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> "We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog." How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted,

> "We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog." How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use and appeal more to their perception of how technology should work! How dare they! The plebes! DO NOT THEY NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DO?! Why won't people do more work to preserve the freedom of the web, like setting up their own blogs, and manually maintaining their own contacts?!

bad_user 15y ago
That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to: 1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier and more limited than the one before it 2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do that Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use What you're missing here is that those products that are easier to use get replaced like socks, with the users being back on square 1 every single time and struggling to perform even the most basic tasks by clicking their way around. People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way. The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore, nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking painful to watch ;) Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of Everyday Things: http://amzn.to/ryfiuI http://amzn.to/ryfiuI (the link does contain my affiliate code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that simplicity is a complex topic. Why won't people do more work ... setting up their own blogs Setting up your own blog is just a few clicks away on Google's Blogger, on Wordpress.com, on Tumblr.com or on countless other services. It takes more work to set up a template that represents your style, but that's not something you can do on Facebook anyway. Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
  "People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way." This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu, the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with grouping bar in Windows 7. All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and stick it out with facebook as "the internet". Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox. Darn it.
  - perfunctory 15y ago
    > Stop designing ...thats a checkbox. Darn it. Exactly!
    - mooki 15y ago
      Yep! What I like about html is how predictable its limitations make it. I can visit a decade old website created by a 14-year old and have the smoothest user experience imaginable. Everything behaves the way you'd expect it. Javascript is more powerful, but that also means more power to screw up. Sometimes the results are amazing (like Gmail) - but more often than not it just ends up confusing and frustrating, with vital parts of the UI hidden behind a clusterfuck of menus and widgets.
  - alexhawket 15y ago
    Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a system that was never intended to behave like an app. Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.
ColdAsIce 15y ago
Most people cant handle facebook. They dont even know what they are doing there, its more like a random walk clicking around stuff. Have you ever watched a teenager use a computer? I have, it was not pretty.
perfunctory 15y ago
> Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems To me Facebook is just as convoluted and hard-to-use as anything else.
tambourine_man 15y ago
If the systems are hard to use that's our fault. We, the technically oriented geeks, failed to build something for normal humans. But I don't think that's the case. Grandma has to be taught to use Facebook as well, it's not like it's an intuitive interface, quite the contrary IMO. It's a problem of not realizing the danger of loosing this wonderful and fragile thing we built. A lot of you geeks have Facebook accounts, so it's not like it's a service for the technically impaired.

bad_user 15y ago

That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to: 1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier and more limited than the one before it 2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do that Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use What you're missing here is that those products that are easier to use get replaced like socks, with the users being back on square 1 every single time and struggling to perform even the most basic tasks by clicking their way around. People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way. The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore, nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking painful to watch ;) Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of Everyday Things: http://amzn.to/ryfiuI http://amzn.to/ryfiuI (the link does contain my affiliate code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that simplicity is a complex topic. Why won't people do more work ... setting up their own blogs Setting up your own blog is just a few clicks away on Google's Blogger, on Wordpress.com, on Tumblr.com or on countless other services. It takes more work to set up a template that represents your style, but that's not something you can do on Facebook anyway. Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.

ColdAsIce 15y ago
"People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way." This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu, the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with grouping bar in Windows 7. All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and stick it out with facebook as "the internet". Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox. Darn it.
- perfunctory 15y ago
  > Stop designing ...thats a checkbox. Darn it. Exactly!
  - mooki 15y ago
    Yep! What I like about html is how predictable its limitations make it. I can visit a decade old website created by a 14-year old and have the smoothest user experience imaginable. Everything behaves the way you'd expect it. Javascript is more powerful, but that also means more power to screw up. Sometimes the results are amazing (like Gmail) - but more often than not it just ends up confusing and frustrating, with vital parts of the UI hidden behind a clusterfuck of menus and widgets.
- alexhawket 15y ago
  Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a system that was never intended to behave like an app. Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.

ColdAsIce 15y ago

Most people cant handle facebook. They dont even know what they are doing there, its more like a random walk clicking around stuff. Have you ever watched a teenager use a computer? I have, it was not pretty.

perfunctory 15y ago

> Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems To me Facebook is just as convoluted and hard-to-use as anything else.

tambourine_man 15y ago

If the systems are hard to use that's our fault. We, the technically oriented geeks, failed to build something for normal humans. But I don't think that's the case. Grandma has to be taught to use Facebook as well, it's not like it's an intuitive interface, quite the contrary IMO. It's a problem of not realizing the danger of loosing this wonderful and fragile thing we built. A lot of you geeks have Facebook accounts, so it's not like it's a service for the technically impaired.