this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It comes down to good interface engineering. There was a time engineers were really good at making complex systems simple to operate. Now it seems they're good at making simple systems complex to operate. It seems to coincide with most companies outsourcing design to cheap labor markets.
On another trend in interface engineering, I think a lot of "apps" are easy to use because they simply don't provide options. This is how you will use our software and that's all there is to it. The plus side is simplicity, the down side is inflexibility.
I'm pretty good at dealing with systems of all kinds myself. I get really infuriated at times by the lack of flexibility for the sake of simplicity in systems now. You can always read a manual, but you can't easily change programming or design.
Me too. I especially hate this trend of implying that your computer is a box full of esoteric black magic that you could never understand. I work in IT, I’m reasonably good with these things, error messages don’t scare me. Telling me “something went wrong uwu” doesn’t help me or the users I support at all. Stop insulting my intelligence and tell me what went wrong, or at least give me an error code that I can search for dammit!
Yes that's another problem, assumed intelligence on the part of the designer. If they assume the average user is not going to be able to deal with the most simple factors, they're not going to design a mechanism to deal with them.
Though I don't know, maybe designers are right about that. I've always been able to RTFM for any problem I've run into and deal with it. Maybe that's too much to ask of the average consumer. Still it baffles me how we can have people designing things like breakthrough AI on one hand and others getting stumped by a printer interface on the other.