Forum Overview :: Still Life :: Tales of Great Product Design

[quote name="Rafiki"]So for the past few months I've been working on upgrading the software for a piece of equipment that Gay Faggots, Inc. manufactures, a large part of which involves the user interface. There are a variety of changes I wanted to make that I had to argue over, but I'd like to talk about the start, stop, and pause buttons in particular. As far as commands go, start, stop, and pause are about as universal a standard as you can possibly get. They do what they advertise. However, whoever originally designed this piece of equipment evidently thought that standard was too straight-forward and intuitive so they decided to innovate. Here's how start, stop, and pause worked on this system: PAUSE -worked as expected. If the machine was doing something, it would halt until you told it to go again or stop. START - It would make the machine run a single cycle doing what it was designed to do (let's say provide a single shotgun blast to the face) - UNLESS it just completed a cycle. Then it would home itself and idle (eg. stop) - UNLESS you changed some operating parameters. Then it would start another cycle - UNLESS you toggled the stop button. Then it would home itself and idle STOP - Didn't do anything. It just set an internal flag so that the next time you pressed the start button it would stop the machine Looking back, I wonder why I didn't think to ask why we had more than one button anywhere in the program. We could just have one big one that changes function depending on context. It would simplify the end-user experience by only ever giving them a single option!!! But since I'm a retard, my ignorant ass suggested that we make the start button always make the machine go, the stop button always make it stop, and the pause button always make it pause what it was doing. This was met with resistance, counter-arguments included but were not limited to: the start button puts the machine in motion and is green. Since the stop button would now technically put the machine in motion because of homing, it would need to be green too. Users would be confused by this. Eventually I was allowed to make my changes. I also made the stop button a different color than green. This won't be released for another few months, but I'm hoping the customers can handle it. [/quote]