Wednesday, February 20, 2013

2013 Mac Book Pro Reset button is pressed a bit too easily ...

So in what may hopefully be an ongoing series of design bloopers here's something from my 2013 Mac Book Pro.  The reset button was previously completely separate from the keyboard, but has now been placed just above the delete key, so that I accidentally hit it a few times a week.

It does have a confirmation dialog to prevent me immediately shutting down my computer when I'm typing, but it seems like a bit of a hack.  I guess there must be some strong technical reason for having changed this around, but I'm not seeing much in the way of improvement in terms of user experience here ...


This seems to fit well with some of Nielsen's usability heuristics.  It does well in terms of "Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors", but perhaps not so well in terms of "Error Prevention"


Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
They've got the confirmation action, but better to design to avoid error occurring in the first place, and Raskin hates confirmation dialogs ... It's particularly odd since the previous mac book pros were designed such that this was never an issue - the reset button was out of reach in a silvered portion of the body of the MBP in the top right, and was set into the frame so that it was difficult to press accidentally ...

No comments: