Dexterity Matters

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Dexterity Matters

  • Good subject today. I agree on the input errors and especially coding for them. Limit input to what is acceptable and allow for easier cleanup when even that is entered wrong. P.S. I still make mistakes with hardware controls. My wife lets me know when I'm driving.

  • Anyone else here have problems with accidentally IMing their passwords out to coworkers? It's so easy to think you are in one application, but instead you have Lync or Skype for Business up. Quickly type in your password, then hit Enter and ... Oops. There goes another password.


    [font="Tahoma"]Personal blog relating fishing to database administration:[/font]

    [font="Comic Sans MS"]https://davegugg.wordpress.com[/url]/[/font]

  • david.gugg (3/28/2016)


    Anyone else here have problems with accidentally IMing their passwords out to coworkers? It's so easy to think you are in one application, but instead you have Lync or Skype for Business up. Quickly type in your password, then hit Enter and ... Oops. There goes another password.

    Yep, have learned to be very careful with passwords.

  • Iwas Bornready (3/28/2016)


    Good subject today. I agree on the input errors and especially coding for them. Limit input to what is acceptable and allow for easier cleanup when even that is entered wrong. P.S. I still make mistakes with hardware controls. My wife lets me know when I'm driving.

    We always make mistakes, but I think hardware controls allow a greater degree of feedback and understanding when you've changed something

  • Oh man, have you hit upon a topic that really bugs me. At my new job there's a software project that I'm help maintain that we purchased from an out of state organization. (I'll not name who or where they're located.) Its got a web interface that stores its data in a SQL Server database. The single biggest thing that really irritates me about this software product is the interface. For whatever reason the designers and developers of the UI made it so that whenever a user enters anything at all and saves it, then its like the save has been done in concrete. There is no way a user can edit anything, after they've saved it. This causes a lot of editing maintenance which shouldn't have to be done by developers or DBA, but is because the UI is unforgiving. It takes 3 people working on maintenance sometimes up to 50% of our time, in order to eliminate mistakes entered by users, simply because the original designers and developers refused to allow anyone to edit anything. (BTW, before you ask, I tried to change the code so that it would actually allow users to modify their entries after they entered it, but I was given strict orders to never modify the code!)

    At the end of the day, Steve, I think it is a great idea. But I also think that there's people out there still who don't, for whatever reason, ever want a user to edit their own mistakes. I guess their reasoning is that it's much better that developers and/or DBA's hunt down the records that are in question, and edit them either in SSMS or write some script to modify them. And God help you if you happen to get something wrong.

    Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.

  • I have a laptop, that I've turned the track pad off, since it gets ghost inputs when I type. Use a wireless mouse instead.

    I commonly use radio gear where every button and knob has different functions depending the mode and type of button press. If you don't use them daily, you end up consulting the manual or limit yourself to a small set of functionality.

    And most software, especially web based, is a unique snowflake with a crippled experience. It's amazing the ordure even works well enough for us primates to use it.

  • This happens frequently to me when browsing a website from my phone.

    The page opens, I'll click a link or a button, but at just the same moment an image loads or something else happens that shifts the text of the page down, meaning that instead of clicking on what I intended to click on, I'm taken somewhere else entirely.

    I swear most ad-clicks are fat-fingered smartphone users.

    Leonard
    Madison, WI

  • phonetictalk (3/28/2016)


    This happens frequently to me when browsing a website from my phone.

    The page opens, I'll click a link or a button, but at just the same moment an image loads or something else happens that shifts the text of the page down, meaning that instead of clicking on what I intended to click on, I'm taken somewhere else entirely.

    I swear most ad-clicks are fat-fingered smartphone users.

    Something I think that everyone suffers from. Certainly me.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • I hate it when developers don't disable submit type buttons when clicked. It is easy to do in client code. Text saying "do not click more than once" is just not good enough. This is especially true on an order, pay or raise request buttons.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • It's important for a software tool, especially a database management tool like SSMS or VS, to provide a visual queue that environmental context has changed. I believe we've all experienced that moment of horror when, after clicking the execute button on a batch of T-SQL, we suddenly realize the query window is pointing to production instead of development. That's why I now use connection color coding.

    http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Management+Studio+(SSMS)/101920/

    Another potential pitfall are DDL schema comparison / deployment tools when attempting to sync from production to development. Get your connections backward, and the rest of your day is blown (to say the least!).

    "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

  • Drag and drop with Windows 7 (and earlier) is the worst. Windows explorer has a habit of changing the folder in the left pane arbitrarily while I am dragging fines/folders from the right pane. Or worse when it starts up and I collapse a folder then select other folders (all in the "navigation" pane) and suddenly everything is re-positioned where it started. Most times I notice, but a few times I missed. It is unfortunate that other vendors have to deal with this kind of lousy interface too 🙁

  • Very good point to this. Additionally, I frequently get unexpected input simply by being careless on the keyboard and touching the touch pad. it makes some interesting and strange things happen.

    Rick

    One of the best days of my IT career was the day I told my boss if the problem was so simple he should go fix it himself.

  • From the article:


    ...[font="Arial Black"]is especially apparent in Azure [/font]and online interfaces where the control, or the browser, might not respond as quickly as I expect.

    Sounds to me like dexterity isn't the problem there. Sounds to me like the 2nd most important thing in all of programming matters, instead. Performance.

    I know there are people that swear by it but the more I hear of Azure, the more I think I'll be left swearing at it, instead.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.
    "Change is inevitable... change for the better is not".

    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)
    Intro to Tally Tables and Functions

  • Eric M Russell (3/28/2016)


    It's important for a software tool, especially a database management tool like SSMS or VS, to provide a visual queue that environmental context has changed. I believe we've all experienced that moment of horror when, after clicking the execute button on a batch of T-SQL, we suddenly realize the query window is pointing to production instead of development. That's why I now use connection color coding.

    http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Management+Studio+(SSMS)/101920/

    Another potential pitfall are DDL schema comparison / deployment tools when attempting to sync from production to development. Get your connections backward, and the rest of your day is blown (to say the least!).

    I use this too. Unfortunately, at the moment I have to use PL/SQL Developer and cannot find anything quite so helpful.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply