2000/11/09

Is Bush going to actually be the next president because of a usability bug?

"If your program model is nontrivial, it's probably not the user model." (from Chapter 2 of UI design for programmers) Any time you do something even a little bit complicated, some part of your user population is going to be confused, because they thought that you were doing the simple thing.

Obviously, usability matters for more than just web sites. Tog writes about this in When Interfaces Kill. And this Florida ballot is going to show up in UI books for the next 100 years.

Florida's Web Site

The Florida Department of State web server is bogged down from zillions of people checking election results. State CIO Gene Bryan is quoted by CNN as saying, "There's not a whole lot you can do other than just get through the night and try to regroup in the morning to get some additional resources to handle the workload."

Um, hello? They've got 4 or five stupid GIFs and a gratuitous scrolling Java applet on that damn page. No wonder you can't handle the load. Clue: Turn off the applet and GIFs for a couple of weeks. Duh. Any half-baked web developer would know that.

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

Enter your email address to receive a (very occasional) email whenever I write a major new article. You can unsubscribe at any time, of course.