Not Smart Is Not Stupid
tedunangst.com
tedunangst.com
Case in point: I recently bought an excellent large(ish) Dell monitor. Lovely bit of kit, but after a few days had me wanting to throw it out of the window. The reason was the power saving mode. The monitor is supposed to have the ability to "intelligently" understand you are not using it, switch the screen off and go into a sleep mode. All good and well until one discovers that the specific combination of graphics card, multiple monitor setup and video connectors one is using confuses the poor beast and it will happily shut your monitor down while you are actively using it.
The kicker that was driving me crazy was, of course, there is no way to disable this particular functionality!
One example of this is Photoshop. The single biggest differentiator between a Photoshop bad-ass and a noob is a deep understanding and copious use of layers. Because of this, Photoshop tries to ram layers down your throat at every opportunity, and that is the correct thing to do in my opinion. When I first upgraded to the version of Photoshop that went all-in on layers, it infuriated me because I felt like I had to do more work to achieve my goals; now I get infuriated when I try to use an image manipulation program without rich layering functionality.
Instead they cram layers down your throat which does work, but it's still a compromise.
In the scenarios above, both Photoshop and Dell are wrong, but they're in a market position to get away with being crappy to the user.
I used to plug my notebook to a big monitor on the side, and then I'd switch some things to one or the other. For example, the "external" monitor had better colour rendition, and so it was the prime candidato for photo-editing, while the "internal" monitor was usually closer to me, and better suited for reading, or opening terminals.
Would this kind of use trigger your "bug" and make the DELL monitor turn off? Can you think any use case where the feature works well? Some were asking in roder to avoid said beast in future/near purchases, and while you do have a point, if the use case works well for the user then this feature wouldn't be a deal breaker (and for other use cases, like yours, it defintely is).
There is a maturity problem in our industry. As in, the developers and product managers are a bit on the emotionally immature side, and have less ability to put themselves in an other person's shoes, when that other person has different goals.
I also use the Netflix streaming service with a Roku. As part of their ongoing campaign to convince me this is a mistake, the Netflix app auto updates itself from time to time.
This feature shuts off the screen without the user asking for it to shut off. What could possibly go wrong?
A surprisingly number of times the answer is "No, I would not only not turn it on, I would also not miss it".
Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that, really! Thank you!
I think we're hitting a critical mass of UX, where we're trying to dumbly pre-suppose behavior. There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning), but blanketing behaviors for all users is just downright stupid.
Please no. The actual users using an account may change over time (and rather frequently), e.g. in a family situation.
Also, in general, I like my systems to be predictable, and I prefer if they don't try to be smart.
> Please no.
Indeed, that's the second coming of Office 2000's "adaptive menus". It was an awful idea then, it's an awful idea now.
Even if the account has a single unchanging user and the feature actually works correctly and it doesn't impair initial discoverability, changes in software behaviour will break muscle memory and at least annoy.
I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it.
Naturally, there appears to be no way to override and say, "just show ALL my folders ALL the time! If I didn't want to see a folder, I'd delete it!"
But I don't expect a lot from Google, which seemly has zero UX experts and I'm not even 100% sure its products are developed by human beings. (See: Buzz, Wave.)
The ribbon is not fundamentally adaptive, IIRC the initial Office 2007 implementation was neither adaptive nor customisable, although it was partially contextual (some ribbon tabs would only appear when they made sense e.g. formatting when selecting text or cells)
This is a horrible feature. I was a Netflix subscriber for years (an early adopter in the mail-order DVD days), and after weeks of fiddling and trying to disable this mis-feature, I finally unsubscribed because of it.
This resonates with me. Sadly I think this happens more often.
Snapchat just has a bad habit of introducing a feature you need to perform a gesture for and only telling you once and nowhere else.
I wouldn't blame your age on it, I just don't think a lot of these popular apps have particularly good design but get by because the service is solid and hits "good enough" for your average (usually non-technical) user.
This also leads to some tech anxiety, an example of which was an acquaintance not long ago being unable to save a missed call into her contacts list on a Samsung/Android and worried that she was somehow too dumb to use the (very costly) "smartphone". Just a huge collective failure of the "smartest" people around to account for other people who are very different.
More generally, any UX design that does not involve user testing (ideally with both new and experienced users) inevitably leads to the designers missing things. If there's one field where co-design is crucial to decent results, it's IxD.
Apparently our UI design decided to indicate that with red and green dots on the order line. If he had though about color blind users, normal users wouldn't have issues either.
That's what you meant, right?
Anyway, that's exactly the argument I always bring up: if you design for the colour blind, the deaf, don't assume righthandedness, etc, and you do it well, the interface will end up more user-friendly for everyone.
In your example, adding a hint based on shape/position/lightness (or all three even) as well as a colour is easier to read for everyone. Similarly, using some verion of Cubehelix[0] is the more readable option for heatmap-scales, and again not just for the colourblind but for everyone.
[0] http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/05/cubehelix-or-how-i-learned...
Yes, exactly.
Although this is was meant ironically, there's a lot of truth in it.
On a tangential note, I've never understood why payola was supposed to be a bad thing.
Grocery stores accept money from food producers for placement within the store. As far as I can see, this is precisely equivalent to payola. Nobody thinks there's a problem there.
If the airwaves weren't regulated by the FCC, why would payola suddenly stop being a bad thing?
The reason it is bad over public airwaves is because the airwaves are communal property. The spectrum is licensed by the FCC so that all of society can benefit from the limited resource. The FCC therefore sets fair usage rules for the use of those airwaves, and one of the rules is that you can't pay to get airplay.
Assuming you're not in the business of producing music, you can even pay to have your stuff included in public broadcasts as part of the main programming rather than the commercials. This is called "product placement". (If your stuff was music, it would be "payola".)
You have yet to advance any argument that payola is a bad thing; you've limited yourself to "it's against the rules".
Payola is a feedback loop that rewards cash, not free consumer choice, and is more or less guaranteed to enable consumer-hostile monopolies.
At the very best you'll get a race to the bottom like the one that happened in online advertising.
However, I'm most curious about the consumer-hostility that you envision resulting from payola. What is the harm that consumers will suffer?
Sorry about the rant. I realized I'm going to have to work with gazebo again soon and preemptive frustration is already building.
Fun fact: there's a non-linear corollary between the growth of compute speed and the growth of network speed. Network speeds do increase, but they are not doing so as quickly as compute and storage.
I have observed that interns at corporations are usually tasked with things nobody wants to do or thinks can't be done. I wonder if there is a correlation between Wirth's Law and interns (the process of learning).
I'm pretty ignorant, but I enjoy trying to misinterpret my own text, which is often easy.
It was either Kernighan or Ritchie that mentioned that every few years they read Strunk & White's Elements of Style to increase their ability to be understood and understand others.
!smart != stupidFun part though is that similar arguments could've been made against the tech behind his "plastic circles" or logistics of receiving them in the mail. ;)
How do you convince people not to be naive though?
One note that I'm not sure how many others hit - iPhones have been especially effective at DDoSing websites for apple-site-association.
On the otherhand, devices and products that are not advertises as "smart" are often better and actually use very sophisticated algorithm.