[gcmrtc]

If you open more than one draw at a time you would unbalance the drawer and it would tip over, falling on you and possibly injuring your feet and damaging your stuff and the floor.

This safety mechanism is not there if the drawer is embedded in a larger frame where tipping over is not possible.

Sometimes it's not bad UX, it's just the thing trying to protect you from your stupidity.

[stupidboy]

Exactly. I assembled a dresser last week, and it came with this label on one of the panels:

http://www.ahfa.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ASTMTip-OverWa...

Think about that: children have died from 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴. It's easy to be smug power user complaining about design when you only consider how you interact with things.

[giardini]

I'm glad to see that label being used!

This very thing happened to me decades ago: I walked into parents' bedroom to find my fearless younger brother, ignoring my yells, climbing up the handles on the front of my father's dresser. I yelled for my parents but I couldn't stop him fast enough. As the dresser began to tip I got between him and it and pushed upward, both removing him from the dresser and tipping it back to rest.

I was truly shaken and astonished that this child might have killed himself, since I knew that the top drawer was filled with my father's most valuable (and heaviest) WWII memorabilia and that the entire dresser, about 5 feet tall, was hardwood with decorative protrusions on the front.

[sizzle]

Makes you wonder how we as humans haven't evolved the ability to innately perceive being crushed by large objects.

I know I become hyper aware of any small black specks in my peripheral vision since they resemble spiders that could have posed a threat to our ancestors so we evolved these heightened senses to avoid them.

[hutzlibu]

Well, storage lockers are a quite recent thing.

And in nature you do not really have much big objects that could fall on you if you climb them.

Maybe a large boulder loose ... but they are very rare in my experience. So I guess it makes sense we are not prepared for it. What is much more likely, a loose rock which breakes off at climbing .. we are prepared for. Instinct reflexes are pretty fast in that case, I noticed ..

[sizzle]

A cabinet being wobbly and starting to tip over towards you should feel pretty dangerous I'd imagine, we have various biological mechanisms that detect balance [1].

I would hope the ability to sense loss of balance equilibrium would innately result in having the strong urge to bail from that activity to sturdier ground, given you knew you could safely land on the ground without a worse outcome.

A tipping cabinet takes much longer to fall unlike a rock dislodging when you are climbing the side of a cliff in nature. Maybe it is simply a blind spot in our evolution like you suggest, evolution never optimized us for this edge case scenario not experienced in the wild.

1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dizziness/mul...

[MobileVet]

As a parent, this is one of the silent killers that haunts me. We only have one dresser and I have it tilted back... but I should also strap it to the wall.

[richchurcher]

I was a PICU nurse before I started writing software for a living. A surprising number of kids also get seriously injured by pulling TV sets/cabinets over onto themselves. Affixing things to walls definitely a good plan. Also PSA for the holidays: fence pools, use your reversing camera and know where your kids are before backing out of the driveway, and that dishwasher detergent does horrible things to kids (airway/oesophagus) and people tend to keep it down low for some reason.

[c22]

Just the other day my toddler fell out of a shopping cart. I never paid much attention to the warning signs because I'm always right there pushing the cart, this time though I'd moved a few feet away to wrangle his older sister and he stood up in the cart. I immediately moved back towards him but I was too late. Normally he has great balance but as he reached out to me his weight shifted causing the cart to roll forward and he toppled right out. He landed right on his face in the most horrifying moment of my life. Thankfully he's all right (giant bump and a black eye) but it easily could have been fatal. I'll never leave him unrestrained in a cart again.

[blondin]

well put this way, it kinda makes sense.

[arkades]

That was the first thing to jump out at me, too. I love crotchety blogs ranting about (whatever screwups), but this one takes a serious credibility hit right off the bat. Ranting about something you don’t understand and being blatantly wrong about it isn’t a great look.

[minot]

> That was the first thing to jump out at me, too. I love crotchety blogs ranting about (whatever screwups), but this one takes a serious credibility hit right off the bat. Ranting about something you don’t understand and being blatantly wrong about it isn’t a great look.

Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

[dspillett]

I thought that was to say "X can't do Y but Z can so X is stupid". You will then get a list of solutions from fans of X.

The most common sighting of this in action is OSs (ask "how do I do Y with Linux" and you'll be pointed at documentation, say "Linux can't do Y but Windows can" and you are more likely to get a couple of pre-baked solutions sent your way, and the same works the other way around and with other OSs) but I've seen it work for scripting languages/environments (powershell, bash, ...), databases (postgres, SQL Server, Oracle, ...) and other tools.

[ksec]

>Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

I am amazed there is a law describe this. This is so accurate. I couldn't be bothered to answer questions even if I knew the answer, but I would be bothered to correct it if the answer were wrong.

