A site I use to track investments was still broken this morning - though I suspect that it wasn't the site itself, but one of the gateways, proxies, or whatnot that constitute the labyrinthine firewall at work was preventing the stylesheet from loading, so what I saw was a bit ugly - here's a screenshot of the "broken" and "normal" views of part of the screen:
What struck me as worth mentioning is that the broken site was still entirely usable. For my immediate purposes, I still had an at-a-glance view of all the securities I was tracking (though I had to guess what the second symbol was and squint to see the first, third, and fourth), I could still click links to ancillary information such as the chart and board. Within about ten minutes, the situation was rectified and back to normal, so I didn't get the chance to fiddle around with the other links and utilities - but by that point, I had all the information I originally wanted and was done with it.
I tried the same experiment with a different finance site I occasionally use - went into the browser settings and told it to ignore the stylesheet. Not only did the display render in a completely unreadable manner, but none of the buttons worked, and most of them had disappeared. It was completely hosed, useful for nothing at all.
I would very much like to give credit to the designers of the first site for making sure that it was usable even when conditions weren't perfect ... though I don't know for a fact that they even thought about it, and the way that the left column overlays the first column of the table suggests that the result is a lucky accident. But I was nonetheless impressed by the fact that the site, while broken, was still completely usable, insofar as I needed it to be at the time.
This calls to mind some of the incidents I've had with my vehicle, as opposed to my wife's experience with hers. I ran over rather a large piece of rebar, but the "self-healing tires" enabled me to get through my day just fine and have the tire replaced after work; another time, my transmission broke (I'm not mechanically inclined enough to be more specific than that) and the vehicle went into "limp-home" mode and enabled me to drive it, albeit very slowly, to a repair facility a few miles away. Meanwhile, my wife once went out to her car to find it wouldn't start at all - the battery was fine, but the starter would not engage. Why was this? Because the parking brake sensor, which has absolutely nothing to do with the vehicle's ability to run (and safely), had failed and the onboard computer, noticing this picayune issue, went completely limp. German engineering at its finest.
The point I'm getting at is that I expect, and feel I am right to expect, that the things I own will still work even when there is a minor defect and conditions are less than perfect. Certainly, there are catastrophic errors that, when they occur, should cause the entire system to shut down and prevent any kind of interaction at all to prevent serious damage. If my wife's brakes had failed, not just a parking brake sensor, shutting the system down and not letting her drive at all could prevent serious property damage, injury, and even death. And I would be grateful that the designers had the foresight to prevent the vehicle from being driven. But again, I can't give them credit for that - they had a system that stopped working altogether, likely by happenstance rather than intention, when a minor and inconsequential part failed.
Ultimately, this brings me to the notion that a site, product, or system of any kind that will operate only under perfect conditions and will break down completely when even something relatively minor goes wrong cannot be described as being well designed. And given the way in which many products become entirely unusable when something small goes wrong (and especially that they are cheaper to replace entirely than repair, but that's a different rant entirely), I'm led to the sense that many of the products available today are, in spite of great effort, very poorly designed. They just don't make them like they used to.
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