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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Proper UI/UX design is tremendously difficult, which is why software engineers should never attempt it in a user-facing product. When it comes to on-screen text, you must choose your words very carefully, because someone out there will read them the wrong way.

Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

If you're wondering why software UX these days is a colorful, foam-padded Barney-esque hellscape of smiling Alegria people and error messages of the form "Oopsie, we made a boo-boo :(", this is why.

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> Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

> "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

At first, I laughed.

Then I realized, I think I remember seeing this error message when I was six years old, and being freaked out.

Imagine how lifelong law abiding citizens felt!

I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare. I would estimate a regular computer user would see it monthly? Maybe more?

I mean, I can totally see how it would happen if you didn't have a UX team, and your developers didn't have any exposure to the concept. The message makes sense to a programmer.

And, they couldn't easily fix anything post-release, right?

(This also makes the original Macintosh interface all the more impressive in my eyes. System 1 is a masterpiece.)

> I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare.

Might have to do with why nowadays Windows 10 blue screens show a sideways ":(" smiley instead of a face despite being in graphics mode.

Back when i first encountered smileys (and that was at the cover of an "internet magazine" - i was already into computers and programming for years at the time and even used the internet and IRC) i didn't understood what they were, i thought they were some sort of code like the :// or @ in addresses.

My guess is that whoever added that sideways smiley is as blind to how it looks to people who don't know about them as whoever who wrote "illegal" was to people back in Win95 times.

> Imagine how lifelong law abiding citizens felt!

I like to think this implies that they had committed countless crimes by the age of 6

> used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

> "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

It does not accuse the user of a crime, but the program (which, by the laws (rules) that the OS enforces on the running programs, is true).

Thanks for showing your view. It does help in making me be more empathetic to UX/UI designers.

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