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This brings up a sad story from my old work.

We had a coffee machine where you had 2 containers, one for the beans and one for the water, never had a problem with knowing which was which. But there was also a place to put in pre-ground coffee, which we never used.

One day a consultant came along, and not being able to make coffee because the machine had run out of beans, they proceeded to pour beans into the space reserved for the pre-ground coffee. We found this out by the horrific gear crunching noise the machine had made as the coffee beans shredded the internals to bits. It was a disappointing and sad day for the engineers, many of whom were frequent coffee drinkers.

Needless to say after the machine was repaired we taped that pre-ground coffee access port closed.



That's a nice story of how a consultant have ruined the engineer's day.


You could also say it's a nice story of how a lack of documentation caused pain for both consultant and engineers.


And yet the premise of good UI design is that it should be self-documenting.




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