Re:Scrollbar Blindness
by munchbunny on Thursday August 27, 2020 @06:35PM
(#24299457)
Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.
Some VCR’s had a timed recording setting. More commonly, and you see this on cars before they got touchscreens, there were settings and options that you had to navigate to by hitting a specific sequence of buttons to get to the appropriate menu.
The core loop was generally fine. It was when you needed anything else that suddenly you needed the manual.
Re:Scrollbar Blindness
by underwater on Thursday August 27, 2020 @11:17PM
(#24301048)
My new air conditioner control panel suffers from this. It has up/down/left/right buttons where it switches between horizontal navigation plus select/deselect or vertical navigation plus select/deselect randomly. Programming a day takes around 30 key presses. And there is no bulk update functionality.
I recall VCRs having a lot of nonobvious digital controls that involved primitive onscreen HUD that involved arbitrary buttons to navigate. Everyone understood play/stop/record, what was confusing was setting the on-screen time using those same buttons.
There was often an additional on-screen interface on VCRs for setting up timed recordings, usually with giant white text on a blue background.
That was only on the last generation or so of VCRs. For the first decade or two, programming them was like setting an old digital watch with 2 or 3 buttons and making different digits on the clock flash.
I disagree with "last generation or so", our one from the mid-to-late 80s had it as an option (you could set a single recording in the way you describe, but needed the TV display for multiple recordings). Apparently the Akai VS-2 was the first with an on-screen display on the TV, in 1983.[1]
[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19830424&id=...
> Nothing is hidden on a VCR.
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So true.
The other hidden complexity was reception and tuning - so many people had problems getting the antenna pass-through working, and then getting the VCR picture to display on a TV channel (no switchable inputs in those days).
That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.
Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.