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Comment by 25cf | Hacker News Reader

Say I want to browse the web. Or check my inbox. Or read Hacker News. Or get a file off of my Dropbox. Or read an ebook.

None of those things are "people-centric", e.g. they aren't tied to a single (other) person. People-centric UI doesn't make sense because I use my computer for interacting with many users at once simultaneously through websites, mail, etc. If I'm not doing that, I may be interacting with my personal data. And probably least commonly, I am interacting with a single person. So "person-centric" (not people-centric", despite what the title claims) design isn't taking off because I'm not interacting with one single person for the majority of my time when I use technology.

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Add yourself as a people in the people centered UI.

We've already had "My Documents" "My music" "My videos" "My pr0n" and similar such default directories in new OS installs for some time. Just kidding about the fourth one?

I would imagine you'd have under Person "25cf" an option for dropbox, ebook, etc. In fact for shared stuff this could be kind of cool, click on my wife and here's our shared dropbox folder (well actually we're more a google drive family, but whatever, I assume dropbox supports semi-private sharing of folders between users, etc). Or click on my wife and then her ebook collection to toss her a copy of a free (libre) ebook.

Given that it is first and foremost my device, or at least a UI oriented at me, I shouldn't have to go inside my self to find my stuff.

People centric design is great if all you do is communicate with a set group of people, however if you're more asocial, then it's just sort of sad and hard to use.

I justify my sorta-bright idea by being an old married guy with two dressers in the bedroom, mine and hers. Do any married couples randomly intermix clothing, like all shirts go here, mine and yours, even the non-heteronormative couples? So it feels "natural" much as there's his and hers dressers to store clothes (and each kid, too) then the phone would have his and hers phone icons to store clothes, err, to store contact info for apps as per the article.

VLM does accept that this could be highly annoying to some people because VLM knows that some people consider it unholy annoying when other people refer to themselves in third person so VLM feels their pain and accepts that as a perfectly valid style disagreement.

The main difference is that you share an actual, physical space with your wife and kids. So it makes sense that you have partitioned places for your stuff. I doubt you share actual, physical devices with your wife and kids, so it makes less sense. If it's your device, the interface can be specialized to you, and not have to present a generalized Your Family interface like your house does.

(You may see a deleted comment of mine; I re-read your top comment and the analogy clicked.)

> Do any married couples randomly intermix clothing, like all shirts go here, mine and yours, even the non-heteronormative couples?

Yes.

> Do any married couples randomly intermix clothing, like all shirts go here, mine and yours, even the non-heteronormative couples?

Yes, and not even sorted by type. This is due more to limited space and getting bored half way through sorting things out and just shoving it all in rather than some thought through philosophy.

Just kidding about the fourth one?

Perhaps the only genuinely useful thing about the cloud is that it means we no longer have to store porn locally.

I assume the "My" stuff is a useless relic from the pre-NT days. "My music"? Of course it is mine, who's else's could it possibly be?

Well... the lawyers want you to think it's not really yours, it's the copyright holder's...

Ditto for "My Computer", "My Documents", etc. I think Vista was the first to get rid of the "My" prefix - and whatever reason they give for it, I still think they want to slowly separate users from the idea that they own (and thus are in control) of their machines...

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