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Comment by SilverRed | Hacker News Reader

This article comes off as "man yells at cloud"

>the changing interface makes me feel like I’m suddenly operating unfamiliar machinery, piloting an ungainly tractor in a construction site. I can’t perform the same actions I used to, and so I can’t use the app in quite the same way.

This sounds like a good thing honestly, It will keep your brain from solidifying and becoming entirely non adaptive as your preexisting knowledge was all that was needed. Constantly learning new things is literally good for you even if the new knowledge isn't more useful than the old was. A child sees the new spotify UI and works it out within minutes, if you can no longer do this, it's an actual issue and you should probably thank spotify for keeping your brain active for a little longer.

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> A child sees the new spotify UI and works it out within minutes, if you can no longer do this, it's an actual issue and you should probably thank spotify for keeping your brain active for a little longer.

Your post so entirely misses the point of the entire article that I wonder whose cognitive decline we should be worried about.

The author isn't bleating meaninglessly about how these applications move interface elements around and confuse his ossified brain, it's about the way the interfaces change to align with the profit-motive of the corporation in ways that are often not aligned at all with the user - the nominal 'owner' of the artifacts (your pictures or your music or books).

My father got online in his 60s in ~2000 for business reasons. Email, video-conference, banking, auctions, etc.

Today he gets confused every time Outlook or another provider changes its interface. He is losing control and making himself vulnerable to scams.

> losing control and making himself vulnerable to scams

This! Thank you, this was the one thing I was never able to put into words.

Gmail's mobile changes irritated me enough to switch over to the barebones Samsung Email app on my phone. I'd suggest having your dad use an email client app to avoid disruptive UI changes on the email vendor's app.

Learning to operate new machines is good. But The article talks about how a collection is a way of relating to the world. How it is a 'personal monument'. It's not good when your personal monuments get disassembled without even consulting you beforehand.

This flies in the face of 40 years of UI design. Muscle memory is a good thing. Muscle memory is exactly the point where you don't have to think about it at a low level. Imagine if they completely and wildly rearranged automotive UIs at the slightest provocation. Suddenly, your brake is on the right because somebody thought it looked better over there. Admittedly, Spotify changing their interface has much less risk for harm than non-standard automotive layouts. However, the idea still holds.

Hell, if something caused the icons on my phone to be rearranged, I'd be pretty damn mad. According to the logical end of your viewpoint, phones randomly rearranging the icons would be a good thing because you have to relearn everything?

There are ways to truly foster neuroplasticity. This ain't it.

I'm very good at learning a new user interface. The problem is when you change things up, you take someone who has become proficient and drop them down a few pegs when you change up too much. Ever wonder why, even with the changes that are present, the core concept of an application like Photoshop is still there, virtually unchanged? One or more edit windows, a toolbox, option panels, and menus. Even though it's been expanded on, the window layout of the latest Photoshop CC is very much rooted in that of the earliest versions.

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