I go to the store to buy a hammer. I’m a hammer user and I use the hammer.
Or I go to the store and I buy heroin. I’m a heroin user and I use the heroin.
These UIs we speak of, are they hammers, or are they heroin?
Because I’m currently looking at a high contrast screen using a mixture of Unix tools created from the late 60s to yesterday.
I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet made by a team of lawyers that is in a UI. The lawyers themselves highlighted and handled the contrast of the document. Beyond the table itself, Excel’s menu bar is easy to read for the basic operating needs of a spreadsheet. I mean come on, the pivot table UI is clearly masterful. (If Excel was a native plaintext tabular format and you could pipe stdin/out to the GUI app? Gimme!)
However, a lot of software is basically useless these days. It’s not designed from the beginning to be productive in any shape or form.
Some stoned dance by a junkie under a highway overpass is definitely some kind of expressive art form. How much more productive is the expressive art forms promoted by TikTok, Twitter or Twitch?
There’s clearly a scale at play. I’m as big fan of Twitch as much as I’m a big fan of the Buffalo Bills. I’ve always appreciated the sociological aspects of sports. To add some context to my definition of productivity, I would say that group sporting events are overall productive from a sociological perspective, be it IPL cricket or Fortnite tournaments.
TikTok is clearly and quite obviously towards the junkie dance scale of things.
From an experiential position there was not much of a difference between my observations of a woman filming herself doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world and the junky on the next block doing a weird little dance on the sidewalk while completely oblivious to the rest of the world. This basic object-level assessment of the actions that we and others experience with our physical bodies is core to the very notion of “meaning”. The “meaning” is just the stoned dance.
I know of no junkies famous for only being junkies but there are definitely TikTokers famous for only being TikTokers so don’t confuse this for some strict equivalence.
I’m just trying to establish a kind of framework for discussing the relationship between productive UI and productive software tools.