I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit People should have a normal person who just tries to make their way through their software before it gets publicly released with an abysmal UI. For all that I love @peertube, I think they have a pretty large problem with this.
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@jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is a question of great and genuine interest to me.
My Apple ][+ was definitely a hard brick wall to somebody who’d never used one. Also, any specific piece of software behaved in extremely limited, extremely consistent ways, so that once somebody had learned to use it, they could continue using it.
My first-gen iPhone was a miraculous device. I could hand it to somebody who’d never used a touch screen or a “smart“ phone of any kind, and they would — without exception! I tried this experiment multiple times! — be able to figure out how to use it just by experimentation and intuition. I really don’t think that’s true of iPhones now. But a current iPhone offers far more capabilities.
Were computers easier or harder in the past? Or just •differently• hard? How? Whose needs have we prioritized? Whose comfort?
@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi at the same time as the first iPhone was released, other phones (I worked for Symbian, a now extinct smartphone OS company) came with an extensive printed manual.
To be fair, you could guess most of it anyway but it shows the assumption that any device required a manual. -
@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi The 70s micro and early DOS PC and Mac era, really the whole floppy/tape era, had another thing going for it: If something went wrong you just turned it off and on again. Nothing you did on your BASIC coding disk could break your homework disk. None of this "if my kid plays with my phone for a minute my e-mails will be deleted, $200 worth of burritos will show up at my doorstep, and my co-workers will receive ten photos of their potty" situation.
@mirth @inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is unintentionally a parable of increasing automation increases the scale of disasters, and I have to think about this for a while.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit Not computers per se, but as an example of usability improvements that got ruthlessly killed off by the dominant players - BlackBerry Hub: I've had to get someone off a BlackBerry 10 device when they were shutting down services for it and the most painful part was reintroducing them to the concept of "your messages live in several different apps". And then "most of them also try to silo you in by making it harder or impossible to forward things elsewhere".
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@mirth @inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is unintentionally a parable of increasing automation increases the scale of disasters, and I have to think about this for a while.
@sysadmin1138 @inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi Interesting way of looking at it. Computers also went from being mostly a calculating and storage thing to having communication be the primary use for a lot of people, which complicates the situation.
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@ajroach42 It's hard for *me*, a professional nerd who gets paid to understand this stuff. I have no idea how normal people haven't come for us with pitchforks and torches yet
@jalefkowit @ajroach42 I assume that it's not just because the developers, including people like us, don't test with 'normal' users (which is probably true) but testing UI for error conditions is very hard - you have to generate the errors on demand and then put in the effort.
Also, the rate of change is such that you don't get the chance to do full UI testing for all new versions.
So we're dependent on developers thinking about this - and most minimise thinking about error handling anyway
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@jalefkowit @ajroach42 I assume that it's not just because the developers, including people like us, don't test with 'normal' users (which is probably true) but testing UI for error conditions is very hard - you have to generate the errors on demand and then put in the effort.
Also, the rate of change is such that you don't get the chance to do full UI testing for all new versions.
So we're dependent on developers thinking about this - and most minimise thinking about error handling anyway@imcdowall @jalefkowit This is absolutely not why things suck.
The incentives of capitalism are towards Dark Patterns and systems that lie to you.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
Jason Lefkowitz Honestly, even for those who have. The current systems are horrifying.
Fermented & putrescent 70s design (optimized for limited hardware & ease of implementation, at the time, rather than correctness or ease of use) stretched far past any reason out of inertia.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit @sjkilleen
Started with "hide the details from the user". No, don't(!), because now we even have experienced users who can't find what it is they need to resolve an issue
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Someone posted a reply saying that computers were harder in the past so it's fine they're hard now, which earned them an instant block. Thanks for identifying yourself as the kind of person I want nothing to do with
@jalefkowit well they're half-right. Computers were hard before GUIs became commonplace and mature.