[dspillett]

The one about the update and upgrade commands in brew too. I've never used brew but I assume they operate the same as update and upgrade in apt related tools and are not really synonymous if you have a vague idea what is going on: update acts on the package catalogue and upgrade upgrades packages. Maybe update should be update-catalogue, but then people would moan about the extra typing.

Update could legitimately mean upgrade of course and you could have it essentially auto-correct, but I'm generally wary of software trying to do what it thinks I mean rather than what I explicitly say (and not doing anything if what I explicitly say doesn't match up with its language). At some point it will mis-guess and do something I really didn't want.

[ysavir]

Thing is, "update" to me doesn't mean "update self to have newest content". Especially in the context of what Brew does: version manager for packages. By definition alone I expect it to be taking an action to update a package.

Now suppose instead of "update" they used called the functionality "sync". I don't think I would have the same problem, since linguistically and contextually, I wouldn't use Brew to _sync_ packages. But it does make sense to use "sync" when talking about getting updated information about which packages are available--we're syncing the local catalogue with the remote catalogue.

So I agree with grumpy blog that their use of "update" here is suboptimal. There are better fitting words that both better describe the functionality and avoid the confusion.

[fenomas]

Yeah, I think the existing UI is absolutely correct for that one.

I'm not a heavy brew user, but if it works like other package managers then the "update" command is a fairly casual, frequently used, and typically reversible kind of action. If you pull in too high a version of something, oops, remove and redo. Whereas "upgrade" is something you probably only do when you have a specific reason.

I mean, it's sometimes sensible for apps to auto-correct on inputs, but a frequently used "muscle-memory" kind of action should never auto-correct into something heavy and non-reversible. I imagine that's the thinking there.

[Too]

apt update doesn't install anything. It's more like git fetch, it just downloads a list of available versions.

[saagarjha]

While “brew update foo” may be difficult to handle technically, it does have a meaning that makes sense: you want to fetch the latest information about just that one package so you can install it, without updating the entire package database (which may obsolete some of your other software).

[omnimus]

It works pretty much like apt. When you do update it also shows you which packages can be upgraded. It seems pretty obvious how and why that is (maybe you dont want to upgrade everything). Seems like solid ux to me.

[jkhrweroi]

Yep. Quite a few times I've had cabinets start to tip on me because I opened multiple drawers at the same time.

It's not something very intuitive since we generally expect furniture to be stable in normal usage. To make it worse, when it starts tipping all drawers slide open and bang into you, compounding the effect and accelerating the move.

[NeedMoreTea]

That makes sense for a 4 drawer, 5' tall filing cabinet -- which generally all have the interlock, and little to none for a 3 drawer under desk unit with drawers half the length or less of a filing cabinet. Even if you wanted to load them as heavily as a file cabinet, the drawers are generally far less substantial or well made. Doubly pointless considering the drawer unit shown has no filing drawer. Most of those solve the possible tip with a castor or slide under the front of the sole bottom filing drawer.

[jmull]

It just depends on what you load into the drawers. Since essentially the contents of only one drawer at a time is accessible in any case, it's the right UX decision.

Anyway, you need to close those drawers eventually, right? Why not before opening the next drawer?

Put another way, the alternative is to support the general use-case of disorganization: "I'm not sure where the thing I'm looking for is, but I need it in a hurry!" Do you really want to categorically assume in such situations that people have mitigated the tip-over risk in some external way? Just to allow for high-speed riffling?

Your castor idea only really helps if the search happened to start with the bottom drawer first. That's sorta logical, at least in some cases, but I don't think you can come anywhere close to assuming it's going to happen all the time.

[jacquesm]

Those drawers can be used to hang folders and those can be very heavy and easily tip over the whole thing if you would slide out all of them at once.

[NeedMoreTea]

That would be a 12" deep file drawer, which either do have an interlock, or in a desk side with single file drawer the castor or slide underneath, as mentioned.

The one illustrated isn't deep enough for hanging files -- maybe the odd ream of A4, pens and pencils. Will need an awful lot of carefully placed paperclips and pencils to tip. Which is why you rarely see those locking each other out. If you use it for storing your collection of lead weights you bring it on yourself (the base of the drawer would probably fall through anyway)... :)

[Aardwolf]

Those folders are normally in the bottom drawer, so it could not tip over very far, the bottom drawer would hit the floor.

Even if there's a top drawer with folders, to open more than one drawer, a bottom one would be open anyway, with the same result.

[hinkley]

I have a three drawer underdesk cabinet with five wheels. The fifth being on the front of the file drawer. Don’t think that one is tipping over.

