Aug 10

Stupidest Interface Ever


The image above illustrates what is perhaps the stupidest interface ever. It’s the “Network Connection Status” dialog in Windows Server 2003. Look the area outlined in red, and you can imagine why I’m irritated.

I was debugging a server issue over terminal server, and I wanted to check something on the LAN interface. I pulled up the window, and meant to click the “Properties” button, but clicked the “Disable” button accidentally.

Turns out that there is no confirmation window for this — you click that button, and your network connection is gone. Along with that, my terminal server window was gone too. Not surprisingly, my phone started ringing immediately.

Luckily the server was just in another room and I could run over and sit down in front of it. But what if I was doing this on a remote box to which I had no physical access?

Two things:

  1. Why put the “Self Destruct” button right next to the “Properties” button? That’s like having a hallway with a “Call the elevator” button right next to a “Shoot a flamethrower through my butt” button

  2. Why not have some kind of confirmation dialog? Disabling a network interface is not a common occurance. If I press that button, can you at least ask me if I really want to do it? What would that have taken — one extra line of code?

Rant over.

by Deane   August 10, 2005 11:52 AM   |

Comments

by ,   August 10, 2005 12:27 PM  

maybe other people aren't as clumbsy as you

by Deane,   August 10, 2005 12:30 PM  

maybe other people aren’t as clumbsy as you

And maybe you could learn to spell "clumsy."

by drmthtr,   August 10, 2005 1:10 PM  

you have been windozed - unix never asks about anything either :)

by Dave,   August 10, 2005 1:33 PM  

I've seen that before and wondered why they put the two together so closely, but I haven't accidentally clicked disable. Wonderful "feature" that, the computer following your instructions without making sure you really want it done.

That's something you'd never see in an Apple OS. (You were waiting for that!)

by Sauron,   August 10, 2005 2:05 PM  

This is very similar to my least favorite "feature" in elevators: Having the "close door" button next to the "alarm" button, with the "open door" button on the other side of the panel. It happened 3 times in one weekend that somebody was rushing to the elevator and somebody in the elevator assumed that the button next to "close door" was "open door", and the alarm went off. The organization we were with was almost fined $10,000 because of this crappy design.

Then I was staying at the Rio with my family and they had the same design. Almost hit the alarm button a few times, then, except that the previous incident had trained me a little better.

by MEL,   August 10, 2005 3:57 PM  

Also in the Adjacency Annoyance: some prior version of Internet Explorer had "Save Image" right next to "Set Image As Wallpaper" on the right-click menu. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally reset my wallpaper that way.

by Deane,   August 10, 2005 9:05 PM  

some prior version of Internet Explorer had “Save Image” right next to “Set Image As Wallpaper” on the right-click menu.

I've done that exact same thing a number of times too.

by Alejandro,   August 10, 2005 9:54 PM  

some prior version of Internet Explorer had “Save Image” right next to “Set Image As Wallpaper” on the right-click menu.

did that, many many times.

by tiffany,   August 10, 2005 9:59 PM  

You think that's bad? Try being the UI design person who has to sit adjacent to the programmer and the CTO who both think it's soooo silly of me to worry about adjacency problems in their designs. They were huge fans of putting a nice fat "CLEAR FORM" button in the spot where you'd expect "SUBMIT" to be. That's why I finally had to kill them all and leave corporate America permanently. Well, that and they laid me off.

by Robert,   August 11, 2005 3:10 AM  

Hear Hear.

Think about the ramifications of clicking that button via VNC on a headless computer in a diffrent country

by Ken,   August 11, 2005 6:24 PM  

I'm mucking around with those settings daily. Never once hit the wrong button.

by Ebax the goblin,   August 12, 2005 12:27 PM  

You should not be allowed to manage a server if you ... do stuff like this !!

by James,   August 12, 2005 2:34 PM  

Well, the worse thing is in Mozilla Firefox, where Close Tabs is right next to Close All Tabs

by Peter Akkies,   August 25, 2005 12:22 PM  

Lower you mouse sensitivity to solve the problem.

by Neil,   December 1, 2008 5:45 AM  

Using a mouse on a very narrow ledge in the server room, I too have clicked on the disable button....

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