PowerMapper Software Blog

We just received this Out of Office reply today, in late February:

Thank you for your inquiry. We are currently Closed for the Christmas holidays and will reply to your enquiry in the new year. A Merry Christmas to all our clients and all the best for 2011

This isn't an isolated example - here's one we got at the end of 2010:

Sorry we are on Holidays and will be back on 23/4/2001

It doesn't look good if your Out of Office reply says you've been on vacation for a decade. It's worse if your Out of Office reply contains an emergency contact email address that doesn't work. None of these examples inspire confidence in the businesses that sent them.

The main problem is a lot of email software makes it hard to see what your auto-reply looks like: you usually don't get an auto-reply if you send yourself an email. Here's how to test it - try sending an email from your personal account to your business account when you turn Out of Office on. Otherwise you might be losing business or alienating customers.

Today is World Usability Day, so I'm going to talk about some famous usability disasters. As web developers we're lucky - our usability shortcomings almost never kill anyone.

Some famous examples of fatal usability problems include:

• The Airbus 320 crash in Jan 1992 partly caused by a mode switch in the wrong position. The mode switch changed the meaning of descent rate numbers entered into the autopilot and was toggled by a small switch in a large bank of other switches.
• The London Ambulance Service dispatch system that scrolled incoming calls off the the screen before they'd been dealt with (and there was no scroll bar to get them back).
• The Therac-25 radiotherapy machine which killed a number of patients due to unclear error messages. A message like MALFUNCTION 1 or MALFUNCTION 64 was displayed when the machine detected conditions which placed patients at risk, but the meaning of the errors wasn't described in the operators manual.