By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

So I took the car into the dealership and they plugged it into their computer. Turns out 2 of the cylinders misfired, causing an error code, in turn this error code activated the “check engine” light. Until the dealership clears the error the light stays on. Fortunately the cylinders misfired only once, unfortunately the dealership can’t say why. “It just happens sometimes, if it happens again we’ll dig into the engine,” well I guess that is good news.

Overall not a bad design, if an error occurs nag the user until they get the dealership to check it out. The less than optimal part though is that there’s only the one light, you have a binary state (on or off, I suppose in theory the light could be broken which would be a third state but we’ll just ignore that detail) for a rather complex issue (potentially). To be fair most car users (myself included, I’m a computer geek, not a car geek) wouldn’t know what to do with a “real” error message like “cylinder 1 timing misfire” which makes me think. Why are we treating computer end users like they actually know what is going on and giving them horribly complicated error messages that are largely meaningless (click “Ok” to get rid of it right?). Like the car the real error can be logged (locally, and remotely) for the administrators to deal with, and the fact that a fault occurred simply stated to the user with perhaps some indication of severity (”a non-fatal error has occurred, if this occurs again pleas see your support person” or “a fatal error has occurred, please contact your support person immediately”). Case in point a friend of mine has a Compaq, less than a year old. The problem is the CD-ROM drive doesn’t work; so I pulled it, plugged a new one in, the BIOS saw it, Windows saw it, and… it didn’t work. Some registry related error in the driver information screen. Anyways the point of this is that Windows should have been able to notice that something had gone horribly wrong and generate an error message indicating that it needs real servicing, but it didn’t.

Maybe it’s time to treat end users of computer products like the end users of cars. It seems to work in the auto industry. We certainly can’t do much worse than we already are.