Chris MartinThe notion that people choose to use computer applications because they are useful at accomplishing tasks is extremely outdated. The vast majority of software use is not voluntary.
We choose or are required to engage with a person, organization, business, government. They dictate what software to use for the interaction based on what is most convenient and advantageous to them.
I have been thinking about this ever since years ago Julie explained to me that the reason she dislikes graphical user interfaces is they feel like prisons because to a much larger extent they are an experience fully orchestrated by somebody else.
Ian K Tindale@chris__martin in a way, the whole UIUX movement is totally misguided, it makes people like their apps and computer interfaces, and this in turn causes people to become attached to them in various emotional ways, and this disparity is upsetting when interfaces which one didn’t choose personally have to be engaged with
It might have been better to have everything ugly and military and utilitarian and brutalist so that we all hate everything equally
After all, machinists on an assembly line or farmers milking cows or violinists playing various strados have to just get on with the job whether the equipment is bare bones or prettified, the only real improvements over time have tended to be safety ones, the dressing-up of industrial gear with cosmetic coatings is just cake icing really
UI is overrated (and that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my design life doing) – after all, I tried a violin once and it was shit, couldn’t get anything musical out of it at all, the UI is appalling, how on earth do they ever sell any of them
It might have been better to have everything ugly and military and utilitarian and brutalist so that we all hate everything equally
After all, machinists on an assembly line or farmers milking cows or violinists playing various strados have to just get on with the job whether the equipment is bare bones or prettified, the only real improvements over time have tended to be safety ones, the dressing-up of industrial gear with cosmetic coatings is just cake icing really
UI is overrated (and that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my design life doing) – after all, I tried a violin once and it was shit, couldn’t get anything musical out of it at all, the UI is appalling, how on earth do they ever sell any of them