Mastodawn

FeralRobots

@anildash @mathowie
man do I ever hate, hate, HATE adaptive UIs. I have used many & have yet to see one that didn't make things harder for me on the average, vs making things easier on one task maybe 30% of the time. The added cognitive load of trying to figure out where the feature I wanted has gone just leaves me irritated until I sigh & accept it as unchangeable. But I never like it.

@anildash @mathowie
...THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, of the CMS i've worked with the one that comes CLOSEST to BEING ABLE TO* fit these requirements is Drupal 7** [& potentially its fork, Backdrop, which I haven't used].
But D7/Backdrop have very little mindshare at this point.
_
*You'd have to customize the hell out of it, but it's designed for that.
**D8 is an utter disaster as anything but a corporate-scope tool. D7 can still run well on commodity hosting & can be implemented with basic skills.

@FeralRobots @anildash @mathowie I’m suddenly really curious about this. What are some bad examples? Do they make it tough to understand across the board or are they just easy to goof up? (And like, are there just cases where rent seekers in the org are “driving engagement” or whatever nonsense, or are there cases where it isn’t just an enshittified ui?)

@ironchamber @anildash @mathowie
OTOMH, the way sharing works in Android, I never know where I'm going to find the target for my share, because Android keeps resorting based on how it conceptualizes 'recency.'
I've also tried out adaptive UIs in several desktop apps over the years - bad-penny pattern there is pruning elements from the menu structures if they're not used within some period of time. (Word did this at one point, IIRC, but I've used others.)

@ironchamber @anildash @mathowie
There was actually a fair body of ergonomics research on this, but the literature I'm familiar with is pre-web. I'd have to look up for specifics (I still have that ergonomics topics reader from school) but my recollection is that they worked OK for a small set of users with very narrow needs, but were a major detriment to power users. IIRC there was speculation that it would also tend to narrow the options that were used through a negative feedback loop.

@FeralRobots @anildash @mathowie “Major detriment to power users” seems like enough of a problem on its own. I’ll have to dig for that research at some point. Would it be under “adaptive interfaces” or something like that?

@ironchamber @anildash @mathowie
What I read in school (early 90s) focused mostly on menu systems for applications; hypertext usability wasnt a big thing yet. But now that I think of it there've been Nielsen-Norman Group articles over the years. They're AI shills now but for a long time there was solid stuff in there, even if one had to adjust some for Jakob's massive ego.

@FeralRobots @anildash @mathowie thanks! That seems like a really solid lead, I appreciate it