Words have meaning and developers often get things wrong in their first drafts (but which they rarely fix)
👁 Colbert Late Show: Flirt Graphs
A common case is an application developer who creates a message:
ℹ️ You haven’t hidden anyone yet.
The logic they use for it is:
if (hidden_users.count == 0) {
show_message("You haven’t hidden anyone yet")
} else {
show_list(hidden_users)
}
What goes wrong
A user uses the hide feature and then uses the unhide feature and then goes to the view which shows:
ℹ️ You haven’t hidden anyone yet.
But, that's wrong. The user has in fact exercised the feature twice.
What to do instead
Instead of treating the state as a boolean:
| count | message |
|---|---|
0 |
you haven't message (never used) |
1+ |
show list |
Treat it as a tristate:
| count | message |
|---|---|
-1 |
you haven't message (never used) |
0 |
you don't have message (you've used but aren't currently using) |
1+ |
show list |
How precisely you manage this will depend on your application's specific persistence structure.
Ideally, for the case I'm picking on, the message could have said something like:
ℹ️ You aren't currently hiding anyone.
Note that if you really don't want to store the extra -1 (uninitialized) state, you could just use this message to handle both -1 and 0. There's nothing wrong with showing this message to users in either category. Whereas showing the -1 message (You haven’t hidden anyone yet.) to users in the 0 state (who have hidden someone) is definitely wrong.
This is a plea to the average developer: Be better than the average developer at big companies. I regularly see this mistake from NYSE top 25 companies.
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