Bianca Hee
Tom WalkerI tried eating fruit but the onboarding was confusing. I have to choose from apple, banana, orange? How is a normal user supposed to navigate this complexity
Each fruit peels in a different way, apparently you don't even have to peel an apple? It's a compatibility nightmare
I'm going to stick to that chopped fruit you get in the little plastic boxes marked "Fruit". Regular fruit needs to take some UX lessons from those guys
Getting some annoyed responses to this. Look it's up to you if you don't want to take UX seriously, but you can't expect fruit to reach a mainstream audience if you don't solve the onboarding issues
Torn between replying to the sincere posts about UX and the ones that stick to the topic in hand, namely fruit
George Station@tomw This is the kind of thing that Twitter never did well after it got big. Smaller spaces are always, always ready for a techie sidebar.
Scott Jenson@tomw it is a funny point but you're likely getting annoyed replies (which I can't see because "fediverse stuff") as you appear to be defending a deeply important issue by using a false comparison. Fruit complexity does not let the fediverse off the hook
Jan D@scottjenson @tomw fruit interfaces are also remarkably consistent and thus, forward-thinking parents teach them in early childhood already; as we all know, familiarity is intuitive.
Änn Euing 📜@tomw sometimes you're not even supposed to eat the fruit. You ignore the fruit and eat the root. So confusing! Someone really needs to streamline this whole plant issue.
salguod, man 🍂🍁 lazysupper@tomw There's a Jamba Juice joke in here somewhere.
Stephan Matthiesen@tomw And the ridiculous names! They even named some fruits after colours (orange), birds (kiwi) or mental states (bananas).
Ben Aveling@tomw clearly we should all agree to eat the same fruit and discontinue all the others. It’s the only way to be fair to ppl who don’t want to have to make a choice.
(((o))) Acoustic Mirror@tomw My favourite fruit might well be the watermelon. All the cool guys at work are using it, but man, does it have UX issues. There's no way you'll get to feast on some nice, juicy watermelon unless you do at least 10 minutes of careful slicing and chopping. Dismal UX, I'm telling you. Watermelon is the vi editor of fruit.
Elias Mårtenson@tomw it gets worse. Have you heard about the tomato? How am I to know what is compatible with what?
Kenneth
pelzvieh@tomw Certainly, Sir. That's not going to be a community success. However, for the nerd you seem to be, the scientific comparison of apples and oranges is a proven way of entering into this complex subject:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021021104329/https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20021021104329/https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
Matjö@tomw i peel apples. Go figure.
James Basoo@tomw You dont *have* to but new users may find it easier to use peeled, although they may need help from an experienced fruit user with the right tools to peel and slice into more manageable pieces. Power users usually don't bother though.
@Jbasoo This made me realise that a pineapple is the Linux of fruit
@tomw And there's some serious compatibility issues with certain kinds of fruit. Take apples and oranges, for example. What a mess, really.
Dagnabbit, Pascaline! 💥@tomw
Try your hands on the finger lemon.
https://www.buildthebottle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Finger-Citron-1-scaled.jpg
Try your hands on the finger lemon.
https://www.buildthebottle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Finger-Citron-1-scaled.jpg
Dale Harvey@tomw The funny thing about this is they literally bred what we know as fruit to be usable by regular people where as oss devs could take the smallest amount of effort but are too busy laughing at idea of usability
@dale I hadn't considered that you could see selective fruit breeding as a type of 'UX' - though I don't think they ever quite fully optimised the FTUE
@tomw it's very well optimized because some people actually care about other people benefiting from being able to eat fruit whereas a lot of mastodon proponents just want to be able to dunk on people without a CS degree from their little clique
@dale I don't quite follow this, do you think I have a CS degree? lol
Akos Szalay@dale @tomw Speaking from experience, working in development for a long time can warp your POV on what's user-friendly or obvious. I personally found Mastodon (or having to try multiple clients before settling on one) no harder to use than Twitter, but many people are finding it such. So we need outside help for this sort of thing. But we need to be aware of this to get the help.
Jeff GriggOh, and you're oversimplifying things!
There are a confusing array of different *kinds* of apples!!!
@JeffGrigg Please call it the "appleverse"
James Carr@tomw @JeffGrigg Apple Inc. legal team: *perks up*
LucifarGundam
@lucifargundam @tomw @JeffGrigg Parody is dead. No matter how ludicrous the joke, it seems you'll find that it's actually happening/happened somewhere. 🙄
I think the Apple computer company lawsuit should be thrown out.
