This safety mechanism is not there if the drawer is embedded in a larger frame where tipping over is not possible.
Sometimes it's not bad UX, it's just the thing trying to protect you from your stupidity.
http://www.ahfa.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ASTMTip-OverWa...
Think about that: children have died from 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴. It's easy to be smug power user complaining about design when you only consider how you interact with things.
This very thing happened to me decades ago: I walked into parents' bedroom to find my fearless younger brother, ignoring my yells, climbing up the handles on the front of my father's dresser. I yelled for my parents but I couldn't stop him fast enough. As the dresser began to tip I got between him and it and pushed upward, both removing him from the dresser and tipping it back to rest.
I was truly shaken and astonished that this child might have killed himself, since I knew that the top drawer was filled with my father's most valuable (and heaviest) WWII memorabilia and that the entire dresser, about 5 feet tall, was hardwood with decorative protrusions on the front.
I know I become hyper aware of any small black specks in my peripheral vision since they resemble spiders that could have posed a threat to our ancestors so we evolved these heightened senses to avoid them.
And in nature you do not really have much big objects that could fall on you if you climb them.
Maybe a large boulder loose ... but they are very rare in my experience. So I guess it makes sense we are not prepared for it. What is much more likely, a loose rock which breakes off at climbing .. we are prepared for. Instinct reflexes are pretty fast in that case, I noticed ..
I would hope the ability to sense loss of balance equilibrium would innately result in having the strong urge to bail from that activity to sturdier ground, given you knew you could safely land on the ground without a worse outcome.
A tipping cabinet takes much longer to fall unlike a rock dislodging when you are climbing the side of a cliff in nature. Maybe it is simply a blind spot in our evolution like you suggest, evolution never optimized us for this edge case scenario not experienced in the wild.
1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dizziness/mul...
Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
The most common sighting of this in action is OSs (ask "how do I do Y with Linux" and you'll be pointed at documentation, say "Linux can't do Y but Windows can" and you are more likely to get a couple of pre-baked solutions sent your way, and the same works the other way around and with other OSs) but I've seen it work for scripting languages/environments (powershell, bash, ...), databases (postgres, SQL Server, Oracle, ...) and other tools.
I am amazed there is a law describe this. This is so accurate. I couldn't be bothered to answer questions even if I knew the answer, but I would be bothered to correct it if the answer were wrong.
Update could legitimately mean upgrade of course and you could have it essentially auto-correct, but I'm generally wary of software trying to do what it thinks I mean rather than what I explicitly say (and not doing anything if what I explicitly say doesn't match up with its language). At some point it will mis-guess and do something I really didn't want.
Now suppose instead of "update" they used called the functionality "sync". I don't think I would have the same problem, since linguistically and contextually, I wouldn't use Brew to _sync_ packages. But it does make sense to use "sync" when talking about getting updated information about which packages are available--we're syncing the local catalogue with the remote catalogue.
So I agree with grumpy blog that their use of "update" here is suboptimal. There are better fitting words that both better describe the functionality and avoid the confusion.
I'm not a heavy brew user, but if it works like other package managers then the "update" command is a fairly casual, frequently used, and typically reversible kind of action. If you pull in too high a version of something, oops, remove and redo. Whereas "upgrade" is something you probably only do when you have a specific reason.
I mean, it's sometimes sensible for apps to auto-correct on inputs, but a frequently used "muscle-memory" kind of action should never auto-correct into something heavy and non-reversible. I imagine that's the thinking there.
It's not something very intuitive since we generally expect furniture to be stable in normal usage. To make it worse, when it starts tipping all drawers slide open and bang into you, compounding the effect and accelerating the move.
Anyway, you need to close those drawers eventually, right? Why not before opening the next drawer?
Put another way, the alternative is to support the general use-case of disorganization: "I'm not sure where the thing I'm looking for is, but I need it in a hurry!" Do you really want to categorically assume in such situations that people have mitigated the tip-over risk in some external way? Just to allow for high-speed riffling?
Your castor idea only really helps if the search happened to start with the bottom drawer first. That's sorta logical, at least in some cases, but I don't think you can come anywhere close to assuming it's going to happen all the time.
The one illustrated isn't deep enough for hanging files -- maybe the odd ream of A4, pens and pencils. Will need an awful lot of carefully placed paperclips and pencils to tip. Which is why you rarely see those locking each other out. If you use it for storing your collection of lead weights you bring it on yourself (the base of the drawer would probably fall through anyway)... :)
Even if there's a top drawer with folders, to open more than one drawer, a bottom one would be open anyway, with the same result.
That set of drawers is not sizeable enough to warrant tipping protection that is so unfriendly to the user. If it were a 2m high filing cabinet, I would agree, but it isn't.
Dressers made of thin, light wood, filled with drawers full of clothes and/or toys never have this safety feature, and those are the things which need it most; they all require (or recommend) that you instead strap the top of the dresser to the drywall, assuming that it is both against a wall and that the wall is finished with drywall, and not some other wall material, such as brick, which is common in certain geographies.
Too many people commenting here completely missed the point of the linked website entirely, immediately homed in on some minutia, commented with some variant of "uh, actually...", and even got that wrong, arguably.
It's really amazing to me.
Thinking about people as stupid, as a designer, is suboptimal and miguided in my opinion.
I agree that using the world "stupid" could be ill-receive and other words could avoid this problem, but with the right audience this shouldn't be a problem.
We are also dumber when stressed, when sick, and absolutely so when we are both at once.
In my opinion, it is bad UX, but for a reason. There might be better solutions.
How about a pulley system which does not require locking the drawers but instead pulls the other drawers shut when i open a new one. No locking, no tipping, better UX.
The system is clever and had its importance.
But people don't, so these companies introduce measures "for safety" by compromising the UX for all their users (can't open multiple drawers at once even if you wanted to) in order to prevent a dangerous scenario that the operator failed to address (leaving the dresser unanchored and ready to topple over).
And what do we think is the goal of the manufacturer? Is their goal to provide a public service and preventing people from injuring themselves? Unlikely, as it's still entirely possible to overload the drawers, or put something on top, that will still provide a dangerous result. No, their goal isn't safety because the safety is out of their hands. Their real goal twofold: First, to prevent situations where their products can be associated with dangerous or fatal situations, even if the fault has nothing to do with them (operator error, not product error). Second, in events where dangerous or fatal scenarios do happen, be able to say "we've taken measures for safety, so don't look at us".
This "feature" isn't for their users' benefits, it's to protect themselves, and they do so at the expense of all the users that _do_ use their products safely and as intended.
Also, it still doesn't prevent toppling over from a single heavily loaded drawer.
Don’t make drawers?
This is my filing cabinet. I put a bunch of papers in it. It's not going to tip over. Your assumption of a worst-case scenario is getting in the way of how I actually use the cabinet that I own.
It is still bad UX, when the result is frustrating.
And some people do not need nor want to be protected from all forms of stupidy. I mean if you would accidentally blow up something by pressing the wrong button, then yes, safety first. But some people actually can use drawers without letting them fall. And if the worst case happens .. it probably won't be catastrophic either. I mean you can break a leg or ancle falling down on any road anyway, if you don't pay attention.