Since my central air conditioning is down I’ve confined myself to working from my bedroom where I’ve installed a small window unit.  Unfortunately, since I can’t cram all of my computer systems in there (and I probably wouldn’t be able to cool the room), I had to shut down everything except a laptop.  This means that my main file and media server is offline.  This is annoying, but I can still work since I have an offline replica on the laptop.  The only problem is that the laptop seem to think that I don’t know this and sees fit to remind me every 30 minutes or so that “dominion is still offline” with one of those little notification balloons.  I wonder who was responsible for this bit of code?  Why do I need to be reminded of something I’m painfully aware of? 

I suppose I could look on it as a learning experience, as I’ve learned where to find the setting that turns that balloon off.  But it brings up a point about user interface design.  I hate annoying pop-ups, notification balloons, etc that simply repeat stuff that I already know.  A good example of this was an internal support application that our corporate masters forced on us through the automatic update feature they load on our laptops.  This helpful little application decided that it would be good to tell you every time your network connection was lost. 

I found out about this while traveling and spending time in a conference room with spotty wireless coverage and only 5 wired ports for 9 people.  We’d share the wired ports by taking turns using them as needed, which means we had to periodically disconnect the ethernet plug.  Windows already features a little balloon for this along with the little “X” on the adapter in the system tray.  So if I’ve just pulled the plug, and Windows has notified me, why does this app need to do the same again?  Worse, unlike Windows (which allows you to disable notification), the app had absolutely no way to stop being notified for dropped network connections.  The best you could do would be to delay notifications for a while.

I was suitably annoyed by this, so much so that I was moved to submit a rather angry trouble ticket against it.  I was a bit surprised to get an actual phone call from one of the developers about a week later (mainly because I expected them to just ignore the ticket).  It turns out that the development team had received quite a lot of “feedback” along the same lines as mine and that it was quite unexpected to them.  But they did add an option in the last release to turn off notifications.

I think part of the problem with both Windows and with our internal support people is that they think in terms of the lowest common denominator of user.  There’s no way for me to specify that I’ve done this stuff for a while and don’t need excessive handholding.  Since I’d not heard of this new application they were deploying until we got an email saying it would be sent to our systems in the next few weeks, I can’t help but think they didn’t involve users with some technical experience in their trials (if they even bothered with trials).

Anyhow, I suppose being too verbose can be excused provided that it can be changed.  Making something verbose, annoying, and useless to certain users without allowing it to be disabled isn’t excusable.