A fun bit of storytelling on the website for a git client Retcon:
I don’t have personal experience with Retcon. I definitely struggled a lot with git’s syntax over the years, and have my own cheatsheet that looks similar to this.
But what I really liked from this page was the elevation of undo to be the North Star. I think it’s very, very well deserved.
To the best of my knowledge, undo in its modern form arrived in 1983 with Apple Lisa – Byte magazine called it a “tremendous security blanket” – and then over the next decade or so blossomed into its current state: an infinite, multi-level, lightning-fast safety hatch that works pretty much everywhere, always there in the bottom-left corner of your keyboard, so second-nature you might not even realize you’re invoking it.
In early apps, before undo arrived, you had to be very careful about what you did and when you saved your work. Later on, undo worked on just one level, so you had to think a lot about how to spend it before things became irreversible.
Today, undo just works. It truly became Back Space: The Next Generation.
But any user-facing “just works” hand wave means a lot of people’s hard and invisible work behind the scenes. So if you’re reading this, and at some point in your career you worked on making undo better, my tip of the hat to you (and send me a message!).
If there was one go-to example of an impenetrable error message in the 1980s, it must have been this – popping up, for example, if your disk drive was dirty:
On some technical level, the options made sense: “Abort” would stop whatever you were doing, “Retry” would try to repeat the action, and “Ignore” would proceed as if there was no error. But in the heat of a moment, or seeing it for the first time, this was a puzzling choice to be asked to make. Not only were the words weighted improperly (the seemingly most innocuous action here, “Ignore,” was actually the only one that could do actual lasting damage), but it also wasn’t entirely clear what’s the safe thing to do to get out of the situation.
(The redesign of “Abort, Retry, Ignore” was “Abort, Retry, Fail,” and it wasn’t really a huge improvement.)
Last night, I installed Google Photos on my iPhone, and the first message that greeted me was this:
This is really a matryoshka doll of bad dialog presentation.
First: any buttons in a dialog should be labeled with enough information to keep me going. Here, both have generic labels, so now I need to pay attention.
Second: Even after reading, I have no idea what is the choice I’m making. I see the pathway marked “yes, keep it the way I had it” and, sure – this would be generally what I want from any given computer on any given Sunday. But what’s the actual alternative?
But the third, and most important one, is this: this dialog has no safe escape hatch. By now, in UX design, we established quite a few canonical escape hatches:
a Cancel button,
a × close box,
a “No, thanks” link,
a press of an Escape key.
But you can’t × this dialog out. The main button seems positive, but it also feels like I’m taking an action with consequences, and I don’t want to deal with that. There is a “No, thanks,” but it doesn’t feel like the other “No, thankses” I have seen – it’s juxtaposed with copy that makes it seem… a dangerous thing to choose.
And this last bit makes it a pretty serious design offense, because you are now messing with foundational stuff. You need to protect those escape hatches for the future; the moment you introduce hesitation into the mix and taint “No, thanks” as a concept, really bad things will start happening all across your product.
In real life, fire doors have to open outwards when pushed with body weight, aircraft stick shakers are impossible to ignore, and anti-lock braking systems do smart things even after your brain turns off its smart parts.
I know seeing a dialog like this would never happen in a moment of true panic, but sometimes I think of the user in their most absent-minded moment: trying to get their kids to hurry up for school, on hold with an annoying cable provider, with a cat looking like it’s about to jump up directly into a running toaster. A dialog on their phone pops up. If that dialog absolutely has to happen, what is the escape hatch it can offer so they can dismiss it safely if they cannot think about it at all?
This Google Photos screen needs a lot more rethinking and rewriting, but in its current incarnation, it desperately needs a clear and trustworthy escape hatch I can tap absentmindedly, just so I can get to my photos.
I moved Keyboard Maestro app to a different folder as it was running. I gather there must be some technical reason for the app to have to be power cycled, so I appreciated this warning, and the thoughtful bit of copywriting: “Continue” is caveated with “not recommended” so that you feel more comfortable choosing “Quit,” usually the less safe choice. I thought it was a good attempt to add the right scent to the strange options at a strange moment.
Did you catch one interesting bit in the last post? The undo shortcut in Paint and other apps in Windows 1.0 used to be Shift+Esc:
This reminded me that the classic Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut was initially Ctrl+Alt+Esc. Except, people apparently invoked it a bit too often by accident, so it was split to require two hands for extra safety.
