quirky software
I find myself annoyed at some of the more personal, human, vague sounding things in operating systems and other software at times that are supposed to come off as less sterile and more personal. I know you have the exact data, why not tell me? You are my technological brain, my cyber memory. You don't need to be cool or quirky.
Why does Windows on my work laptop categorize files in the Download folder as “Today”, “Last Week”, “Last month” and “A long time ago”? I’m completely fine with the first few categories, but “A long time ago” doesn’t mean anything. You aren’t supposed to reason like some human trying to gauge fleeting time, just say it was “A year ago”.
All Microsoft apps suffer from this - Outlook is an offender, too. Instead of showing the dates of some emails, sometimes it will just say “Yesterday” so when I need to enter a date in our database, I have to first check what date it is today. It’s small and easy to do, but annoying me nonetheless.
There’s also the trend of woobifying errors. Some mascot is there looking sad and it will say: “Oopsie! Little Badoodle did a wrong!!! 😋😋 Please check back after Badoodle stops chewing our cables!”
It was cute the first few times, but I feel like we can retire this now after 10 years. Ideally, I want a meaningful error code and error message that I can investigate on my own, and if it’s an online service, I want a link to a status uptime page that is operating separately and not on the same servers that can go down.
I’m also not a fan of showcase videos as the only means to present your product. This trend of web services replacing meaningful texts, lists, graphics and screenshots on their website with a video that’s usually meant to be casual and cool and meme-y. I don’t want to sit through your video, I want to see the information at a glance in a concise way. Offer the video as an option, not the main or only way. What is it genuinely for? Hiding info in a video people will not watch, or skip through, or stop watching halfway through? It’s like the next step up from stuttery parallax stuff. Not a fan.
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Published 05 Feb, 2025