Most of the usability practitioners agree that every application (or device) should do its best not to present the user with a dialog, message box or any other kind of useless information unless the app (or device) needs information that:

• it cannot continue working without
• only user can provide

I have recently upgraded to the full digital connectivity at home - my TV, phone and Internet all go through the ADSL2+ line. The speeds are as expected and generally things work very smoothly. I have a “modem” I got from the ISP called Freebox and a Netgear WGR614 router/wireless AP that all my devices are attached to.

Yesterday evening all of the sudden we lost Internet connectivity. The phone was still working so I thought the problem was with the computer. But when I turned the Freebox on and switched to its TV channel, I was greeted with the classic case of redundant useless message (I paraphrase, the original message was in French ;)):

There is a required upgraded for your Freebox that you must install to use the network properly. Please upgrade by restarting your Freebox.

The message is redundant because prior to reboot nothing worked, the device was aware of it and it is possible to reboot via software only - that's exactly what I did using a remote control a few moments later. As a matter of fact, the Freebox does not have a physical reset button that is easily accessible, so there was no need to ask me to reboot the device - it could have done it all by itself.

Oh well, maybe in one of the following updates...