Re:The Lost Art of Steam Heating (2017) [video]
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @04:24PM
(#18445036)
> People are not going to read and remember detailed instructions for every one of the hundreds of devices in their daily lives.
I'm not saying hundreds. I'm saying couple dozen. Anything you interact with more often than twice in a lifetime. Nobody complains that they have to learn how to use a pen. Or a bike. Or a car. Or a gas stove. Or a microwave oven. People just suck it up, spend the necessary effort, and enjoy significantly improved capabilities. If you use something daily, you owe it to yourself to learn how to operate it.
What we have with modern UX trends is a culture that despises learning. It's a marketing artifact - a software sells by first impression, not by value delivered, so the less learning user needs to get first results, the easier it is to sell a product or service.
> You're quite right that this is an ongoing problem in software UX. The problem is devs who insist that the user should accommodate the software rather than the other way around.
I meant precisely the opposite and you know it :). The rationale is this: the only way to have software that can be used by a newcomer to its full potential within first 5 seconds of exposure is to dumb the software down to near-uselessness. Which is the dominating trend nowadays. Lowering the beginning of the learning curve by flattening the entire curve creates a hard ceiling on utility of a piece of software (or hardware). If there's nothing to learn, the user is forever stuck at beginner productivity levels. Which means the software isn't really providing much value (it probably provides negative value if the user was forced to upgrade from older software which allowed for mastery).
I'm not saying hundreds. I'm saying couple dozen. Anything you interact with more often than twice in a lifetime. Nobody complains that they have to learn how to use a pen. Or a bike. Or a car. Or a gas stove. Or a microwave oven. People just suck it up, spend the necessary effort, and enjoy significantly improved capabilities. If you use something daily, you owe it to yourself to learn how to operate it.
What we have with modern UX trends is a culture that despises learning. It's a marketing artifact - a software sells by first impression, not by value delivered, so the less learning user needs to get first results, the easier it is to sell a product or service.
> You're quite right that this is an ongoing problem in software UX. The problem is devs who insist that the user should accommodate the software rather than the other way around.
I meant precisely the opposite and you know it :). The rationale is this: the only way to have software that can be used by a newcomer to its full potential within first 5 seconds of exposure is to dumb the software down to near-uselessness. Which is the dominating trend nowadays. Lowering the beginning of the learning curve by flattening the entire curve creates a hard ceiling on utility of a piece of software (or hardware). If there's nothing to learn, the user is forever stuck at beginner productivity levels. Which means the software isn't really providing much value (it probably provides negative value if the user was forced to upgrade from older software which allowed for mastery).