The 14 Crimes of the Software Sector… and their Solutions

jackbellis.com
3 min readDec 21, 2024

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Eventually I’ll carefully rank these by amount of aggregate time lost by users.

  1. Re-typing your email address and almost everything else a zillion times
    Solution: Let the user (or more precisely software developers who in turn create user-desired functionality) own “the input box,” meaning everyplace we type free-form entries. We could then see apps proliferate that eliminate all the re-typing.
  2. The Password Dance
    Solution: tell us, from all the circumstances, whether the system believes an account already exists. Some apps show your name even before you re-log in.
  3. Spam
    Solution: Oh, come on. We can’t solve this problem, or we don’t want to. I think a hack already is possible: everyone creates their own secret word that they hand out to anyone (including companies, creditors, and so on) to be included in their emails. And we all make personal filters to only allow emails to get in when they have the secret word.
  4. Fraudulent “Friendly Names” in Email are deceptive and therefore the least friendly thing in software.
    Solution: I have no idea, just solve it, wudja? Maybe don’t display ‘friendly names,’ unless the recipient ‘accepts’ the friendly name???
  5. Butt Dials
    Solution: Make almost every button that initiates a phone call a “long press.” Users might configure this back to a normal press, but it would protect the uninitiated.
  6. Phishing
    Solution: All companies announce a policy that “We will never send you a link to click on. Always go to our website or call us.” And how about, when you click a link it gives you a shitload more data on the potential action before it actually sends?
  7. Reply All
    Solution: OMG, how fucked up is this one? I think I’ve seen some situations where Reply All gets higher priority in the user interface than reply, and some situations where the act of simply replying does a reply all. Stop it, stop it, stop it. HIDE reply all so that it takes an extra, deliberate effort to invoke it.
  8. Unsubscribe
    Solution: Legislate that one-click unsubscribe must be in any mass emails or texts.
  9. Legalese (Terms and Conditions)
    Solution: Legislate uniform rights of software companies and users that supersede any gibberish put on sites. Vendors can still choose to make users jump through hoops, but their incentive to do so will be reduced.
  10. Click Here
    Solution: Better education of software developers, and intelligence in authoring tools to counsel against it.
  11. Most software is created from a blank slate and working up, rather than from completed code and building out.
    Solution: Not sure how anything but market forces can solve this. Maybe a quasi-governmental body like ISO-9000 stuff could make it more popular to use one of a handful of frameworks to meet their standards?
  12. Social media defaults to public instead of private
    Solution: The social media vendors are the richest people on earth because of the advertising effect of this default, so it probably needs to be driven by users in the same way many can choose a tool like DuckDuckGo. But the “network effect” makes it very hard to unseat the biggies. Maybe some day decentralized computing will do the trick, so that we don’t use any particular brand of tweeting tool or community tool, but instead use something like a blockchain (but one that doesn’t carry the whole chain everywhere).
  13. Apps don’t show their names
    Solution: phone apps should default to showing their app names at the top of the page, like software did from 1980 to 2007. Users can then configure it away as they become skilled… or better yet, the app hides it based on frequency of use. Duh.
  14. Lists are not 100%, state-of-the-art configurable
    Solution: My personal pet-peeve here. The main list I’m talking about is Google search results, which don’t give you full control. By full control, I mean sort order (on any piece of data in the results), density of the information (classic ‘summary’ layout, title only, one row per result (!), and so on). We now have to deal with painful lists on our television home pages, where there are thumbnails in an ever-changing clutter of sales promotion. This is a list; it needs to be 100% configurable, such as “no thumbnails, 1-text-line-per-row, and fully sortable.”

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jackbellis.com
jackbellis.com

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