## 30 If you knew what they do…

...with the things you created. You can never imagine all the bizarre behavior of the users of hardware, whether computerized or not. I'm not creating user interfaces for cars but just using it sometimes before it is sold. Pre-production versions are always awful, full of bugs. It's like any softwares but not only with the good practices to create and develop them. The first problem is...the physical interface. A car is not a computer with a standard keyboard or a touch screen. Designers want to create an «experience», a kind of atmosphere with the materials, the shape of the buttons, the colors, etc...And there are people who are in charge of the User Experience (UX). The problem is to know who has the «final cut». If buttons are dispatched everywhere on the dashboard, it can be a problem for UX....especially if UX management comes at the end of the process.

I recently used one of the Group's flagship cars, which will be launched in a few months' time. And just before that, I had to charge this electric vehicle. If you've never used one, it's not like filling up a petrol (or internal combustion engine, ICE) car. It's not like plugging in your vacuum cleaner. The car has to be in park, like an ICE, but there is a communication cable between the charging point and the car. The car locks the plug when the communication is right. And to release it, you have to cut this communication. Sometimes it's with the interface of the charger, sometimes it's with the car. And for a pre-production car, it doesn't always work. So when I went to charge the car, the cable I found was broken: the socket had been ripped out, leaving bits and wires dangling. Normally, if you can't unplug the socket, you have to get someone with a computer to plug into the car to deactivate the function. But someone has found a quicker way ... to destroy the charger and the car! I can now imagine what
 could go wrong in real life if a car had a bug like that. The solution was probably to move the charger and the car several times, but I'm not sure that all chargers allow this, such as a domestic charger. The other problem with the charger is wear and tear on the pins and contacts of the socket. Sometimes they don't communicate and you can't lock the socket. A bad contact is random and you have to move the socket up or down to make contact just to lock it. It's never explained to the user, and I've seen a lot of testimonials on Youtube about problems with charging points. Dimensional tolerances could explain it, and I'm sure you've experienced the problem with a socket at home.

That was for physical problems, but of course there are other problems with softwares and UI. I was testing softwares for a selection, several years ago, and I had some habits from an old software that did the same work. I was making queries to find out the status of a database, using an interface. In one of the new software, there was a simple interface to see your "wallet", another more detailed development for a more complex extract. You could click on the result to see the details. And there was a more general interface for querying the whole database... but you couldn't click on the result and had to write down each entry on a piece of paper to ask for details. In the end, this software was chosen (and not for good reasons...). 7 years later, they finally found that the second interface was the right one and added the ability to click on the results to see details. I've done hundreds of bug reports and feature requests, but when it's a software used by thousands of people in different countries, it's ve
ry, very long, especially with a small development team. I've done a lot of customisation to overcome problems like using code in fields because I couldn't create a new field in the database, or because the field couldn't be queried.

For example, when I'm creating a new tool with a spreadsheet, I try to look at people's habits. Now I use the same colour codes everywhere and limit the number of fonts and colours. Sometimes I have to rebuild everything, but I'm always trying to make a smooth evolution. And the most important thing is that I block any possibility of modifying the tool, because there's always someone who will do it the wrong way. I have a big spreadsheet that I use in my work with 7 different people who can modify, delete or add information. We kept the original version in case there was a problem... But after 2 years of use it was a mess. I had to understand what was developed as a Visual Basic script (I hate it) and what could go wrong. Now I'm waiting for the next big development to ask for modifications of the structure and...some protections to avoid such problems. I have the same problems with measuring instruments. With only 20 buttons and one screen, you can't imagine what a user could do ...wrong and what functions 
they could activate with a combination of buttons. I know how to reset and set the correct configuration. It's always quicker than asking someone how they did it. Backup and reset are always the key! But you knew that because you do it on your own computer/smartphone, didn't you? 

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