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I suspect many people reading this HN thread also serve as their family's tech support team. Every week I get calls or emails from my parents requesting help fi

I suspect many people reading this HN thread also serve as their family's tech support team. Every week I get calls or emails from my parents requesting help figuring out something that's not obvious from the UI, is accidentally triggered by users, deliberately activated (by the app) during a software update, or buried deep in some settings or submenu. This week's selection includes: - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents' new Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it turned on, but it required me visiting their home in person again to turn it off) - Trying to help my father disable the "get Outlook for iOS" line that suddenly started to be appended to the bottom of his work emails. - Helping my spouse troubleshoot a Shopify app feature that prevents >1 item being subtracted from inventory at a time - Figuring out how to enable a social media save shared photos to her phone's photo album Yes, sometimes software is so complicated and feature rich these items have to buried deep in the settings. But often I find that the lack of obvious text labels for basic features and navigation items is the problem. Hamburger menus and the three dots "more actions" icon are a poor substitute for clear text labels and links.

brimble 5y ago
The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about. They opened the thing to use it, not to read your changelog or marketing shit. Coupled with auto-updating, it confuses the absolute hell out of them, and the way modern design (and Android especially) make it hard to tell what's a button and what's text, and inconsistent cutesy button labels, make it even worse (it often takes them a while to figure out how to make the thing they didn't ask for and never, ever want go away). Google loves to do this pretty much everywhere, and it's especially bad on mobile, but FF desktop's post-update new-tab-to-market-at-you-about-what-changed (nothing important, 95%+ of the time) is almost as bad. Hell, I don't like that stuff either (does anyone?) but it's just a minor annoyance for me. For them it can mean they give up trying to do whatever they wanted to do.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about. I would bet in almost all cases, these can be directly attributed to the developer company's poorly devised career incentives. Behind every full-screen "OMG CHECK OUT WHAT'S NEW" takeover or notification-spam lies a product manager or engineering manager whose bonus is tied to some vanity measurement of how many users are engaging with the new feature they launched. "How much of the user's attention and screen space can I take over in order to try to jam this unwanted feature down their throat and show huge usage numbers next performance review?"
flutas 5y ago
> - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents' new Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it turned on, but it required me visiting their home in person again to turn it off) For this one, I don't think it's a software update but rather user error (though it's not clear even to me how). I myself have accidentally enabled it, there seems to be some combination of buttons on the remote that will enable it. Still not sure on the specific combo though.

brimble 5y ago

The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about. They opened the thing to use it, not to read your changelog or marketing shit. Coupled with auto-updating, it confuses the absolute hell out of them, and the way modern design (and Android especially) make it hard to tell what's a button and what's text, and inconsistent cutesy button labels, make it even worse (it often takes them a while to figure out how to make the thing they didn't ask for and never, ever want go away). Google loves to do this pretty much everywhere, and it's especially bad on mobile, but FF desktop's post-update new-tab-to-market-at-you-about-what-changed (nothing important, 95%+ of the time) is almost as bad. Hell, I don't like that stuff either (does anyone?) but it's just a minor annoyance for me. For them it can mean they give up trying to do whatever they wanted to do.

ryandrake 5y ago
> The thing about modern software that infuriates me the most, watching my parents struggle with it, are the damned screen-takeover or focus-stealing on-launch notices, usually about some update they don't care about. I would bet in almost all cases, these can be directly attributed to the developer company's poorly devised career incentives. Behind every full-screen "OMG CHECK OUT WHAT'S NEW" takeover or notification-spam lies a product manager or engineering manager whose bonus is tied to some vanity measurement of how many users are engaging with the new feature they launched. "How much of the user's attention and screen space can I take over in order to try to jam this unwanted feature down their throat and show huge usage numbers next performance review?"

flutas 5y ago

> - Turning off yet again the annoying computer voice announcing any navigation or volume change on my parents' new Samsung TV (accessibility option, not sure why it turned on, but it required me visiting their home in person again to turn it off) For this one, I don't think it's a software update but rather user error (though it's not clear even to me how). I myself have accidentally enabled it, there seems to be some combination of buttons on the remote that will enable it. Still not sure on the specific combo though.