Mastodawn

A little louder, a reminder:

"Good UX" mostly means "I've seen this before."

Have you ever seen an adult without your cultural baggage approach a doorknob for the first time? They'll start by pulling it, then pushing it. There's nothing "intuitive" about turning a round doorknob. But you've been trained, so you don't even notice.

"...but Apple, but the iphone", the iPhone was never "easy to use" or "intuitive". They bombarded TV with training videos disguised as ads for 6 months pre-release.

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mhoye Nov 5

"You just point and click and drag everyone knows that" you spent hundreds of hours training to "just" point and click and drag, but you didn't call it training, you called it solitaire and minesweeper.

You practised.

Today, if we want a better user interface for any computing - and I think we do, and it's possible - we have two choices. Entirely 100% new - clean-break, fresh-start new - tech or to acknowledge and own that we're going to spend some time fighting reflexes honed over decades.

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sn 🐦‍⬛Nov 6

@mhoye fighting reflexes, like when Apple inverted the scroll direction?
If you think there are no intuitive UIs, watch little children use an iPad.

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mhoye

@sn Yeah, precisely like that. Apple changed the metaphor from "interacting with the viewpane into the document" to "interacting with the document". I think an improvement, once I got used to it? Going back feels weird now.