(whispers: the original iPhone was in many ways a superior user experience) https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/113162083054623081
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The "impersonal" technology — "cloud" computing, for example — is carefully designed to direct attention elsewhere (& thereby hides its redistribution of externalities)
The personal tools that don't self-aggrandize don't get considered as "technology"
- the paper notebook
- the seatbelt
- the filling cabinet -
@trochee
That’s an important insight! -
@joe @gregtitus
Yes. Something we don’t tell students nearly enough is that all these things were made by actual people, and they were solving real problems. Sometimes even solving them well! -
@inthehands
incentives for the phone
to be loyal to its owner
not its manufacturer -
@inthehands @tehstu While I don't think strict skeumorphism actually makes UX better, the (Jony Ive?) era at Apple where they ripped the graphical design out and replaced it with minimalist flat color, also ripped out a bunch of context on what was an interactive element and what was UI chrome, to the detriment of usability.
To make the UI usable it needs to do less and demand less state tracking by the user, esp when your brain doesn't have a 14-element working-memory
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@inthehands I wonder how much the need to keep the dev team busy with visible "features" and trying to be all things to all people drive this MS Word level of feature creep away from a simple tool which does simple things. If there were a more competitive market with 6+ viable phone/tablet OS companies you would have a better chance at finding an OS with an interface that fits your usage, as each fights for a different overlapping set of users with different needs. Duopoly can't produce that.
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Lisa L. Spangenbergreplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands In a related observation, UI chages to basic intersactions mean I spen dseveral weeks helpin residents in my mom's senior community figure out how to do basic tasls that no longer work the way they did
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Lisa L. Spangenberg last edited by
@medievalist
In my very strong opinion, software folks and designers of all stripes should give sustained and serious attention to the moment-to-moment experiences of beginners, the elderly, and other groups likely to experience usability friction — not just for the benefit of those people, which is reason enough, but because it will frequently improve the experience for everyone. Universal design ftw! -
@inthehands
While it might seem counterintuitive, I think having a physical keyboard made it much easier to not only not constantly have to look at phones, but also meant it was easier for people to pick up and start using then. Once we got away from physical parts of the phone, we started making the screen and specific UIs way more important and knowledge of them far more necessary. -
@lindsey
My experience watching people learn phone UIs was very much the opposite: the first iPhone was usable in a way that other contemporary smartphones like the Blackberry and the Razr simply were not. But it’s also true that that the keyboard was the weakest part of the original iPhone UI!