(whispers: the original iPhone was in many ways a superior user experience) https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/113162083054623081
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In many ways, modern phones are power user devices. People use the interface all day every day — and are more or less stuck with using it. Two results: (1) Users get extremely frustrated over minor points of friction in frequently repeated processes. (2) It’s reasonable to expect huge (semi-involuntary) time investment from users to overcome steep learning curves.
Result: a UI overstuffed with semi-hidden affordances designed for repeated workflow, not for learning or for low cognitive burden.
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Stureplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by [email protected]
@inthehands I think we've hidden so much behind clean user interfaces now. Well, and clean hardware too, devoid of mechanical inputs. If I remember correctly, early iOS made quite clear which on screen elements you interacted with. Websites of the era similarly so.
And not only are we hiding stuff, but we keep altering the paradigm. Burger menu? Sure, lot of people now familiar with it (and a waffle, etc). But Google is moving away from that now.
Minimalism has set us back, I reckon.
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People often lament how everything always seems to get worse (and I’m saddened by the semantic drift of “enshittification” to mean this vague sentiment instead of its far crisper and important original meaning).
I don’t think it’s as simple as that, though. There’s a real tradeoff here. Perhaps it’s the right call for phones to serve expert workflows. That does make a lot of sense. Still…
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…I look at the modern phone, an invisible labyrinth of gestural Easter eggs, and wonder:
What would it look like to move toward a phone design that’s meant to •disappear• instead of constantly demanding our attention and our cognitive investment?
What wildly different set of incentives would push things in that direction?
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Jeff Miller (orange hatband) last edited by
@jmeowmeow
Yeah, that’s very clearly not the general experience.The one thing that clearly sucked about the original iPhone was typing, which was good only if compared to T9. Then again, I •still• think typing on phones is terrible…so.
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@inthehands this seems to be a general pattern with how human systems evolve, whether they be hardware, software, bureaucracy, spoken language, etc. once you have experts in the system, it becomes costly to change their learned workflows even if it would lead to an overall simpler, easier-to-use, or more efficient design, so new capabilities get pushed into weirder and weirder niches
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@inthehands this is perhaps the best thing I have ever read that captures the zeitgeist that modern smartphones have. You could certainly add a thread on the capitalistic influence on the smartphone market – meaning that originally the ease of use aspects were to target money holders – and now it’s to target power users because we aren’t having to convince them to spend the money.
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@tehstu
“Minimalism” is •part• of the story, yes. “Clean” was something we desperately needed in 90s/00s days of flame animations behind main menus. I’m glad we shed that junk. The babies that went out with the bathwater, however, were (1) visible affordances and (2) clear visual hierarchy.OTOH, I don’t think modern phone interfaces are minimal. They’re overstuffed: so many states, so many transitions, so many modes of interaction. Stripped down graphic design, overstuffed state machine.
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@inthehands My mom has a iphone, and I use android. When she asks me for help I have to search for answers because the interface is filled with non-obvious actions.
The fact that both android, and ios do things in such different ways also doesn't help anybody.
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@miah
Yup. Thing was, this was pointedly not true of iOS prior to ~2010 or so. -
@joe
Indeed. I wonder if anyone’s done a credible survey of histories of complicated human systems becoming simpler and more uniform?First examples I think of are centralized or lead by a central figure: Spanish and Korean get tidy orthographies, Luther’s bible establishes Hochdeutsch, Dijkstra vs GOTO. But then there are organic movements (European music baroque → classical). Isolation/separation seems to matter (phonemically limited Polynesian languages). What else? hmm
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@inthehands Yup! I had the original iphone. It was very easy to understand, I had moved to it from a WinCE mobile device.
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to the idea of "self-effacing personal technology"
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@inthehands I've never thought of it that way, but you're right. Ostensibly clean, but they hide the non intuitive complexity. Plus, for the sake of appearing to be new (and sell devices), I think there's impetus to keep fiddling with it.
After I replied earlier, I was reminded of how consistent the Xbox user interface has been (after they shed the silly Windows 8 look). Probably for close to a decade now. I assume the PlayStation is similar.
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@inthehands Did you ever try using a Linux phone like the Librem 5 yet?
I mean it only asks for attention if I allow it and I'm okay with it to do so. Still it more seems like your concept of a tool for specialists.
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@trochee
The “self-effacing” phrase is yours, and I love it. -
P.S. If you’re wondering about my gripe about semantic drift above, the original meaning of “enshittifcation” was a situation where one middle player comes to control both the buyer and seller side of a market in such a way that they can go all in on extracting value from the whole system without having to care about making things worse for everyone else. Traditional anti-trust view focus on the seller side (monopoly/cartel); enshittifcation points to a semi-distinct •intermediary• pattern.
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@joe @inthehands I don't disagree, but there's a positive side to this. Like technical vocabularies in many disciplines, where you can express more in shorter words and more exactly, but a layman will be confused.
Similarly most consumers of smart phones are now domain experts in smart phones, so we get interfaces that depend on this knowledge to do more, at the expense of confusion to those who are unfamiliar.
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Brian Hawthornereplied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands @darkuncle Well, a Gen 1 iPhone had no AppStore and no way of installing software beyond the carefully coordinated set of Apple apps. Non-Apple software was limited to web apps. In retrospect, perhaps Steve Jobs was right.
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@thejackimonster
I haven’t used one, no. I am interested in the PureOS effort.iPhones are in fact super good at not asking for attention unless allowed…if people undertake the considerable effort to actually use those features! But it’s not a default.