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Google rose to a prominence in an era of portal pages. Yahoo in particular had a home page without hundreds of links. Google presented you with a logo, a text b

Google rose to a prominence in an era of portal pages. Yahoo in particular had a home page without hundreds of links. Google presented you with a logo, a text box, two buttons and <50 words of text. What to do on such a page involves less decision making. In the 90s there were lots of experiments with directories. Yahoo had one. Think about this: typing in a search involves one decision. Finding something in a directory involves one decision at each step. Yep. Also consider the superior experience of reading a news article (like this one) in single-page mode instead of page by page. Clicking on a link feels a lot more like "a decision" than turning the page of a book, which flows naturally. The single-page option just "feels" a lot better. One issue that comes up in web design is that reading a link (even a spurious one) taxes the reader's mind substantially more than reading regular text. If I recall correctly, the cognitive load of a link is about five times that of a regular word. People tend to "block out" the clutter, but there's a subconscious mental energy expenditure in the "blocking out" process. People don't notice the effect day-to-day, but over time it leads to people preferring Google over Yahoo. Apple is famous for making decisions for its customers. Many people rail against this lack of control. I personally appreciate it. I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't. Apple provides you with a B+/A- default experience, and Jobs's attitude is that if you want something "better", you should use something else. Which is the right approach because one person's "A+" experience is another's confusing horror. The quickest way to enervate someone, in this regard, is to present that person with lots of decisions to make, and then ensure that the outcomes of those decisions are still somewhat unsatisfactory. That's the Windows experience, in a nutshell. The second is on leadership. Leaders make decisions, obviating the need for followers to weigh up choices. Could this be part of why so many of us are so eager to follow? I remember a scene from an early Mad Men episode where Don was saying that what most people crave is to be told that whatever they're doing is OK. Don Draper: banned on Google+. :) I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war. One proposed candidate for the increasing prevalence of PTSD is the way soldiers are treated when they return from war. War has always been terrible, but the change is in how soldiers are seen on return. In 1945, they were received as heroes for defeating the Nazis, which helped them feel "OK" about what they'd had to do. After Vietnam, they were called "baby killers" and generally treated quite poorly. For that reason, a lot of the Vietnam vets never recovered.

cletus 15y ago
> I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't. I have a slightly different take on this. While I agree that Windows is an example of how trying to be all things to all men leads to a confusing mess, at least in Windows 7 it's still a fairly decent default experience. It probably does punish the true tinkerer for all its complex layers of the registry, local and group policies, magic folders (eg startup), etc. But Linux on the desktop just goes to prove time and again just how bad a user experience it is to give true "freedom". I don't want to figure out what the best way of playing video or audio files is and choosing between N (where N is typically a fairly large number) options. This is something that Canonical (for one) is trying to address but at this stage it almost requires a complete rethink of the Linux desktop (which may be what Wayland and others hope to achieve). > I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war. I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day. That's certainly an interesting take on war. I think it's more than that though. In modern warfare we (as a society) have become incredibly good at training soldiers to do their job reflexively. In a combat situation the training kicks in and the modern soldier will, generally speaking, shoot an enemy (as one example) almost completely instinctively. It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day. Something I find interesting is that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are superficially different shows, but actually extremely similar. Ignore the radically different backdrops and they're both about out-of-control egos and "men at work" drama. The difference is that one setting involves alcoholism and advertising and people who fall out just get fired, while the other involves methamphetamine and murder and failing (for Walter) means death. Mad Men is erotic, Breaking Bad is thanatoptic; but the shows are two different takes on the same society. I don't know if this correspondence is intentional on the part of AMC's directors, but Mad Men and Breaking Bad are, to me, clear A-and-Z bookends of the American Era. It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training. Soldiers and policemen have a terrible job. For psychopaths (2%) killing another person is easy. For everyone else, it's extremely difficult (even in self-defense) and something people generally avoid. Which means that an untrained normal person drawing against a psychopath is likely to be shot dead. This may not be new knowledge, but 85% of guns issued in the American Civil War were never fired.

cletus 15y ago

> I agree. Windows, as far as I can see it, is the worst of both worlds. You have to do a lot of work (make a lot of decisions) to get a half-decent experience but if you want to control it at a low level, the way you can with Linux, you can't. I have a slightly different take on this. While I agree that Windows is an example of how trying to be all things to all men leads to a confusing mess, at least in Windows 7 it's still a fairly decent default experience. It probably does punish the true tinkerer for all its complex layers of the registry, local and group policies, magic folders (eg startup), etc. But Linux on the desktop just goes to prove time and again just how bad a user experience it is to give true "freedom". I don't want to figure out what the best way of playing video or audio files is and choosing between N (where N is typically a fairly large number) options. This is something that Canonical (for one) is trying to address but at this stage it almost requires a complete rethink of the Linux desktop (which may be what Wayland and others hope to achieve). > I remember that scene (in Mad Men) quite well and I think it's insightful. It reminds me of On Killing, an excellent book on the psychological effects of war. I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day. That's certainly an interesting take on war. I think it's more than that though. In modern warfare we (as a society) have become incredibly good at training soldiers to do their job reflexively. In a combat situation the training kicks in and the modern soldier will, generally speaking, shoot an enemy (as one example) almost completely instinctively. It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training.

michaelochurch 15y ago
I could probably rhapsodize about the insights of Mad Men all day. Something I find interesting is that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are superficially different shows, but actually extremely similar. Ignore the radically different backdrops and they're both about out-of-control egos and "men at work" drama. The difference is that one setting involves alcoholism and advertising and people who fall out just get fired, while the other involves methamphetamine and murder and failing (for Walter) means death. Mad Men is erotic, Breaking Bad is thanatoptic; but the shows are two different takes on the same society. I don't know if this correspondence is intentional on the part of AMC's directors, but Mad Men and Breaking Bad are, to me, clear A-and-Z bookends of the American Era. It's only after that happens when the soldier has time to process what they've done that they run into trouble. I saw a documentary on this and it was talking about how there's a real disconnect between the how of a soldier's actions and the why with the increasingly effective training. Soldiers and policemen have a terrible job. For psychopaths (2%) killing another person is easy. For everyone else, it's extremely difficult (even in self-defense) and something people generally avoid. Which means that an untrained normal person drawing against a psychopath is likely to be shot dead. This may not be new knowledge, but 85% of guns issued in the American Civil War were never fired.