When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

Me: Electronic calendars, whether on my desktop or on my phone, can’t replace my good old-fashioned paper calendar with my specific notes and annotations keying my memory to essential issues

Also me: who the fuck is Joel and what am I doing to or with him at 11

There are two trends in government over the past 30 years that have collided to cause a never-ending series of high-profile failures:

1. Outsourcing anything technology-related, regarding tech as outside of government’s core competencies (or even government’s proper role).
2. Relying on technology to accomplish nearly all agency goals and intermediating interactions with the public through software.

Can you identify the problem here?

the framing of mastodon having attrition problems bafflingly misses what's interesting here

mastodon's new user retention rate being as high as it is, despite there being no UX team designing shady psychological tricks into the service/apps to keep you coming back, is a pretty big deal

like, let's be honest, there's very little about mastodon that's making us want to return here compulsively or addictively the way so many for-profit services implicitly aim for

it's pretty much just the people