Yes! You are correct! There was no indication at all of errors or missing data. There WERE a couple screens that required me to scroll down and accept terms, but the final screen was not one of this type.
My company’s HR health/dental enrollment website is this way. Click through a bunch of screens of personal and dependent data entry, select providers and network doctors, and hit submit and the submit button turns from inviting green to inactive grey with no other changes to the page. No confirmation number, no new page, nothing. Did it really submit? Were my changes accepted? Will I be insured for the next year? Who the hell knows.
Yes, that’s as awful as not giving a hint or help with insufficiently filled out forms. I had that happen a few times, too. As I mentioned above, I used to be a developer, but like every other developer I was also a user, so I took user concerns into account when writing apps. That’s why I cannot understand how these blunders happen.
This is stretching the definition of “software design” since there is sensory and display hardware involved as well as software, but my partner’s 2007 Mitsubishi is currently showing an orange alert on the dashboard: “Service Engine Soon”.
“Well, that’s freaking informative”, I said, and dug out the car manual.
Car manual says this light can come on because
• the gas filler cap wasn’t put on tightly enough; or
• the car is overdue for a maintenance visit; or
• it’s low on oil; or
• something else, for further details go purchase a DeviceNet module and it will interpret the codes
Why the fuck can’t an informative message show up on the dashboard? “Gas tank isn’t airtight; check gas cap” ; “oil pressure low (xx lbs)”; “air-fuel mixture is erratic; get a tune-up”; “you are overdue for general maintenance check” or whatever?
What I’m being provided with is about as useful as a debugger message that just says “a problem occurred”.
My biggest problem with that is the problem could be mostly harmless (overdue for maintenance), or it could be catastrophic if you keep driving for too long (low on oil), but there’s no way to know. (Unless I guess the check engine is meant to serve as a general warning, letting you know you need to look at the oil pressure gauge)
Oh, yes, brings back bad memories of the Pontiac Montana we used to own. We loved the car, except if you tightened the gas cap two clicks (instead of one), the SES light came on. The only way to clear the error was to take it to our local dealer, who could clear it in about two minutes, at no charge. PITA.
It’s not just laziness. A lazy developer would just use an existing standard implementation, that has those features. It’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect where the incompetent developers think that they can make something from scratch that’s better than the standard solutions. Or they’re so incompetent that they don’t even know of the existence of the standard solutions.
Auto parts stores will sell you a dongle that plugs into a socket under the steering wheel. The dongle will give you a number that you can look up on a website. For each possible number, there is a list of possible problems. It does seem like they should be able to show you that list of possibilities on the screen.
I believe that “dongle” is an OBD-II scanner. As little as twenty bucks on Amazon.
The thing with consumer OBD scanners is that the onboard system reads data points about WHAT is happening (pressures, oxygen levels, electrical faults, bus interruptions, etc.) but not necessarily WHY it’s happening. Pros have a more elaborate scan tool that breaks it all down but they still have to rely on training and experience to know what it means.
Yes, the online research I did indicates this model is assessed with one of those critters. But they should build that functionality into the car and its dashboard. My 1965-vintage car would tell me the oil pressure, amps from the alternator, etc; nowadays it’s easy to set up a display that can render any message that the computer determines to be relevant, but instead I get “Gee something’s wrong”. 
This might not be the best fit for this thread, as it isn’t really about software design. It is a general example of how everything Microsoft does is stupid.
I teach a Tuesday/Thursday night class in a computer lab. Last night, the students were all gone, and I was about to turn the lights out, when I noticed one of the student computers was showing an error, with nothing else open. Curious, I walked over to see what it said…
I found it funny enough to take a picture, which I think speaks for itself:
Sorry, I’m not seeing what’s funny or stupid about that.
Yes, I’ve seen much worse error messages from MS in the old days. This at least gives you the executable where the error occurred (msedge.dll, so it’s Edge), an error code you can look up on the net and the advice to reinstall the app.
My point was that the error message is saying MS’s own dll wasn’t designed to work with Windows.
That used to be often the case, because programs installed their own version of certain system DLLs and overwrote the former version, and some other programs weren’t compatible with the new version and stopped working. It was called “DLL hell” and was a mess. In the last years, MS has done some measures to prevent these issues, but I can believe that it still sometimes happen, as your example shows.
And yes, with this you sure have a point, because it’s a classic example of bad software design.
The error message says the DLL was either not designed to work with Windows OR it contains an error. Obviously Microsoft did not release a version of msedge.dll that doesn’t work with Windows. Either the wrong version of the file got installed (perhaps from some attempt by the student to install something inappropriate), or more likely, the file is corrupted, perhaps by a disk or memory error.
Not as obvious as you would hope.
My credit card is expiring soon, so I went to my pest control company’s online billing porthole to update my payment information, as I have their services auto billed to that card. Their website won’t let me simply edit my credit card information, I have to enter it again as if it’s a completely new card. But the worst part of the design is that their website simply lists your saved payment methods by credit card number. Since the new card has the same number as the old one, and it doesn’t show me the expiration date or any other information, I can’t tell which one is the old almost expired card, and which one is the new one I just entered. I want to delete the old card from my saved payment methods, but I can’t tell which one it is.
Yesterday, I was helping my mom to sign up for a Signal group she wanted to join. They helpfully sent her an email with joining instructions. The email contained two things:
1: Directions for installing and setting up Signal. Which she had tried to follow faithfully, but with no effect, since she already had it installed and set up (her siblings use it for a group chat).
2: A QR code to scan for joining that particular chat. Which she could use by simply aiming her phone camera at the screen of her phone. Which is the only online device she has.
What, notably, was not in the email was the link itself, which, if it had existed, she could have just clicked on.
I’m not sure if the stupidity was from the creators of that group, or if they were just using a standard template created by Signal. But someone had a stupid.
I ended up forwarding the email to myself, and then used her phone to scan the QR on my phone.