People Expect Technology to Suck | Hacker News Reader

People Expect Technology to Suck

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36 pointsatomlib6 comments

I would interpret the situation differently. Instead of reading it as most people bring a bunch of rubes who will click anything on a dialog box to make it go away, I see people who feel their agency has been robbed by technology attempting to put them in straitjackets and their best option is to accept what they’re dealt. I imagine this is the kind of experience (feeling completely powerless against the machine which runs your life) can feel extremely stressful and have unhealthy but silent health consequences.

It’s a chicken and egg problem, but I see it as a pattern of learned helplessness, only encouraged by the paternalistic (dark) patterns in user interfaces for contemporary products — because (cynically) nobody cares about educating users to make them more capable.

I think a big part of this is the disincentive to not follow a pattern of learned helplessness. Something I've anecdotally noticed in talking to older people who need to use computers for their jobs, but who are not technologists, is that they complain about user interfaces changing.

If you run some old version of Windows or macOS in a VM with relevant versions of common office productivity software, you will see that the UIs are quite different now from 5, 10, 20, ... years ago.

My perception is that people are sick of learning how to use some operating system, software version, whatever, only to have to re-learn everything because a new version of release. Especially considering that many professionals upgrade when their employer's IT department makes them, not on their own time. As a result, you get the attitude of "why bother learning how to use this when it's going to change out from under me in six months?".

I'm not suggesting that the answer is to never change or improve any UI ever, but I don't think we've struck the right balance, at least in consumer-facing software.

Consider that most of the people on HN have a very different experience. If you live in a UNIX environment, you can often use the same workflow/scripts for decades on end. If a new version of Bash or Vim came out that was backwards-incompatible, it would never be adopted, or would at least take many years to be.

"I'm not suggesting that the answer is to never change or improve any UI ever"

Honestly, why not? Or at least have the option to keep as much of the old ui as possible? Dwarf fortress, famous for its awful borderline incomprehensible ui, is having a complete redisign for its upcoming steam release and yet they remain committed to keeping everything about the old ui usable if you wish, on a ui that is only remotely usable if you have memorized every keybind for every menu and use third party tools to manage some parts of it.

Learned helplessness is made worse by flat design[1], and major software developers' habit of changing the UI frequently, for no reason.

1. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design-long-exposure/ : reduced efficiency even in "skilled" computer users.

In a lot of ways I think our current metaphors encourage churning through information with no attention to detailed intent.

If you look at what most information workflows in most circumstances do, they involve moving around, organizing and filtering a set of data. This is stuff that can metaphorically be done with pages, books, shelves, bins and labels.

But the actual UI we present avoids such tight spatial skeumorphisms, or corrupts them for implementation convenience. Everything magically resizes and reformats itself, locks into place preventing free movement, disappears from one place and reappears in another, and has multiple labels and identifiers that have magical meaning.

It's like waking up in a rearranged house every day and being greeted with a prerecorded message: "We made it better for you, now don't screw it up!"

You dont feel it yourself? I dont have the stamina of a computer.

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