It is a “design flaw” because they cannot find a real reason for it to be there other than they don’t want to spend the money and resource to redesign it.

It’s not we are plugging in nuclear reactors that need an emergency shutdown button.

My solution is just tape over it and cover it up. End of story.

Thanks for the comments, but to be honest, you are missing the point here. Spilling water or other accidents are just that — accidents — and thus the manufacturer is not to blame. Dell has no control over what you spill on your laptop, and the intended purpose of a laptop computer is not to serve as a tray for catching spills.

In the case of the UPS, it’s intended purpose is to keep the devices connected to it on and running. As I said in one of my posts, the most important letter in UPS is the U for UNINTERRUPTIBLE.

Now a child, or a cat or an adult could accidentally turn off any individual device that has a prominent on/off switch. But the likelihood of accidentally turning off 8 individual devices is 0.

But once those devices are plugged in the UPS, with the intended purpose of keeping them ON, the prominent and easy to depress power switch on the UPS means that the UPS can be a single point of failure for all those devices. i.e. the opposite of it’s intended purpose.

The real design question is why is that button there and why does it instantly turn off all power to all devices connected to the UPS?

What important use case is being addressed by having this prominent and instantaneous power cut off “feature”?

As Andrew (the PM from APC) commented above, they understand the issue, but haven’t adequately addressed it because of other constraints.

Another issue here from a product management perspective, is the difference between a home environment and a work environment. Kids or pets are not a problem in an office, but at home, they are a reality of life. That simple change in location impacts the conditions under which the product needs to operate.

Hope this helps elucidate the issue a bit more.

Saeed

Supervision is key. Everyone seems to want their hand held now-a-days. It’s up to you to tell your 2 year old “NO”

However, I can assure you we’ve thought many times before about the frailties that the on/off button of a UPS injects into a computer set up. To combat this problem, on some products we have recessed the button. Although, this method seems like it wouldn’t have worked in the presence of a small child with a penchant for pressing buttons. We’ve also considered requiring users to hold the button in for a few seconds in order to turn it off, but we already use this method on our units with AVR as a means to adjust voltage sensitivity transfer settings. Software changes could also be made, but many people never install it. We even put a removable “kick guard” on one of our surge protectors, but we found out that the vast majority of people didn’t read the instructions and never used it. And to further frame this issue, we try to maintain a consistency of features across a product line, so that customers know what to expect from APC as they purchase different units over time. In other words, in a perfect world, all the on/off buttons of our Back-UPS products would look and operate the same way.

While there have been a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon of the original post, to be fair, it’s worth looking at this from a UPS manufacturer’s point of view. As a product manager, I can tell you that every feature we include on our UPSs represents a trade off, a compromise between user needs and ease of use, between cost and functionality, complexity vs aesthetics. In order to be as competitive as possible in this marketplace, we strive to please the maximum amount of people with the minimum number of products. This probably holds true for most of the companies people reading this post work for. Additionally, I can also tell you that APC spends considerable resources on focus groups as we try to continually improve our products. And you’d be surprised when seemingly harmless changes deter less tech savvy people, sometimes forcing us to retreat to more “plain vanilla” features in an effort to please the most people with the fewest number of products. Frustratingly, the old adage, “You can’t please all of the people all of the time” comes to mind.

Now, having said all this, based solely on this blog, there are a few people here talking about some new ideas to better protect the on/off button. Please keep in mind that any changes critical to user interface, like this one, have to be reviewed and pass a series of “hurdles”, any of which having the potential to guide us towards (or away from) keeping this switch just as it is now. (Incidentally, testing new ideas like this is one of the best parts of my job). So while we haven’t found the “perfect on/off button” yet, APC, and a lot of others are still on the hunt.

Good luck with your 2 yr old. I used to shut the french doors to my office and quarantine my kids in the living room. I can still remember their tiny faces pressed against the glass as they drooled yogurt and saliva onto the rug, wondering what I could possibly be doing on the computer for so long. Oddly, it seems that now-a-days the situation has been completely reversed…

Andrew

Molly guard — awesome! I wonder why these UPS companies don’t know that term?

Saeed