Comment by DanielHB

19 hours ago

Anecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.

He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version.

I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.

edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.

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DanielHB

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mncharity  14 hours ago

> To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem

[1] Susan Kare https://kare.com/ at EG8 (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ&t=273s

"I designed this image [unhappy Macintosh] and this bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone! So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

"The programmers truly thought at the time that they would be deeply hidden. I know that right after the Mac shipped we were in our software area and a call came in fielded through Apple and it was a woman who was using MacWrite, and it had crashed, and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up! So, I felt kinda bad!"

Transcript from http://jimrattray.net/blog/2014/7/1/on-designing-an-iconic-b... .

MBCook  18 hours ago

Whether you think emojis are ok or not, there are times and places.

That’s not a time and place.

  • something765478  2 hours ago

    Yeah. If I'm trying to debug a problem and keep running into error messages, the emojis would drive me up the wall.

  • DanielHB  8 hours ago

    I know, I was against it when he added it, triggered a 5min discussion and I was "whatever, sure"...