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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

I recently had to enter a promotional code from a company that obviously spent a lot of money on design. The code contained letters and numbers, and was quite long.

You've probably already guessed: the lovely font used for the code made O and 0 indistinguishable, as well as I, l, and 1.

UX designers forget that functionality is more important than beauty. If you can achieve both, that's great. But without functionality, a beautiful UI is useless.

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It's not even hard to exclude possibly ambiguous characters from codes in the first place. Then the designers can use whatever they want.

It's the reason grid layout ICs don't have rows I, O, Q, S, X or Z.

It's not a bad idea to exclude all vowels -- which gets rid of the ambiguous I and O -- for a different reason: some people are going to be unhappy if something like SHIT appears in the middle of their randomly-generated promo code. (This isn't just about "taboo" words; some people might be upset at TRUMP or BIDEN or GOD or JEW, for instance.)

but then is JHWH ok?

According to the Jews, yes.

If "FCK" or "XXXCNTSLT" appear in the middle of the code, do you think the people who would have been offended by "SHIT" will be happier?

A is a vowel

Right. You got my point though.

Yes.

Talking about taboo words, this makes me think about the words you can spell with hex numbers. When I did a bit of embedded programming and electronics control, we used these to visually mark up the raw data. I remember DEADBEEF and B00B, and there were others I forgot.

CAFEBABE is famously the java class file magic number

ofc i know this because im writing a jvm for my thesis :/

And the ever popular A55FACE.

> DEADBEEF and B00B

0xDEADBEEF is even more evocative. OxB00B is, well, problematic.

I’m not sure what your point is here. Excluding visually ambiguous characters from randomised strings that are going to be manually entered is very common, very trivial, and does not compromise “beauty”.

It sounds like were you working on this project you would’ve unnecessarily compromised. And given that you’re seeking to make some generalised point about “UX designers”, it honestly sounds like you both undervalue UX design (since you’re looking for the first opportunity to dismiss design in an instance where the real issue is that ambiguous characters are being used in the first place), and don’t understand the bounds of UX design as a skill set (because any good, and note that I’m not saying “very good”, UX designer, will consider exactly what you said).

Sorry that you used a crappy website but I don’t think it’s justification to generalise a profession.

And, for the record, I’ve never been as much as a front end developer, let alone a designer. My speciality is certainly much more under the hood than that. I’m just…aware that those people do good, important work.

Typography is a bit of a thankless profession. If you do a good job, nobody notices because your job is to make type unnoticeable. It's only when someone messes up that you suddenly notice the type and start thinking about it. Unfortunately that means you're more likely to think that typographers don't know what they're doing (whatever the application); it's the only type you really looked at.

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