Tuesday, 24 August 2010

The Principle of Least Surprise

An oldie but a goodie.

When you write / design / create, be it a building, a program, a document or something else, try and think what reaction would cause the least amount of surprise to some input (eg. if you walked down a hallway and came to a dead-end, you would probably be surprised, ergo don't design dead-ends into hallways for no reason).

Why then, does the Windows XP "ctrl + alt + del, u" always shutdown straight away, unless there happen to be 50 updates waiting to be installed?  Now I'm stuck waiting for half an hour with a dead computer, because the shortcut I always use to shut down has changed from "shut down now" to "install updates and then shut down".
 
Copyright 2009 Another Blog. Powered by Blogger Blogger Templates create by Deluxe Templates. WP by Masterplan