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Comment by _carbyau_ | Hacker News Reader

My mother doesn't have a computer or mobile phone of any kind. Landline phone, TV and snailmail is her contact with the world from home.

I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right?

But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet. So she turned off the laptop and never opened it again.

On the one hand, she has mental health issues including paranoia. On the other hand, she wasn't wrong!

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Proper UI/UX design is tremendously difficult, which is why software engineers should never attempt it in a user-facing product. When it comes to on-screen text, you must choose your words very carefully, because someone out there will read them the wrong way.

Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

If you're wondering why software UX these days is a colorful, foam-padded Barney-esque hellscape of smiling Alegria people and error messages of the form "Oopsie, we made a boo-boo :(", this is why.

Thanks for showing your view. It does help in making me be more empathetic to UX/UI designers.

> Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

> "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

At first, I laughed.

Then I realized, I think I remember seeing this error message when I was six years old, and being freaked out.

Imagine how lifelong law abiding citizens felt!

I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare. I would estimate a regular computer user would see it monthly? Maybe more?

I mean, I can totally see how it would happen if you didn't have a UX team, and your developers didn't have any exposure to the concept. The message makes sense to a programmer.

And, they couldn't easily fix anything post-release, right?

(This also makes the original Macintosh interface all the more impressive in my eyes. System 1 is a masterpiece.)

> I still don't understand how that message escaped being fixed. It wasn't rare.

Might have to do with why nowadays Windows 10 blue screens show a sideways ":(" smiley instead of a face despite being in graphics mode.

Back when i first encountered smileys (and that was at the cover of an "internet magazine" - i was already into computers and programming for years at the time and even used the internet and IRC) i didn't understood what they were, i thought they were some sort of code like the :// or @ in addresses.

My guess is that whoever added that sideways smiley is as blind to how it looks to people who don't know about them as whoever who wrote "illegal" was to people back in Win95 times.

> Imagine how lifelong law abiding citizens felt!

I like to think this implies that they had committed countless crimes by the age of 6

> used to routinely frighten its users by falsely accusing them of crimes.

> "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."

It does not accuse the user of a crime, but the program (which, by the laws (rules) that the OS enforces on the running programs, is true).

As they say, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

> But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet.

Even through her reasoning was wrong, she still managed to reach the right conclusion.

Define "someone". A person? No.

>I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right?

>But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her" page was. Ergo "someone" was watching her on the internet. So she turned off the laptop and never opened it again.

>On the one hand, she has mental health issues including paranoia. On the other hand, she wasn't wrong!

I would call this an accessibility issue, and a failure by the ISP to maintain access for someone who has trouble adjusting to changes in the user interface.

While true, there is:

"You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time"

For simply changing their webmail page, most of us would adjust pretty quick. If I had been quick enough I could've simply updated her link and she never would have known. But when mental health comes to paranoia, doing things behind her back is a sure way to get offside. I have zero issues with what happened, it is life.

Would you say that building wheelchair ramps is also a waste of time, because you can't please everyone all the time, and they're only a small percentage of the population?

You are arguing shades of grey.

1. You only have so much effort to spend. 2. You won't be able to please everyone with it. IE result.

Sure, for any large enough building (significant effort anyway to spend!) expecting a reasonable chunk of the population through the door a wheelchair ramp(decent chunk of populace affected) should be du jour. Hell, it is a wheelchair ramp not rocket science, I'd be happy to see them in a home building code for anywhere 2 or 3 steps are used. Little extra effort over the alternative (stairs) and get a result.

Alternately, I love my mum but it is unreasonable to expect the world to bend to meet the sheer levels of disconnection-from-reality that mental health paranoia can go to. We can't treat everyone like they are Truman from the Truman Show.

People have to be able to cope with change. When they can't, it is sad. But the world will keep changing anyway.

"The world" may keep changing, but "my applications" will continue to bend over backwards to accommodate every scenario I can imagine.

I'm glad people like you exist and want to make the world a better place for everyone you possibly can.

I suspect you will continue to find ways your applications are not received in the context you hoped. But is also an opportunity to do better which it seems you might enjoy.

I also think you won't be financially competitive in the larger world. And while I'd love a world where this doesn't matter, money makes the world go around until humanity as a whole can figure out how to do better. So I don't think many will follow your path.

I honestly wish you the best to make it all work. For my own part, I will continue to try and leave contexts I am involved in better than I found them.

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