“Tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone”
Recently, I asked on social media, “Is there a UX design equivalent to this?”, and attached this photo:
In case you don’t know, this is a (mythical) male-to-male power extender. Requests for those seem to spike around Christmas, and the reason is this: if you put up your lights, chain them together, and only then realize you did it in the wrong order – with the holes next to a socket – it seems much easier to imagine using this cable than reversing all the lights.
There are apparently other uses, like powering your whole house from a portable generator. But I don’t know if you can actually buy such a cable. What I do know is why you wouldn’t want to buy one. The cable has a horrible flaw that might not be immediately obvious: once you plug it in, the other end now has exposed live wires that can electrocute someone.
So, my question was really: What in design has a similar property? What’s something that seems like a good idea, but is actually pretty bad and/or even dangerous?
I would be curious if you have any nominations, but I got two answers that seem interesting enough to share.
The first one comes to us from the (also mythical) Jargon File, in an entry for DWIM:
DWIM [acronym: Do What I Mean]
Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else’s typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!’.
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another [user] there typed
delete *$to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending$to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren’t any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The [user] managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch [Ctrl-Alt-Del] after only a half dozen or so files were lost. […]DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have.
I have a complicated relationship with the Jargon File – a collection of computing anecdotes from the 1970s – and I don’t know if I fully trust it, but I liked this story and Wikipedia has a bit more about it:
Teitelman’s DWIM package “corrected errors automatically or with minor user intervention”, similarly to autocorrection for natural language. […] Critics of DWIM argued that it was “tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone, and no others” and called it “Do What Teitelman Means” […]
If this rings bells, it’s because we talked about a similar idea before vis-à-vis Postel’s Law.
The second answer was a property of the desktop trashcan on Windows or a Mac, and this one I could’ve thought of myself, because in 2020, I wrote about it in my book’s newsletter.
To spoil the story: any onscreen trashcan that has a bulging/filled/gross appearance whenever there are files inside will prompt some percentage of users to clean it just to restore its pristine appearance… in the process nullifying its utility and purpose.
Like the original power extender, the second visual state of the trash seems like a useful thing to offer to the users, but it comes with a possibly regrettable price. This is what connects the two stories – both talk about “nice,” but underbaked improvements leading to potentially losing files.
Oh, you say, all of onscreen trashcans do that? Well, then, there’s your problem.
