both. I can’t estimate in my head how long a file is going to take, but I do know about how fast my connection goes. In many cases I have options of download sources (game demos, linux ISOs, …) and if I see that the rate is much below what I know my connection will do, I’ll try a different source.
wget does it quite nicely, for example, with a visual progress bar, a numeric “transferred so far” readout, a current speed indicator, and a time remaining estimate.
The second thing I remember is in the following
month’s issue of the magazine a letter writer had
written in a scathing letter stating that he
thought that polite software was the dumbest idea
anyone had ever come up with. I remember being
stunned by this reaction.
Hard to say. On problem is that he may not have read and understood the article. If so, he may have been reacting to his experiences with “polite” software. I’ve had some bad ones myself; polite doesn’t necessarily mean effective.