Ralph Ammer – Make Me Think

"Today, as a result of their efforts, we interact with wonderfully designed interfaces." I wonder what's wrong with me, because in my experience, interfaces are degenerating, no improving since the 90s. I no longer know whats happening behind the one or two ambigiously named buttons, I have no way of anticipating the outcome or handling the edge cases. In a way, the fourth gif shows it well, the machinery is hidden from the user, there are few choices with extremely complex, and hidden interactions and consequences, and it's now up to the user to try to deduce this hidden logic from only a few inputs, it's terrible.

Oh, and the rest of the article agrees, and makes its points much better than I ever could. Excellent article!

Designers jobs never has been doing pretty things. That's a misconception, That pissed off any good designer.

Design is not only visual design. I'm reading mentions to don't make me think, and the whole book talks about pitfalls of bad design not making it usable.

In fact, the problem comes from engineers precisely doing things overcomplicated, UIs overcharged with steps and functionalities, etc.

For some reason culture of big tech startups dictated that design is somehow moving pixels around a screen or copying some trending dribbble shot. Sad reality. All those silly interfaces done by a front end developer with 0 real design skill is the problem.

I hate when people try to use the fact that some words are used differently in vastly different context to create equality. No, it's not because I'm a 'user' of an interface that we can say that I'm a 'user' in the drug addict sense. I don't feel the need to use an interface, or do I want to come back to it. It's a tool.

This kind of slip up destroys the point being made.

Decent article. Terrific visual design. Love the animations.

Yes and:

> What is our mental model? ... by using increasingly complex technologies with ever simpler interfaces.

Yup. The difference between mental models and abstractions.

My personal working definitions:

- Useful mental models reveal how something truly works.

- Abstractions attempt to hide complexity.

I've struggled for decades to articulate my own personal philosophy of design. I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense. It's so clear in my head.

Better mental models are at the root of all my design break throughs.

One example:

Late 90s I worked on print production manufacturing software (ScenicSoft's Preps, TrapWise, Color Central, etc). Every other image positioning (aka imposition) app looked like CADD meets Illustrator tailored for putting ink on paper. So they digitized the creation of artifacts. It took noob me years to finally understood the problem domain for bookwork; how everything is determined by the folding and binding, done at the very end of the mfg process. Information flows BACKWARD thru the system.

Eureka.

I was finally able to model the process. Think origami for bookwork.

So then it was trivial to create a simple form-based app to create impositions as needed.

Every other app solution tried to manage the complexity, hide the excruciating details. Abstraction.

My solution revealed how the system works. Simplifying the problem so any one could do bookwork. Mental model.

Just want to say I love the illustrations here. Very simple and effective.

When complex tasks are too simple, users can lose trust in the interface. For example, if buying a car is as simple as pushing a button, it seems too convenient to be true. You want to make the task easy to do, but not too easy if the task is more complex than usual. As a designer, it's key to keep that balance in mind. Super easy-to-use isn't always optimal. Sometimes easy enough is enough.

Interestingly, I was able to skim the article pretty easily because the author has created wonderful depictions of his ideas in the form of animated GIFs.

Curious how they did the animation in the article?

For a more in depth review of this idea, look at Taleb's Antifragile.

There's a lot of issues with this kind of thing, but it is definitely an interesting new lens to look at problems through.

I don't think I'll be using these ideas in my designs though. The modern "Just works" philosophy seems to work way better than people claim it does.

Sure, there's a few things that are arguably a true negative to forget, like cooking and such, but I am perfectly fine with the fact I've never needed to solve a calculus problem and I don't understand 99.99% of the billions of lines of code I use.

I don't need to know obscure tech details because we have division of labor.

Nicely written, many points are easy to agree with, and a light touch too.

I always disliked the title of Steve Krug's book (even if I appreciate some of the design sentiments) because it seems to lionise intellectual sloth.

To me the problem is actually deep and accords with the split between philosophies of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is anti-humanist, deferential as (Ellul, Mumford, Postman) would frame it, and the more optimistic IA (Intelligence Amplification) which is _real_ human-centred design.

There are also resonances with how Taplin tackles the Reckless Engineer as one who sweeps problems under the rug of UX in order to "move fast (and leave things to just break later)"

This whole cargo-cult (cultivated ignorance) of truly celebrating "Not Thinking" is pathological. It is setting us all up for quite some disaster.