You never know what the users mean

A couple of days ag Elon Musk tweeted (it's still called that, right?) about how their recommendation algorithm easily can get things wrong since they don't know why you are sharing content with friends. This is a great example of a problem I have to deal with on a regular basis.

Using soft limits to prevent abuse with good user experience

When you develop a service you will probably run into a situation where you want to put in some arbitrary large limit on something to prevent bad behaving clients from using too much of your resources. This can be a max length of the URI, max length of each request header, max size of a request and so on. What we tend to do is often to return some kind of error when this happens and expect the client to fix their request if it is legitimate. But what if it is a legitimate request - just something you didn't expect to be valid? Or what if there is a bug in the client, but the user have no way of fixing the client but rely heavily on your service? Do you really want to completely break your users in these cases?

How to annoy your users featuring Volvo

I've owned a Volvo since 2017 and I would have hoped would have been fixed by a software update at this time, but no. So here are two things that annoy me pretty much every time I use the car. And then a third recent WTF moment.

How to prevent your users from deposit checks with your app

So it has been a long time since I encountered a user interface that make stupid assumptions about their users but a few weeks ago my bank managed to do so.

Kanban and rants

Since I apparently got carried away blogged a lot in August 2008 I have to pick a few of the more interesting posts from that month and see if there is any update to be made. I guess that also means that by definition the things I don't mention today are not that interesting any more...

When in doubt - don't brick your hardware

Being an Xfinity Home customer I've had two interesting experiences with their hardware. The user experience have been weird at best.