People Expect Technology to Suck

kilobitspersecond.com

3 points·dvcoolarun··5 comments

Ordinary people using devices created by very clever folks, find them hard to use. Not surprising.

Maybe that does mean they suck. More accurately, they are mismatched with the skill level of some customers. Which is a flaw, surely, you want to make money, you gotta place the device somewhere on the bottom half of the bell curve, maximize the customer base. Go too far, you start losing the top tail. Complicated.

I'm as far from an ordinary user as most readers here, but I have come to expect technology to suck these days. Because it mostly tends to. I suppose that whether or not a person thinks something sucks depends on what they value. Our industry often values things that are at odds with what users value, and make engineering tradeoffs that reflect that.

Yes! My hot-button suckage is when a product is shipped with everything turned on, like a laptop with hibernation modes and quick-saves and automatic update. So you're in an airport and want to board and it says "Don't turn off! Gonna do fifteen minutes of updates you don't want!" and I have to close it anyway. And arrive, and the battery is dead because whatever.

I call it 'shipped in screw-you mode' because some marketing idiot wanted to make sure everybody could see the shiny new thing.

Many highly intelligent people are bad with the so called “technology”. I wager that non negligible number of mathematicians among others fall into this category. They do not seem to bother.

And it doesn't dissapoint on that regard!

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