5.1.1 Blooper 43: Exposing the implementation to users

An extremely common blooper is for programmers to let the software's implementation "leak out" into the user interface. The textual form of this blooper exposing terms from the implementation to users, was described in Blooper 35: Speaking Geek (Section 4.1.3). However, it is possible for aspects of the software's implementation to be exposed to users in other ways besides textually.

Products that commit this blooper expose internal details and concepts that may be important for the implementation of the software but have no bearing on what users intend to do with it. Like many of the other bloopers, this one has variations.

Variation A: Forcing users to think like a programmer. In early 1999, a company asked me to critique a prototype of a Web application it was developing. The application had several control panels: one for each of several functions it provided. Each control panel consisted of some text fields and option menus. One particular setting an option menu appeared on several different control panels. In reviewing the application, I discovered that changing the value of the menu on one control panel changed its value on all the other panels as well. This seemed counterintuitive to me; I expected the menu on a particular function's control panel to be set as I left...