Market Discussions

Ohh and while we are here, there is another small peculiar item.

When you set up a sell order on something from your stock, some UI-coding genius found it would be amusing not to tell us which number represents your item sell price, and which number is the item count!
How would anyone think this is helpful?

Granted, there is a ".00" after the suggested sell price (until you start typing, then it disappears). And my sell orders usually read as e.g. 3 x 299,999,999 isk so they are hard to confuse.
But neither of those have helped when I have quickly typed one number, hit alt-tab, typed the other number, then look. Then having to start over because I could not see what I was doing. Because you know, we tend to think we know what we are doing, hence we type before we think.

I imagine if you are new in trading and maybe want to sell 2,000 items at a price of 4,000, you could often end up typing in the wrong field altogether and not realise it once you have done it.

For the people attacking OP, blaming him as the sole cause of the mistake is misguided. What he is pointing out is a user experience design flaw. These exist in every type of software, and they can and will cause even the most diligent of users to make mistakes.

I have all-too-often seen that people (especially smart programmers or system admins) love to blame users as the first response to an error. Often, this only distracts from the root of the issue, which is usually a flaw that needs correcting in the user experience of the software.

He is calling for greater consistency in the design of the order warnings. Lack of consistent design patterns is a classic UE issue! This type of reporting of flaws should be encouraged, not responded to by condescension.

I'd say, just be attentive when entering the last three digits of the order, and mentally keep in mind what you're dealing with - million, billions or thousands.

The number of orders that I modify per day predisposes me to a lot of risk, which can be managed with a sensible approach, and so far the losses only amounted to a few billion ISK.