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I wonder if that's what someone from the 1980s would say about iOS 12. We consider it intuitive for toddlers to pick up, and even advanced actions (4 finger swi
by newsbinator 8y ago
I wonder if that's what someone from the 1980s would say about iOS 12. We consider it intuitive for toddlers to pick up, and even advanced actions (4 finger swipe) and hidden widgets (pull down to refresh) are quick to master.
Maybe these UIs pre-suppose childhood familiarity.
- simonh 8y agoMultitouch hasn’t been commonly available for long enough. The vast majority of current users learned to do so as adults. But anyway I don’t see how toddlers learning to use them quickly argues for childhood familiarity helping. Children don’t have a previous childhood to get familiarity from. If they find them easy to use, it’s because they are.
- newsbinator 8y agoOops to clarify, I meant if children can master iOS 12 (and if iOS 12 on its face would seem complex to people a couple generations ago), then perhaps SciFi interfaces that seem ridiculously complex or opaque to us now would in that universe seem intuitive to adults. Because they would have had decades of familiarity with the building blocks of those interfaces, and the hidden actions that manipulate them. And because they wouldn't have had other ui experiences to block them. Like how our parents struggle to learn new user interfaces not because they're necessarily complex, but because they're fighting against past experience.
- simonh 8y agoThat’s reasonable, sure. I have know plenty of people that bemoaned the limitations of GUIs compared to the power and expressivity of command like interfaces. But they learned the command line first. It’s not the most intuitive, but certainly what you become familiar with first can affect your future preferences and ability to accept and take advantage of alternatives.