

Engineer Thinking - aycangulez
http://mattgemmell.com/2010/03/09/engineer-thinking

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stcredzero
_The existence of uncertainty is not an excuse for exposing it to the user.

It is software’s responsibility to mask uncertainty and to make the effort to
provide a sensible default behaviour._

This is often a good policy. It's not always a good policy. There are
situations where the user better damn well think what it is they want and I
have been asked to _not default_ an option to force them to think. This will
rarely be the case for a consumer facing app. It's not too uncommon for
something like a commodity trading app or a financial call center app where
choices can have costly and irreversible repercussions. In these cases, the
application should _highlight_ uncertainty and make the effort to provide data
to make the correct choice.

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barrkel
Eclipse is near the apex of the problem indicated in the article. I recently
had the displeasure of using it, and had a torrid time trying to configure the
colors to my preferred grey on black color scheme. Not only are the options
for setting colors spread over different areas of the configuration UI, but
there were too many "fine detail" choices regarding semantic markup, without
there being a clear and obvious way to change the general thrust (i.e.
inverting the text contrast scheme). I had to change dozens of settings, as I
recall, to end up somewhere close to what I wanted.

I had to give up on virtual space in the editor, though.

~~~
nooneelse
> "had a torrid time trying to configure"

Was that a hot, parched time or an avid, passionate one? I don't know what
fits this context.

~~~
barrkel
Indeed, I meant horrid. The torrid times are here in London, UK though.

