[dundee] Bad design examples...

[Rick Moynihan]

On 29 June 2010 10:47, Robert Ladyman <it at file-away.co.uk> wrote:
> Apropos of nothing at all, other than a desire to have a moan, I'm wondering
> about your experiences of annoying small design issues with software or
> systems that you use.
>
> The one that set me off is my accounting package: if I decide that I want to
> see (say) all customers, and don't enter a search condition, it whirs for a
> short time and then pops up a modal dialogue box warning me that I have
> selected to view (say) 260 customers, which might take a long time, do I want
> to proceed? It actually takes more time to move the mouse and click OK to
> proceed, than it does to select and display the customers (grr...). Not only
> that, I know, from checking the logs, that the software has to run a query to
> find out that there are 260 customers...and it only has to do this to populate
> the dialogue box.

Ewww...  Other points here, though you see this kind of interface a
lot, I'd argue its usually a bad or misleading UI design (though that
depends on how the choice is framed)... as asking the user to enter a
condition doesn't usually imply (to the user) that no-condition (to
view all records) is an option.  You tend to see this kind of design a
lot on crappy property websites or webstores.  For those of us who
know these tricks, few would consider it not to be a hack...  A better
(more intuitive) design is often to display all records by default and
allow the user to filter by a condition.

Also If presenting "large" datasets to the user at once is an issue,
they should be using some kind of paging table to display, maintaining
a cursor into the DB...  That way the count should always be
consistent... though that might depend on the specifics of the
database/drivers etc...

> Don't even start me on the implementation of a system that thinks that 200
> customers is  a lot of records. I've looked at the code for searching and that
> didn't improve my temper, either:  select * from customer, then loop through
> each record for matches, rather than SELECT * FROM CUSTOMER WHERE (some search
> condition).
>
> ...and relax...
>
> --
> Robert Ladyman
> File-Away Limited
> 3 Ralston Business Centre, Newtyle, Blairgowrie
> Perthshire  PH12 8TL SCOTLAND
> Tel: +44 (0) 1828 898 158
> Mobile: +44 (0) 7732 771 649
> http://www.file-away.co.uk
>
> ============================================
> Registered Office: 32 Church Street, Newtyle, Blairgowrie
> Perthshire, PH12 8TZ SCOTLAND
> Registered in Scotland, Company Number SC222086
>