alt Hacker NewsAnecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.
He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version.
I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.
edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.
Replies
Whether you think emojis are ok or not, there are times and places.
That’s not a time and place.
> one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.
Was this LLM-driven development? I'm so glad that phase is over.
> To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem
[1] Susan Kare https://kare.com/ at EG8 (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ&t=273s
"I designed this image [unhappy Macintosh] and this bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone! So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case."
"The programmers truly thought at the time that they would be deeply hidden. I know that right after the Mac shipped we were in our software area and a call came in fielded through Apple and it was a woman who was using MacWrite, and it had crashed, and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up! So, I felt kinda bad!"
Transcript from http://jimrattray.net/blog/2014/7/1/on-designing-an-iconic-b... .