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em-bee | 5 days ago

I'm not against "intuitive UX design" in general, but at it's extreme, it just fuels incompetence.

how does it do that? (i am not getting hung up on "intuitive", i just mean you argue that the currently used design fuels incompetence)

how is a UI designed that doesn't fuel incompetence?

i have a hard time imagining what design aspects matter here, and how to improve upon them.

discuss

order

plst|4 days ago

> how is a UI designed that doesn't fuel incompetence?

I'm specifically talking about UX ("how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service"), not necessarily UI.

> how does it do that? (i am not getting hung up on "intuitive", i just mean you argue that the currently used design fuels incompetence)

tl;dr We have a product, we want to make money, we need people to use the product. One of the things that stand in the way, is people not understanding how to use our product. We will make sure they can get started as fast as possible, and not mention how they may hurt themselves with the product, that would scare them away. Hurting yourself with our product is in the broad "don't do stupid things" category. We will never explain the "framework" (in case of an OS I mean apps, that apps can interact with each other and your data, how you can or cannot, control that), even in broad terms. Just click this button and get your solution.

It started with PCs and people not understanding how to not lose their documents. Now that every device is connected to the internet, the problem became worse.

You can now say that "sideloading" is stupid anyway, but this is not the only problem. Another thing that people still usually learn by painful experience is backups. There are fake apps, on both stores. Another thing, in-band signaling. You cannot trust email, phones, whatsapp, messenger... Even if your friend you often chat with is messaging you, they could've just been hacked. Try to explain that you also cannot trust websites and that even technical people don't have a good way of telling if an email of a website is real.

But at least enrollment is fast and adoption metrics are growing. Since we are already in "move fast and break things" mindset, we will think about fixing such issues when it actually becomes a problem.

To be clear, I'm not saying that making technology easy is always bad, that you should always expose the user to "the elements" and expect them pipe commands in the shell. But I think that often the focus is on only making enrollment fast. "Get started"

What if we actually expected people to understand something about technologies they want to use?

em-bee|4 days ago

What if we actually expected people to understand something about technologies they want to use?

but that's what we have now, and it's not working.

the implied question is: what if we don't allow people to use technology unless they can demonstrate that they understand it?

is that really something we want to do? this sounds like gatekeeping, elitism, and anti-innovation because if if less people are going to use a technology, then there is less motivation to build it.

remember, i think it was someone at IBM that said that the potential for computers is some small number? and then it grew beyond anyone's wildest expectations?

do you think that would have happened if we had required understanding before we let anyone buy a home computer?

besides education, i don't know how to approach this issue.