But they conveniently glossed over the fact that there was a period of about 15 years when computers were easy. That ended when most companies that build software realized they could manipulate users instead of serving them, that they can ship "experiences" instead of tools.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
Preach Brother! Preach!
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@jtonline They were bad in the old days, but it was more excusable then (IMO) because the whole field was so new. Everybody had to figure out from scratch what worked and what didn't. Plus computers were much slower and had less resources; there weren't CPU cycles available for things like nice interfaces.
Today we know what works and we have the resources to do it. We just don't, because someone can make more money by making things hard
@jalefkowit @jtonline It was surprising & fun when it worked.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit yup. I usually end the discussion by "it's given me a job" ahah.
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Someone posted a reply saying that computers were harder in the past so it's fine they're hard now, which earned them an instant block. Thanks for identifying yourself as the kind of person I want nothing to do with
@jalefkowit old computers didn’t have to deal with 2FA, Passkeys etc. on dozens of services just to start up your computer
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@jalefkowit Really?
Wanna go back to fucking around with IRQs and config.sys?
Installing Windows 3.1 from floppy disks?
Removing and re-adding TCP/IP from your dialup adapter in Windows 95 every week?
Screwing around with BBSs and BTX?
Getting printer drivers delivered by snail mail?
Bluescreens on a daily basis?
Reading the 300 page manual for Word Perfect?
All without Google?I think measured by the possibilities a modern system delivers it has become incredibly easy to use.
@thechris @jalefkowit Spot on, I couldn't agree more. The fact he blocked you over such an obvious statement tells me he doesn't have skin thick enough to be in IT very long.
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@jalefkowit @KentNavalesi This is a question of great and genuine interest to me.
My Apple ][+ was definitely a hard brick wall to somebody who’d never used one. Also, any specific piece of software behaved in extremely limited, extremely consistent ways, so that once somebody had learned to use it, they could continue using it.
My first-gen iPhone was a miraculous device. I could hand it to somebody who’d never used a touch screen or a “smart“ phone of any kind, and they would — without exception! I tried this experiment multiple times! — be able to figure out how to use it just by experimentation and intuition. I really don’t think that’s true of iPhones now. But a current iPhone offers far more capabilities.
Were computers easier or harder in the past? Or just •differently• hard? How? Whose needs have we prioritized? Whose comfort?
@inthehands @jalefkowit @KentNavalesi
I feel like Word Processors (much less the OSes on which the would run) were definitely one of those things you had to outright LEARN. I remember the idiosyncrasies of WordPerfect's utter reliance on the Function Keys F1-F12, and every CTRL, ALT, SHIFT combo required to get to all the features functions (and don't get me started on [ESC} escape codes to format text for printing. It was harder, 100% to learn a Word Processor back in the day.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
@jalefkowit I have been marinating in computer stuff since I was a teenager in 1965. It was a lot harder when you had to code your queries for punch cards and then wait until they ran it overnight, but early pc and Mac stuff wasn’t hard, and you had control and a manual for this and that you could study, because nobody was stupid enough to confuse expertise with intuition.
The 90s were an adventure—google actually worked, and even Amazon used to be cool. Then things started to get harder by design and more cluttered with all those electronic hands reaching for your wallet.
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I occasionally help an elderly neighbor get stuff done with their computer. And every single time, I walk away in incandescent rage at how hard we have made this stuff for people who have not spent their entire waking lives marinating in it
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@Siff @jalefkowit @inthehands BART
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@jtonline They were bad in the old days, but it was more excusable then (IMO) because the whole field was so new. Everybody had to figure out from scratch what worked and what didn't. Plus computers were much slower and had less resources; there weren't CPU cycles available for things like nice interfaces.
Today we know what works and we have the resources to do it. We just don't, because someone can make more money by making things hard
@jalefkowit @jtonline I got a Masters in information science 25 years ago. The class that sticks with me most to this day is the one where we did real-life user testing.
The software industry needs to do a LOT more real-life user testing.
