Comment by Jtsummers
1 year ago
That takes a pretty basic safety mechanism to address, require confirmation after the change. Windows has (had?) that, after 15 or 30 seconds or whatever from a change (like to resolution or something) it reverts back without confirmation. This makes changes of all sorts easy and cheap to perform. The worst case is you idle for 30 seconds waiting for it to go back to a legible form.
I think having the monochrome mode (which might be available at start time, and would also (temporarily) reset the font) would help with this and other problems (e.g. if one colour of the display is defective). This might be used for the UI to confirm the change but also when you start the computer that it can display such a message so that you can use that to recover from this and other problems (including screen resolution, colours, fonts, languages, and many more).
And when they click through the confirmation without reading it like the vast majority of users?
If you can't see it because you borked up the colors badly enough, why would you be clicking on it?
Didn't say the buttons were invisible, just text.
Even if this specific example is flawed, non-technical users can and do end up in similar non-sensical situations that require a call to support to sort out. The more customization that's possible, the more complicated those calls can get. (Think of the support guy that has to figure out that Grandma's Windows Home setup has custom group policy settings that her well-meaning grandson setup to make things simpler for her by hiding this or that, and now she can't follow the tech's instructions that work for 99.9% of users)
Not only that, but they do so enough that the added cost to field those support calls is enough for companies to change their products to reduce their likelihood.
Almost no-one on this forum falls into the category of user I'm describing. And this kind of user is one of the most common for general consumer software. There is a real cost burden to supporting software with configurability.
And when this kind of thing gets messed up, do users go "Oops! My bad!"? No, they go "This software sucks, I'm going to use <competitor> instead where this kind of thing never happens!"
1 reply →