4 ms·

> it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead. This. In the m

> it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead. This. In the modern world, it feels everything and everyone’s apps have a good reason to beg for your attention. I think it even transcends OS. On GitHub, my notifications are spammed by Dependabot. Who cares if my benchmark repos from 5 years ago have security issues.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Loved my Mac Plus back in the 80's. (Still have it - recapped it and got it up and running recently — floppy is no go — had to boot with some kind of modern flash board.) No internet, no passwords. When you Shut Down the Mac — click — it shut down. Eventually, I owned a procession of more modern Macs — eventually the first install of Mac OS X. Shutting down the computer now took, curiously, a minute or so. I remember my coworker showing my wife Mac OS X and she even commented, "I don't like how long it takes to shut down." He replied, "Yeah, you'll have to find something else to like about it."
ericd 4y ago
I think it comes down to respect. Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users, and in some cases, it seems to veer into contempt. No, you may not disregard what I want you to do, the most I’ll allow is for you to delay it by an hour, at which point I’ll interrupt what you’re doing again. Because I know better than you what you should do, despite my having zero context.
- panic 4y ago
  I think it's less about individual designers and more about the industry in general. A company that respects its users will find it harder to get money from advertisers and investors.
  - NexRebular 4y ago
    the industry needs better advertisers and investors, then
- datadata 4y ago
  I don't think it is the designer's fault, it is the fault of data driven culture done poorly and picking the wrong incentives. In your example, if the dialog is say for a system upgrade, the metric would be percentage of users finishing the upgrade. An annoying, non dismissable notification would clearly boost this metric. Any decrease in user satisfaction short of public revolt on social media will not be noticed, or will be noticed over a time scale too long to be attributable to the notification change. By that time the PM has already taken credit for decreasing the number of users running old software.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Yeah, I think you’re right that it’s likely largely due to data-driven management. Brand damage is relatively hard to measure, and doesn’t seem to make its way into OKR’s.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Another way of thinking about things is that whoever is setting these incentives are indirectly designing the software, which obviously causes issues. It’s shockingly easy for large companies to completely destroy useful software loosing out on billions per year with nothing obvious to blame.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users Tragedy of the commons. In general it’s probably a good idea to hold a healthy disrespect for your average user. Power users used to be the norm, and as that changed, so did the design.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
fsflover 4y ago
I solved this problem by switching to GNU/Linux on the laptop and on the phone.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

Loved my Mac Plus back in the 80's. (Still have it - recapped it and got it up and running recently — floppy is no go — had to boot with some kind of modern flash board.) No internet, no passwords. When you Shut Down the Mac — click — it shut down. Eventually, I owned a procession of more modern Macs — eventually the first install of Mac OS X. Shutting down the computer now took, curiously, a minute or so. I remember my coworker showing my wife Mac OS X and she even commented, "I don't like how long it takes to shut down." He replied, "Yeah, you'll have to find something else to like about it."

ericd 4y ago

I think it comes down to respect. Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users, and in some cases, it seems to veer into contempt. No, you may not disregard what I want you to do, the most I’ll allow is for you to delay it by an hour, at which point I’ll interrupt what you’re doing again. Because I know better than you what you should do, despite my having zero context.

panic 4y ago
I think it's less about individual designers and more about the industry in general. A company that respects its users will find it harder to get money from advertisers and investors.
- NexRebular 4y ago
  the industry needs better advertisers and investors, then
datadata 4y ago
I don't think it is the designer's fault, it is the fault of data driven culture done poorly and picking the wrong incentives. In your example, if the dialog is say for a system upgrade, the metric would be percentage of users finishing the upgrade. An annoying, non dismissable notification would clearly boost this metric. Any decrease in user satisfaction short of public revolt on social media will not be noticed, or will be noticed over a time scale too long to be attributable to the notification change. By that time the PM has already taken credit for decreasing the number of users running old software.
- ericd 4y ago
  Yeah, I think you’re right that it’s likely largely due to data-driven management. Brand damage is relatively hard to measure, and doesn’t seem to make its way into OKR’s.
- Retric 4y ago
  Another way of thinking about things is that whoever is setting these incentives are indirectly designing the software, which obviously causes issues. It’s shockingly easy for large companies to completely destroy useful software loosing out on billions per year with nothing obvious to blame.
Aeolun 4y ago
> Modern designers seem to have very little respect for users Tragedy of the commons. In general it’s probably a good idea to hold a healthy disrespect for your average user. Power users used to be the norm, and as that changed, so did the design.
dr-detroit 4y ago

fsflover 4y ago

I solved this problem by switching to GNU/Linux on the laptop and on the phone.