20 Nov, 2007
Usability Reflections: Provide a way to resolve and indicate failure
Posted by: Jure Cuhalev In: Planet Kiberpipa| Planet LiveCD| usability
Observing how RescueTime, a neat application for tracking computare usage, behaves on my Mac got me thinking about fall-back mechanisms in applications. It seems that there is a bug that causes it to quit every few hours. What is left is grayed out menu bar with just a couple of options to “hide”. Launching application again seems to give me my options back.
What I, as a user, would prefer to see in this case is that there would be an option labeled “Restart RescueTime”, that would automatically kick in every time there is a problem somewhere. By leaving the title bar icon in place, the application is communicating that it is still “there”, but for whatever reason it is not taking any commands.
RescueTime is expected to be running all the time and is indicating this by having a icon. Looking at this icon being inactive enough time just means that I will not notice it, or click it since there is no real need for interaction.
In order to resolve this problem there is a number of ways developers can choose:
- provide an alert indicator for icon when something goes wrong, and integrate restart option into the menu
- just integrate fall back restart option into menu
- make the icon go away, when application is not responding for any reason
There is also the most obvious option, just fix the bug, but provided it is impossible to find all the problems, one has to also consider other strategies.
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