8 ms·

There was a book linked on HN a month ago about the Deisng of UI/UX experiences. One chapter mentions how cars are simple and easy to use despite being more com

There was a book linked on HN a month ago about the Deisng of UI/UX experiences. One chapter mentions how cars are simple and easy to use despite being more complex than a phone numpad, because the linkages between the car controls and your mental mapping is one-to-one. Having to endlessly recombine your mental mapping with a numpad or digital pad to generate letters/sentences is much worse for humans than driving, or pen and paper. The mental mapping for pen and paper is also one-to-one, using behaviours to make specific known shapes is way more powerful than submitting to an arbitrary remapping device. Electronics are really no good for first order knowledge generation and gathering. The metaphysics of reality hasn't been overcome by tech revolutions, unfortunately (or not).

makeitdouble 3y ago
That doesn't sit right with the fact that we remember passwords or other sequences with our fingers or can type whole paragraphs without minding the keyboard. There might be a threshold to be good with an input method, but it feels contrived to me to assume that only the most basic ones can be mastered and become intuitive.
eternityforest 3y ago
I never made any progress learning to drive, and I still can't write legibly without carefully considering every letter. These one to one things are not easy. The pen acts like an untrained intern. It does exactly what you say and doesn't deviate from that. The computer acts as your manager. It tells you exactly what spot to hit to make a letter. I'm not sure if this is pure crackpot armchair psychology, but my theory is that some people naturally think on multiple levels and understand things from first principles, and for them UIs are confusing because their brain tries to understand every single thing it sees. I see "Press button, letter appears, hit the other button to comment" and if I think harder about it "HTML textinput in a form". They see a lot more and are distracted my questions and don't just expect stuff to mostly work even if they don't know exactly what it does. Maybe at least subconsciously, they are bothered by stuff they don't fully understand. Like, to me, a file is a "real" thing, with nothing below it that enters my thinking unless I'm reading an article about filesystems. If you tell me about a file, I will probably see file icons and explorer windows in my mind, that's what they look like and that's where they live. Do people with a natural propensity for first order thinking get bothered at least a little bit by these abstractions? Do files feel less "real" to them? Is some part of them trying to figure out what's going on? And if they are highly technical, is some part of them wondering what the code looks like, how the text is rendered, or maybe even feeling a sense of self disappointment for not deeply understanding what they're doing? And is pure old fashioned boredom a factor? If I could see something in my head and then draw it in recognizable form, perhaps I wouldn't see the appeal of vector graphics, if I already knew what point on the paper mapped to what point of the picture in my head, maybe i wouldn't want the overhead of loading up the app to drag points around. I'd just want to draw it in the right spot the first time, and get better every day at doing that. And then there's spatial memory. If you have a good memory, the endless tweaks of modern UI probably bothers you. If you don't... Well... The new change isn't any more unfamiliar than the old one because you never deeply learned it! Digital vs analog is such a completely different paradigm. Analog people are basically working with a blank canvas all the time. With digital you're constantly being led by the machine, and if your mind is overflowing with ideas that the programmer never intended, you might hate it. If you don't have a deep understanding of how things work and what possibilities there are, you might adore having a framework where you only make small deviations in predefined ways, the possibilities are obvious, right in front of you. We should probably all do more analog stuff, but a pen is definitely an "Outside the comfort zone" thing for me rather than something that feels like an obvious and natural way to work, aside from simple things we do every day.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, you appear to have the ability to relate to images on your own terms, nearly completely. I do not. I have at all times, "two sets of books" or "two maps". Unified by a singular Duty that limits what I can and can't do. My imagination is tied to imaging the next step in my 'journey'. (something like that anyway, it has subjectivity built into it). I cannot dump relations to random ideas, I have to understand the 'background'/'whole scene' to clear out the clutter of my imagination and keep my two frames of reference, clear. The actual dutiful work of computer use is not that terribly difficult intellectually, it is often the kind of flower-arranging drudgery that I used to enjoy a lot in my 'youth' (lol im not that old). I can understand one set of technologies C/C++ buut the bugs and face-slapping error chasing in programming really begins to wear quite badly. The only way I can really program is to submit to 'someone else's ruleset' that I don't like or agree with and then endure grinding my way to how I mean it to be, based on my sense of subjective expectation and structure, hand-tied to my categorical imperative. It is possible to make elegant and powerful code like this, inside a company structure.. with uninspiring code architecture, set from the top down. Buuuut whenever I imagine some novel technology that gets me excited, I can make shallow prototypes of the idea in existing tools and inevitably find that I need to rejig/rework the tooling to get my idea out there. And often that means editing a second set of tooling. And every single time I have started and attempted this project, it starts off rocky-and-okay, the middle part is absolute hellish grind fighting the system and then the end is a complete drain of all my emotions and an inability to finish, leading to an internal frustation with wasted time. Then the technology tooling all changes and I have to re-process my understanding because the semantics in the new tech stack are different to the last. The reationships between ideas are the biggest, slowest chore that wears the most. The concepts in new languages are not terribly interesting, as most are re-arrangments of the same old music... Every single programming language is set up in such a way that the "glue" between all the concepts, is held by an insider 'brotherhood' of experts. The documentation for plebs tells you one specific way and if you fall off the documentation's instructions, then all other ways are pain and time-wasting death. A simple map of relationships between concepts would save so many man-hours globally, it is insane (but I digress). The devil-in-the-detail level bugs and jankiness is something only an American man with infinite pleasure - to keep his head cool and his fingers typing - could tolerate. I'm honestly getting to the stage where I think the only reliable way to make new code, is to control the hardware from the bottom up, and do the software from the bottom up. Every single middleware provider is another layer of shifting maps, that I have to war with, to make some new tech that works from top to bottom. And then I'd have to release that code into an environment where my competitors can open up my assets and copy-paste out the novel bits into their own products (or minds) and jiggle the appearance of the code enough for it to look like they made it. I simply cannot do that. It is not allowed under my rules and I have the scar tissue to prove that I can't overcome my own 'programming', my own Duty.. in that regard. Programming.. I don't think itma for me, even though my novel concepts would make a difference. The industry is just hostile for people who 'think differently' as it is colloquially said to be, but I really mean, the industry is not for people who have a subjective structure they wish to provide as a gift for organizing knowledge. The "shape" of programming is to be that Shelf on the factory floor that everybody wars over the ever-changing maps on the Shelves. The maps fail to provide coverage of the entire, ever-changing factory itself, and are constantly updated and their meaning constantly changes. I can not.