[naikrovek]

In this case it is bad user experience.

That set of drawers is not sizeable enough to warrant tipping protection that is so unfriendly to the user. If it were a 2m high filing cabinet, I would agree, but it isn't.

Dressers made of thin, light wood, filled with drawers full of clothes and/or toys never have this safety feature, and those are the things which need it most; they all require (or recommend) that you instead strap the top of the dresser to the drywall, assuming that it is both against a wall and that the wall is finished with drywall, and not some other wall material, such as brick, which is common in certain geographies.

Too many people commenting here completely missed the point of the linked website entirely, immediately homed in on some minutia, commented with some variant of "uh, actually...", and even got that wrong, arguably.

It's really amazing to me.

[george_ciobanu]

It's not stupidity it can be lack of knowledge, could be a day when you are tired and forget or you clumsily opened both at once.

Thinking about people as stupid, as a designer, is suboptimal and miguided in my opinion.

[gcmrtc]

I think people are stupid, it's our right to be and things should be designed with this in mind.

I agree that using the world "stupid" could be ill-receive and other words could avoid this problem, but with the right audience this shouldn't be a problem.

[hinkley]

We don’t want people to die from brain farts.

We are also dumber when stressed, when sick, and absolutely so when we are both at once.

[tuco86]

> Sometimes it's not bad UX, it's just the thing trying to protect you from your stupidity.

In my opinion, it is bad UX, but for a reason. There might be better solutions.

How about a pulley system which does not require locking the drawers but instead pulls the other drawers shut when i open a new one. No locking, no tipping, better UX.

[hinkley]

Opening a drawer in a hurry could pinch your other fingers, or break something sticking out of a drawer. Whatever you do will be a compromise.

[m-p-3]

Maybe if it didn't lock all the other drawers because one is almost imperceptibly closed by less than 1mm, the experience wouldn't be as frustrating.

The system is clever and had its importance.

[praptak]

It's still bad UX. Someone could not be arsed to make this thing stable, so they made user's life harder.

[kick]

This is like saying a gun with a safety catch is "bad UX." The best UX is the one that enables the user to use an object like it's supposed to be used while not allowing them to literally or figuratively shoot themselves in the foot.

[ysavir]

But we already have a solution for the problem: Anchor the dresser to the wall.

But people don't, so these companies introduce measures "for safety" by compromising the UX for all their users (can't open multiple drawers at once even if you wanted to) in order to prevent a dangerous scenario that the operator failed to address (leaving the dresser unanchored and ready to topple over).

And what do we think is the goal of the manufacturer? Is their goal to provide a public service and preventing people from injuring themselves? Unlikely, as it's still entirely possible to overload the drawers, or put something on top, that will still provide a dangerous result. No, their goal isn't safety because the safety is out of their hands. Their real goal twofold: First, to prevent situations where their products can be associated with dangerous or fatal situations, even if the fault has nothing to do with them (operator error, not product error). Second, in events where dangerous or fatal scenarios do happen, be able to say "we've taken measures for safety, so don't look at us".

This "feature" isn't for their users' benefits, it's to protect themselves, and they do so at the expense of all the users that _do_ use their products safely and as intended.

[praptak]

It fails the first condition - using like it's supposed to be used. It would be like a gun that refuses to shoot when pointed too low because sometimes people shoot their own feet.

[dx87]

What's your solution? You could give it a super wide base so it has trouble fitting in places people normally put filing cabinets, or make the body so heavy that having all the drawers full and pulled out won't tip it over?

[praptak]

These. Or just don't make this thing at all.

Also, it still doesn't prevent toppling over from a single heavily loaded drawer.

[chrisseaton]

> Or just don't make this thing at all.

Don’t make drawers?

[praptak]

Don't make shitty stand-alone cabinets.

[stevehawk]

To bastardize Mitch Hedberg: "sorry for the safety."

[toomim]

> If you open more than one draw at a time you would unbalance the drawer

This is my filing cabinet. I put a bunch of papers in it. It's not going to tip over. Your assumption of a worst-case scenario is getting in the way of how I actually use the cabinet that I own.

[hutzlibu]

"Sometimes it's not bad UX, it's just the thing trying to protect you from your stupidity. "

It is still bad UX, when the result is frustrating.

And some people do not need nor want to be protected from all forms of stupidy. I mean if you would accidentally blow up something by pressing the wrong button, then yes, safety first. But some people actually can use drawers without letting them fall. And if the worst case happens .. it probably won't be catastrophic either. I mean you can break a leg or ancle falling down on any road anyway, if you don't pay attention.

[chnx]

If you can only open one at a time it means the locking mechanism only needs to lock one drawer. They do the same thing with tool cabinets.