Under The Fridge

A little while ago I created some software that will be used by other people. In one of the configuration screens I had an option that would most likely mess things up, but could be extremely useful in very specific, urgent, situations. I elected to make the option usable, but to post a big warning sign around it saying “Do not do this unless you understand what it does.”

Wrong choice. The user did this, then because they’d been warned not to, got embarrassed and tried to hide the fact.

I’m in two minds about how to deal with this kind of situation, since not providing the option at all could prevent a knowledgeable user from averting a rare catastrophe.

For the next update to that software I’ve moved that option to a completely separate (seemingly unrelated) page that is not intended for general use. User Interfaces are hard.
Still thinking about it.

- Colin

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.