3 ms·

> See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest

> See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore. On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.

noduerme 4y ago
Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them. Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  That Casio calculator watch is still sold—I saw one in Walmart yesterday. I was also admiring a digital Timex Ironman watch that had an "OCCASNS" function, including customizable calendar and time-of-day alerts, which I had never seen before on those watches. It only took me a minute or two to figure out how it worked, even with a segmented LCD and odd contractions to fit the words on the screen. (I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)

noduerme 4y ago

Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them. Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
That Casio calculator watch is still sold—I saw one in Walmart yesterday. I was also admiring a digital Timex Ironman watch that had an "OCCASNS" function, including customizable calendar and time-of-day alerts, which I had never seen before on those watches. It only took me a minute or two to figure out how it worked, even with a segmented LCD and odd contractions to fit the words on the screen. (I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)