All of a sudden, this delightful article about a dad creating a toy for his kids now reads like a big-tobacco eyes-only internal memo: How to hook a kid on a screen when they should be interacting with real world physical objects.
It makes me think that if they designed adult books today, they would be like children's books. One sentence in a big font and one image per page.
Doesn't have to be bad, but I worry we lose discipline and our cognitive abilities decline when everything is spoon fed.
Studies indicate that tech literacy is dropping, what does that entail for those moments where the more user respecting (as in more secure, preserves privacy, gives autonomy) software is inherently more complex than "user-friendly" alternatives?
The main UI parts of books to learn are page numbers, tables of contents, indexes and glossaries. They're not necessarily intuitive but they are pretty universal and standardized.
The reality is that people will use the things they use the fastest. And not having to learn how to use things means people will use them more.
They definitely are! We just learn them so young that we forget that we had to.
That is not to say that complexity does not have merits, but I say let the pendulum swing. I think we could do with a lot less in most areas still.
A scientific paper is written for a specific audience, experts in that field, and when you read many papers, it's very annoying 'easy writing' because you need to rapidly understand the meat of the paper, not being introduced again and again to your subject. Now it's more difficult to find the details that you need, if they're even written.
It makes maybe the job of a PhD easier when he start studying in the field, but I think we lost something there..
Not all fields are equal, deep learning papers are very easy to read, but also very annoying to read, too many repetitions of something that is explained in another paper, I don't need to read for the 100th time what NeRF is, only what is different in this paper compared to the previous ones. While many mathematical papers are way more dense and target the intended audience.
Increasing the page count is not really a solution either, it is a burden for the writer to continue writing easy things, and for the reader to never find the interesting parts.
On the other hand, when I read a paper that is not in my field, I appreciate the easy to read paper.
I think papers should return to dense readings by experts, but authors should also maintain blogs where the paper is simplified, and those blogs should be included in the evaluation for a PhD. In this way, if you are an expert, you get the interesting parts, and at the same time, if it is not your field, you can be introduced with many good blogs to the field.
While those might all be things 7-year-old children appreciate, they are also things my 70-year-old parents appreciate.
Though while some designs are necessary for accessiblity, some design decisions seem to be cultural preferences: Japanese UIs tend to be information dense, and they tend to prefer it whereas some westerners would probably scream if they had to interact with it.
And yes, I too have parents of that age, and yes, they're still mentally sharp.
Voting should be weighted compared to average remaining life expectancy, for one.
https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...
I read TFA because I thought some of it because some of it could be applicable to attention-deficient adults, victims of the pandemic that started before the pandemic.
Wasn't disappointed. The first observation of FTA is that children don't read, and so are adults; they don't read the docs (and forget about putting helpful info in tooltips and dialogs, they don't read them either), they read every other line in emails, etc. Unless they asked for those texts, and that may be one of the reasons why conversational AI is successful.
> Doesn't have to be bad, but I worry we lose discipline and our cognitive abilities decline when everything is spoon fed.
I think TFA is about apps with unforgiving users, so the author has to perfect the UI; he is a bona fide UI designer. I think the vast majority of applications out there don't have one. As a result the UX is generally passable at best, which adds artificial cognitive overload. You can't really blame users for taking shortcuts such as not reading. I do that, you do that, we all do that.
While easy to use softwares are more 'enjoyable' and the dopamine reward is high for small actions, it also prevent to develop some ability and resilience in navigating harder things. When the software complexity increases, users get annoyed and don't use it correctly because they were never exposed to much complexity before. (thinking about medical softwares that require many many actions to encode a patient, finance softwares, etc..)
Now, not all softwares are made to improve one efficiency. In your case, the app allows a children to express its creativity in other ways, which is very valuable also. So I think it is good that the interface and the interaction are easy, the focus should be on the creativity and not on the manipulation.
Professional apps should stay professional and more time should be spent in training power users.
I'm trying not to mix with my own survivorship bias,but I tend to believe that current trends of design remove the existance of advanced users at a young age. The applications are so polished and limiting that you don't spend time trying to do complex things with them.
I find bugs in old apps were a feature for learning. If it doesn't work, you try to understand why. Curiosity is intrinsic to young children, until we remove it by giving them something that never bug or limits their possibilities.
What is exploitative is the way almost all supposedly child friendly apps try to trick or corrupt children with ads and gamified purchases. My post comes out very explicitly against this, which I presume you read.
I was merely responding to the kind of language you used to describe it. You call it the language of designers and engineers, but I'm sorry, that's not my language! To me, that is the language of commercial entrepreneurs and capitalists and they give me a gag reflex.
I would love for you (and everyone else) to be able to live in a world where you can pursue this kind of passion project without having to worry about “making a living”. The commercial and capitalist mindset is what's standing in your way.
It's odd to see such nonsensical detractors here on HN.
This article can be read two different ways.
A parent making an app for their own children is wholesome and making a list of UX finds is helpful to other parents in that position.
At the same time app stores are filled with games that hook kids on with bright visuals, sound effects, and basic button mashing.
That second use case is vastly more common.
You say "that second use case is vastly more common", however the author is very clearly aimed at the first use case. Yet you are arguing that they fall into the second.
You called a viewpoint that I share "utter nonsense". So I presented a counterpoint. A counterpoint to your opinion is neither a troll nor an attack on the original author's intent and/or character.
All I'm saying is we can both read the same article and one of us goes to build an app for their kid while the other goes and builds an app that gets other people's kids addicted to it while shoving ads. This has nothing to do with the author of the article.