More reasons to love XKCD

[prog]

* The ambiguity of this comic:

Slashdorks will read it and be like "rofl i deal with idiots like this at work every damn day, but they'd fire me if I hung up on them for real", even though I'm fairly confident that's not the joke. Something for everyone!

* The comic is hand-lettered. I have probably already mentioned this as a reason I like the comic, but I'll say it again. Hand-lettering makes any comic look about ten times better to me. (And you could make a "zero times ten" wisecrack here, but I would retort that there is a basic charm to the art. Very basic, sure, but still.)

* There are no comments or ratings or anything attached to the comic. Everyone likes getting comments, and I'd understand if he wanted to have comments so that every comic would have an ever-growing beard of public "LOL ^^;" messages attached, but I wouldn't like it.

* The cartoonist invites and even encourages direct linking to the cartoon images, even printing the necessary HTML code beside each one. That's great.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah.

Although sometimes it continues:

USER: But when I said I wanted an autostabbing feature in the toaster I didn't mean it should stab me!

ME: Remember when I explained that it would have no way of knowing who it would be stabbing because the perceptual universe of machines is too narrow to accommodate notions of identity?

USER: I remember you used a lot of big words I didn't understand.

In fairness to users, clearly stating the consequences of requirements is incredibly hard, as it requires an ability to reason about conditional probabilities. If the Monty Hall problem has taught us anything, it is that most people are completely incapable of doing that.

Ergo: prototype and user-test. Rinse, repeat. Although if you can figure out a way to get users to user-test the systems they want you'll make a million out of it.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Most of our users refuse to do testing. They're "too busy". They'd prefer to waste future time dealing with problems and misdirected design rather than think things through up front (yet another persistent human trait).