When you look at the keyboard for the original PC, it all makes sense. Esc is at the edge of the main typing block, and in line with all the modifier keys. It would make sense to build a system around this, and it’s interesting to imagine the Esc Kinematic Universe that never happened.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s good that it didn’t. ⌘Z or Ctrl+Z are much easier to get to than Shift+Esc, especially in concert with cut/copy/paste next door – that system introduced by Apple Lisa and Mac teams deserves endless trophies and infinite accolades. (In case you are curious, Windows 1.0 used Delete for Cut, Insert for Paste, and… F2 for Copy.)
But it has always been peculiar to me that Esc isn’t seeing more use. I see Backspace tasked with all sorts of modifier key combinations in various apps, but Esc – equally available on the other side, and even easier to target on some keyboards – is often left alone.
Poetically, given the beginning of this story, it was Mac that grabbed ⌘⌥Esc for force quit:
There is a nice thoughtful design element in that window that’s worth calling out: the hint line the bottom.
Why, of all places, would this window go out of its way to announce its own shortcut after you already figured out how to open it? I think this might be for a similar reason airlines repeat the safety announcements before every takeoff. If your computer goes haywire, if one of your apps starts hogging resources, if the UI slows down so much any action takes forever, it might benefit you if somewhere in the back of your head exists one small bit of information: “ah yeah, I don’t know how I know this, but I think I’m supposed to press ⌘⌥Esc now.”
Many of you have probably heard the repeated story of the first Moon landing in 1969 almost getting undone by a bunch of onboard computer glitches:
There could not be a worse time in the flight to have computer problems. At, the time the press gleefully reported how Armstrong seized manual control from a crippled and failing onboard computer and managed to heroically and single-handedly land the spaceship on the surface of the Moon against all odds.
Robert Wills argues against this narrative in this 2020 talk, wanting to shine a spotlight away from Neil Armstrong and toward people who designed the software (among them Margaret Hamilton), and the mission control’s Steve Bales, who made a decision not to abort the launch as the 1201 and 1202 errors were piling up.
The argument: the computer was working as intended, it fixed itself over and over again owing to its clever software, and it actually helped Buzz Aldrin understand (at least subconsciously) what led to the seemingly random and distracting computer errors.
The above is more of a traditional talk than the videos I usually share – a bit more technical, taking up an entire hour, and with generic slides – but it’s buoyed by Wills’s enthusiasm and knowledge.
Besides, it’s lunar landing! Did you know about DSKY and its fascinating keyboard and UI? Did you know the spacecraft’s window was part of the interface, too? Or that its software was woven into the hardware? Or that the Apollo 11 had a… guillotine in it?
An unsung hero of the decision not to abort the landing is Richard Koos, a NASA simulation supervisor who […] 11 days before the launch of Apollo 11, put the team of controllers including Bales […] through a simulation that intentionally triggered a 1201 alarm. […] Unable to figure out what the 1201 was, Bales aborted that simulated landing. He and Flight Director Gene Kranz were dressed down for it by Koos, who put the team through four more hours of training the next day specifically on program alarms. When the 1202 and 1201 alarms occurred during the actual landing, Garman, Bales, and even Duke recognized them immediately.
I feel macOS these days starts feeling like Windows in the 1990s where occasionally some core component of it breaks, and a reboot is necessary to restore it to full functionality again.
But even with that in mind: this happened literally right after the reboot, with nothing much happening and no other signs of the system in distress.
It’s hard for me to even understand what would make this kind of thing pop up. Trash feels like one of the core tenets of a GUI – like undo, or copy/paste, or windows gaining focus. You don’t expect it to just… stop working, especially with a circular error message like the above.
This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.
There’s so much cleverness hiding in here: recognizing that this particular flavour of l’esprit de l’escalier exists, shifting time from the past to the near future, the repurposing of the undo branding, the fallback if things go wrong.
There was, I imagine, even the challenge of having to forget about the previous version of this feature elsewhere, which were the awful emails with RECALL: in the title, which I think maybe only worked in Outlookk, if at all? (Everyone else suffered like green bubble people do today.) I don’t know. Sometimes the biggest hurdle to a great idea is blocking bad execution you already know from your head. On the other hand, sometimes someone else’s bad execution can be motivating.
I even think that not using ⌘Z for this was a clever idea. ⌘Z without text editing context/focus can be really tricky. Do you remember when Safari had ⌘Z to bring back last closed tab before they came to their senses and used ⌘⇧T like Chrome?
It is sometimes harrowing when you want to click it Undo Send and just miss it – keyboard is more precise here – but not sure ⌘Z would register here. Even Esc would be tricky.
I miss when Gmail was in the “young and open to trying new things” phase.
