Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

The 90s seem like they would have been a good time to worry about users who don't really know what computers are. Why are we now driving for that market when everyone under the age of 30 grew up using modern computers? Are we still gunning from the mostly imaginary "grandmother who doesn't know how to use computers" market? The market that 1) is only shrinking, if indeed it ever existed and 2) presumably doesn't buy computers...

Makes about as much sense as designing all cars in the 50s for people who grew up with horses. While those people are certainly still alive, it is a business strategy decades out of place.

View on HN

I have family members who have used Apple products since at least System 7 (probably earlier, that's the first one I can remember). But they're still more comfortable with an iPad than a Mac.

There are a ton of things that we assume are second nature, but are really learned skills. I think the notion that applications that aren't in the dock still exist (in the Applications folder) is starting to sink in, but installing software from disk images? You have to mount it, copy the program to the Applications folder, understand where it went so you can launch it, and then eject the disk image.

I knew people when I was in high school (granted that was a while ago, but it wasn't their first time using a computer) who would download software and just run it off of the disk image every time they wanted it. Unless the developer has put in an alias and a background image to explain things, there's no indication that there's a better solution.

> I knew people when I was in high school...

Yeah, these people exist, but I think they are a dying breed. Children who grew up using computers are not going to have these problems. I think our obsession with this dying breed of computer users is very convenient, since it paints a narrative of "regular users (read: most users) are so much dumber than we are."

It strokes our ego to believe that dumbing down interfaces is necessary.

It's not about people who don't know what computers are. It's about creating simple solutions to common problems. Most people do not want to fiddle with their computers regardless of how well they understand them, they want to accomplish a task and move on. Even as a developer this is why I choose OS X over Linux.

The question is how far can they push it without totally frustrating the power users. I think it may be inevitable that Apple eventually stops making machines that the majority of non-Apple developers can tolerate.

I don't think that is what is being done. Making things better is something that can be enjoyed by all users, not just "regular" users.

This part of ComputerGuru's post is what resonates with me:

> But my biggest pet peeve is just the sheer dumbing down of things. iTunes 11 is pretty, but why put everything a click away? What was so bad about a sidebar that makes everything instantly accessible and only takes 80px? Why does the app now prefer to be run in full screen?

Some things are legitimately being improved. Network configuration in all of the major operating systems is a great example of this. NetworkManager is wildly better than manually editing a wpa_supplicant file, and Windows/Macs have seen similar improvements. Not "Better for 'Regular Users'(tm).", just "Better.".

There seems to be a sort of schizophrenia in the field of "improving" computers. On one hand you have people who are honestly just trying to make things better (and are, for the most part, succeeding). It seems to me like you fall into this camp. You see value in changing things to improve the situation for everybody. I totally dig that attitude. However on the other hand you have people who are trying to make things better... for people who are perpetually trapped in the 90s. The improvements these people create are the ones that concern me.

Both are trying to improve things, but the attitude towards users is very different. I only mean to attack the second camp of "software improvement"; I think their motivation is flawed, outdated, and toxic.

Do you work with people? General people 'get' computers as much as they did in the 90's and they've been using them the whole time.

The success of the iPad shows that there is still a market for making computers easier to use--why not take some of those ease-of-use features and put them on actual computers?

Power users might not like some of the changes, but it's easy to provide them with advanced setting options to change them back (like scrolling or Gatekeeper)--or build the new features in such a way that they're easily ignored (like Launch Pad).

I think the success of the iPad has more to do with it being a good piece of product that does what people want it to do, and less to do with all of it's users being trapped in the 90s.

So why not take iPad design mentalities and slap it into a computer? Because the iPad experience was engineered for the iPad. Simple interfaces are necessary due to the nature of touch devices, and usage patterns are designed for the form factor of the iPad. Dumping all of that into a PC because "Users are dumb, but they are smart enough to use the iPad" is missing the point entirely I think. If the same people are involved in both efforts, then I think either they have lost their focus, or I am giving them too much credit to begin with.

iOS is good. OSX is good.

The attitude "OSX is too hard, we need to make it more like iOS" is my concern.

If you can create a legitimate case for making changes to OSX that look like iOS features, then by all means do so. Natural scrolling direction is a great example of that, I remember wishing I could make my touchpad in linux do it 5 years ago. "Users are dumb" is not a legitimate case though.

Just because people are used to something doesn't mean that the something is optimal, that no improvements can be made, or that a simplification isn't useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com