Skip to content

Forgive your users; even when they are drunk

usabilityfriction.com
4 pointsashleytowers1 comment
On HN

Comments

This isn't forgiving users. This is adding a gimmicky feature that frustrates late night hackers.

How about trusting your users? Short of a BAC test there's no surefire way to know they're drunk, and in addition so what if they are? Impossible to detect the context of when someone really shouldn't be sending an email.

Virgin Mobile did a similar thing with their mobile service a few years ago in Australia. Just like this it generated a lot of media interest and discussion, and just like this it is a useless addition by a 'funny' engineer (Jon Perlow? Likely, given his single use case he quotes as inspiring this.). If anyone else had done it it would have been derided -- Google can't keep public goodwill like this for much longer.

Thank goodness it's in Gmail Labs and not actually released.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.