Not Alone

[supergee]

We are in the Age of Inadvertent Programming. I am glad that World War III has not been started by someone inadvertently bumping into a touch screen, but I don’t know how long our luck will last.

I am both old and dyspraxic, so it’s not surprising that I have trouble with interfaces, but I just shared/blogged an article about the problem, and many people feel the same way.

I have realized for a long time now that two-valued logic is not a good way of dealing with issues like sex and race, but I miss the days when pushbuttons worked that way. The article notes that the iPhone (which I am fortunate enough not to have) conveys one message if you press it lightly and another if you press it just hard enough. There’s a lot of that going around. Facebook can, as usual, serve as a Horrible Example: When I use wheel on my mouse, I sometimes Like things and offer to friend people because my touch is not delicate enough.

GUIs are gooey. I feel as if they were quicksand I am sinking into.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

There are guidelines for people making websites and apps to do better about this so that UIs are easier for everyone to use, but often the people making things don't follow the guidelines. :/

[weofodthignen]

I can only imagine. I don't have a smartphone and refuse to use Assbook, but the rump successor to Yahoo is now closing down Yahoogroups after successive "upgrades" made it almost impossible to use. And I just had a three-mail exchange with my library, which has spent good money imposing a social-media-style interface on its webpage so that I could not see how to get to what I almost always want to see there: the record of what I have out, when it's due, and the progress of my interlibrary loan requests. (Imagine my enthusiasm for sharing reviews of what I have read with my neighbors; you may well overestimate it.) Through a friend, I was finally able to identify the basic problem, apart from the utter inadequacy of the FAQ, and the librarian was actually grateful to hear it: having trained us all to regard a downward-pointing caret mark as the symbol for "we've hidden a menu under this, hold it down until you risk RSI", they've now made the identical symbol mean "click here once", like the thing like an overgrown equals sign that I have been told I must call a hamburger.

People earn huge amounts of money for changing things so that only the cool people can use them anymore.

M

[lavendertook]

You already know I am an old fart about tech, too. I’m still on iphone 7 and don’t know if you’re talking about problems I’ll have to look forward to when I am forced to upgrade, but mine doesn’t have those problems, but I only use a fraction of it's functions and they’ve been good to me so far.

The problem is that programmers and other computer brained people always say, “just go explore--you’ll get it” and they don’t get that we don’t LIKE exploring computer functions--we want computer functions to help us explore more of our world with as little of our dwindling brain space and power focused on this tool as possible. Learning the tool doesn’t make my brain feel sharper and grow synapses--reading and exploring the world and those in it does and the people who design these tools and love the design have differently functioning brains and the gap needing bridging between our brains may be growing.

[supergee]

I used to argue that with Richard Stallman, who never seemed to grasp that computers could be mere tools.

[autopope]

Apple seem to have decided that force touch was a bad idea, and have dropped it from their newer phones. It never made it onto the iPad. (Also, there was haptic feedback: if you pressed hard -- and you had to use some muscle -- the device would vibrate as well as showing you a different on-screen state.)

[supergee]

That is good to know. It gives a modicum of hope.