For one thing, the Swiss farmers are selling real organic apples. It shouldn't be possible to deny a grower a reasonably realistic outline of their product.
Also, the computer "apple"
1. has a bite out of it
2. has a "leaf" instead of a "stem"
The Swiss apple has a stem, and the swiss "plus" on it.
Hard to confuse the two.
And even more important than that, the products don't compete.
moopet@JeffGrigg @lucifargundam @jcarr @tomw I worked for a company Apple were suing. They dragged it out for years even though we weren't competing and the only similarity was that we had the word "pod" in out product name.
We sometimes used it as a marketing gimmick, "as sued by Apple".
@moopet @JeffGrigg @jcarr @tomw
"as sued by Apple" should make it more pronounced a brand
@lucifargundam @moopet @jcarr @tomw
The Swiss farmers should advertise
"Sued by the Apple computer company -- who obviously don't know a thing about real apples!"
Michael Gemar
Eleanor@tomw To be fair, if you'd never encountered a fruit before, and then someone put various fruits in front of you and left you to it, it wouldn't be immediately obvious which one you should try or how.
@eleanorrees This is true but babies give it a good go!
@tomw Well, they do when someone else does the prep and makes it easy for them...
Ian Tindale@tomw oranges are not the only fruit
Gina B Fla@tomw Wait 'till you're confronted with tomatoes !
Frank McPartland@tomw I tried peeling a Pineapple, and it is very difficult!
@frankmcp It's true, there are still several fruits I am mystified by. What's up with that giant stone in the middle of a mango? How am I supposed to more than a slither of fleshy fruity bit from this?
Robert Boler@tomw Sincere question: Do you want non-techies (so, most humans) to be able to join the federated web without a manual?
I have smart, kind, thoughtful friends who have repeatedly tried to join and participate on mastodon, but the onboarding confusion has kept them off.
There’s no need to gatekeep.
@rcbo I think gatekeeping is going around saying "this is too hard for you", which is the opposite of what I'm doing here.
The idea that anyone needs a "manual" to make one decision is ridiculous.
@tomw Fair definition of gatekeeping, agreed.
But blaming users is never the way to making a successful product. If a decision is asked of someone, and they aren’t given the context/info needed to feel confident making the decision, the issue is with the system, not the person.
@rcbo I agree to that extent, which is why I'm strongly in favour of having .social as a default instance in the 'official' apps, even though everyone screamed about it endlessly
@tomw Ah, I may not have been active here during that debate. That’s definitely one solution!
Maybe even narrowing it to three, like choosing your first Pokémon. 😆
Maybe .social / .pics / .news or something.
Thanks for the earnest chat. 🙌
Marcello Bastéa-Forte@tomw just try one at random and if you don’t like it try another one
Ricardo Harvin
Tushar Chauhan@tomw I think the urban-cool and probably debt-inducing option is the apple.
Mike Rodriquez@tomw ?? You (likely) have a whole lifetime of experience with fruits. What they are. How they taste. Textural differences.
But yeah, sure, you also know everything about 25 randomly named servers, none of which have a description, and it was a simple choice?
That's rude. Give some consideration to normal folks who really have no idea what a "server" is or how to choose one.
Your post is insulting to all the non-techies who just want to leave the bird.
@tomw Your actual point would be more effectively made if it was made in the first post, not 3 deep into the thread.
Fwiw, I agree w/your actual point.
But your first post is just "rage bait" and I guess it worked.
Hyperlink Your Heart@glowrocks @tomw Where are servers listed without descriptions? They almost all seem to have them on joinmastodon.org (where the concept of servers is also explained)
@hyperlinkyourheart @tomw This is a very useful page: https://joinmastodon.org/servers
I think it's somewhat new, and it certainly does make things easier.
I recall starting the app and being presented a list of servers w/very brief, if any, descriptions.
This is MUCH better.
@glowrocks @tomw That existed when I signed up! Maybe it's just the app specifically that's the problem? I've never used it, I signed up on the web and use Tusky.
@hyperlinkyourheart @tomw I don't know ... to me, the point is that mastodon used to be hard to sign up for and folks have done a lot of work to make it easier. That's a good thing in my opinion. There's probably more to be done, but it's hard for me to say, as I'm here now 🙂
Pait