{"id":91,"date":"2007-11-20T05:22:55","date_gmt":"2007-11-20T04:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/20\/usability-reflections-provide-a-way-to-resolve-and-indicate-failure\/"},"modified":"2007-11-20T05:24:19","modified_gmt":"2007-11-20T04:24:19","slug":"usability-reflections-provide-a-way-to-resolve-and-indicate-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/usability-reflections-provide-a-way-to-resolve-and-indicate-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Usability Reflections: Provide a way to resolve and indicate failure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Observing how <a href=\"http:\/\/rescuetime.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">RescueTime<\/a>, 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 &#8220;hide&#8221;. Launching application again seems to give me my options back.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/gandalfar\/2048526139\/\" class=\"tt-flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2004\/2048526139_32ecceb961.jpg\" alt=\"RescueTime problem\" border=\"0\" height=\"268\" width=\"329\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p> What I, as a user, would prefer to see in this case is that there would be an option labeled &#8220;Restart RescueTime&#8221;, 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 &#8220;there&#8221;, but for whatever reason it is not taking any commands.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>In order to resolve this problem there is a number of ways developers can choose:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>provide an alert indicator for   icon when something goes wrong, and integrate restart option into the menu<\/li>\n<li>just integrate fall back restart option into menu<\/li>\n<li>make the icon go away, when application is not responding for any reason<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<h3 class=\"zemanta_related\" id=\"zem_related_h3\">Related articles:<\/h3>\n<ul class=\"zemanta_related_ul\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/16\/usability-reflections-rescuetimecom\/\">Usability reflections: rescuetime.com<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;hide&#8221;. Launching application [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[46,42,45,936],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usability","tag-mac","tag-rescuetime","tag-title-bar-icon","tag-usability"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}