After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
We have been trained to hoard apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any intuitive or easy way to organize them. And their solution isn’t to make things more organized or usable. No, our technological overlords have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift through the mess.
Ugh. Who’s the teen writing for Scientific American?
This same complaint was made back in the oughts about search. “Everyone should just categorize and properly tag documents!”
Turns out users hate that.
alcasa@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.
Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great… if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.
As a matter of fact I don’t believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don’t ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn’t have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn’t have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn’t use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.
But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.
Zerfallen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I agree with everything you wrote, except as a designer I wanted to point out that the lack of scope limitation is not usually due to design, but rather product and marketing who drive new features, because their job is to increase new customers, and improving life for existing customers is a far second – only so far as potential new customers may be impacted (reviews, comparisons with competitors, or churn). So long as they can mostly keep existing customers they will always fight against spending development time on improving their experience, when they could add a new point to the feature list for marketing.
The issue is the drive for infinite growth is counter to a human-usable quality-focused UX (with a focused scope and focused target audience).
beeng@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Something like the Linux philosophy of doing 1 thing and doing it well comes to mind. FOSS no less.
AccidentalLemming@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Rodeo@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
That’s the UNIX philosophy, not the Linux philosophy. That idea predates Linux by like a decade.
lloram239@feddit.de 1 year ago
That philosophy has never been successfully applied in the GUI space and especially not in the Linux world.
knobbysideup@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s going away with people like poettering running the show.