Comment by balder1991 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balder1991 | Hacker News Reader

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For the vast majority of people, including professionals like doctors, a computer or an OS is not a subject of interest, it's a tool, and they want it to be as invisible and reliable as the electricity that powers it. The moment the tool demands attention—be it through an error message, a confusing interface, or an unexplained requirement—it stops being a tool and becomes an obstacle that creates frustration, anxiety, and outright hatred.

The average user doesn't want (and shouldn't need) to understand technical stuff like file formats (JPEG vs. PNG), the data load of video streaming, what a "driver" is, etc. Forcing them to grapple with these concepts is a fundamental design failure, but I think it’s a difficult pill to swallow for nerds to accept that others just don’t care about these things.

This is why companies like Apple have been so successful: they don't just simplify the interface, they abstract away the complex, technical reality into a language and experience that feels intuitive and friendly for the users.

The industry has adopted entire, common UI elements that are hated by basically all people who aren't so used to computers that annoyances like this become invisible; I'm thinking especially of any kind of alert modal pop-up or announcement. The on-launch ones especially confuse the absolute hell out of "normie" users ("why's this here instead of the program I was trying to start? What's this about? How do I close it? 'Colorways'? WTF is that, do I need to do something with it, why did my browser icon open 'Colorways' instead of my browser and what the hell is it for? Is that what my browser is called now? Is that what my email (their usual default tab) is now?")

[EDIT] The core problem, in case the example didn't make it clear, is that these things interrupt a workflow they use often, and are accustomed to having always work the same way, and do so in service, usually, of showing them a bunch of stuff they don't give a fuck about and didn't really need to know. Even the ones that block interaction to highlight new features are really bad—OK, that's nice, but I'm trying to do the thing I always do with this and you're getting in my way, making my program temporarily behave and look weird and confusing, et c.

My mom often asks me to “fix” her phone, which means that she simply ventured to some unfamiliar place and doesn’t know how to get back to where she was supposed to be. For her, when something like that happens, the phone is “broken”.

She has no conceptual understanding of what’s an app and a webpage and why they’re treated differently, she just kinda accepted she uses something called Firefox to do a search and some icon in the phone that has the exact name of the other app she wants to use. She never understood (or cared) what it means to “close” an app if she already does that when she presses home or back, no matter how much I try to explain.

When you think about it, it’s all very confusing for them, and since people making these things already understand them well, they make stuff assuming the users will understand the whole thing as well as they themselves do.

This is why I think the single "home button" interface was one of the most brilliant UI innovations ever (no, I'm not joking) and Apple was insane to abandon it. Hit home (maybe twice, if you weren't on the very first screen of apps) and you're back to somewhere you know. Hit it too many times, nothing bad happens. And it's a physical (or, convincingly physical-imitating) button! It never moves around, it's always in the same place and you can feel it! It's one of the most comfortable, reassuring, and for normal users practically useful UI elements ever created. Even if you hold the button down and get in a "weird" mode (app moving and deleting mode) the way out is to... press the button once. It always works.

No other buttons (visible on the face, anyway) to confuse it for. It's right in comfortable reach of the thumb. "Which button do I push again? Oh right, there's only one."

(I also think going to "swipe up to unlock" instead of the brilliant slider they had before was a big mistake, as far as reducing the level of comfort for the median user)

Linux doesn't have to grapple with any of that. Consumer distros do, because they're general purpose operating systems designed to be run on anything for any use case.

But your POS system where you enter in orders? That's Linux. And guess what - it just works, it chugs along and does its thing.

There's no reason that doctors offices couldn't use software that utilizes Linux. And to pretend that windows is low maintenance? Tsk tsk, windows is a time bomb.

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