makeitdouble 3y ago

That doesn't sit right with the fact that we remember passwords or other sequences with our fingers or can type whole paragraphs without minding the keyboard. There might be a threshold to be good with an input method, but it feels contrived to me to assume that only the most basic ones can be mastered and become intuitive.

eternityforest 3y ago

I never made any progress learning to drive, and I still can't write legibly without carefully considering every letter. These one to one things are not easy. The pen acts like an untrained intern. It does exactly what you say and doesn't deviate from that. The computer acts as your manager. It tells you exactly what spot to hit to make a letter. I'm not sure if this is pure crackpot armchair psychology, but my theory is that some people naturally think on multiple levels and understand things from first principles, and for them UIs are confusing because their brain tries to understand every single thing it sees. I see "Press button, letter appears, hit the other button to comment" and if I think harder about it "HTML textinput in a form". They see a lot more and are distracted my questions and don't just expect stuff to mostly work even if they don't know exactly what it does. Maybe at least subconsciously, they are bothered by stuff they don't fully understand. Like, to me, a file is a "real" thing, with nothing below it that enters my thinking unless I'm reading an article about filesystems. If you tell me about a file, I will probably see file icons and explorer windows in my mind, that's what they look like and that's where they live. Do people with a natural propensity for first order thinking get bothered at least a little bit by these abstractions? Do files feel less "real" to them? Is some part of them trying to figure out what's going on? And if they are highly technical, is some part of them wondering what the code looks like, how the text is rendered, or maybe even feeling a sense of self disappointment for not deeply understanding what they're doing? And is pure old fashioned boredom a factor? If I could see something in my head and then draw it in recognizable form, perhaps I wouldn't see the appeal of vector graphics, if I already knew what point on the paper mapped to what point of the picture in my head, maybe i wouldn't want the overhead of loading up the app to drag points around. I'd just want to draw it in the right spot the first time, and get better every day at doing that. And then there's spatial memory. If you have a good memory, the endless tweaks of modern UI probably bothers you. If you don't... Well... The new change isn't any more unfamiliar than the old one because you never deeply learned it! Digital vs analog is such a completely different paradigm. Analog people are basically working with a blank canvas all the time. With digital you're constantly being led by the machine, and if your mind is overflowing with ideas that the programmer never intended, you might hate it. If you don't have a deep understanding of how things work and what possibilities there are, you might adore having a framework where you only make small deviations in predefined ways, the possibilities are obvious, right in front of you. We should probably all do more analog stuff, but a pen is definitely an "Outside the comfort zone" thing for me rather than something that feels like an obvious and natural way to work, aside from simple things we do every day.

barrysteve 3y ago
I understand where you're coming from, you appear to have the ability to relate to images on your own terms, nearly completely. I do not. I have at all times, "two sets of books" or "two maps". Unified by a singular Duty that limits what I can and can't do. My imagination is tied to imaging the next step in my 'journey'. (something like that anyway, it has subjectivity built into it). I cannot dump relations to random ideas, I have to understand the 'background'/'whole scene' to clear out the clutter of my imagination and keep my two frames of reference, clear. The actual dutiful work of computer use is not that terribly difficult intellectually, it is often the kind of flower-arranging drudgery that I used to enjoy a lot in my 'youth' (lol im not that old). I can understand one set of technologies C/C++ buut the bugs and face-slapping error chasing in programming really begins to wear quite badly. The only way I can really program is to submit to 'someone else's ruleset' that I don't like or agree with and then endure grinding my way to how I mean it to be, based on my sense of subjective expectation and structure, hand-tied to my categorical imperative. It is possible to make elegant and powerful code like this, inside a company structure.. with uninspiring code architecture, set from the top down. Buuuut whenever I imagine some novel technology that gets me excited, I can make shallow prototypes of the idea in existing tools and inevitably find that I need to rejig/rework the tooling to get my idea out there. And often that means editing a second set of tooling. And every single time I have started and attempted this project, it starts off rocky-and-okay, the middle part is absolute hellish grind fighting the system and then the end is a complete drain of all my emotions and an inability to finish, leading to an internal frustation with wasted time. Then the technology tooling all changes and I have to re-process my understanding because the semantics in the new tech stack are different to the last. The reationships between ideas are the biggest, slowest chore that wears the most. The concepts in new languages are not terribly interesting, as most are re-arrangments of the same old music... Every single programming language is set up in such a way that the "glue" between all the concepts, is held by an insider 'brotherhood' of experts. The documentation for plebs tells you one specific way and if you fall off the documentation's instructions, then all other ways are pain and time-wasting death. A simple map of relationships between concepts would save so many man-hours globally, it is insane (but I digress). The devil-in-the-detail level bugs and jankiness is something only an American man with infinite pleasure - to keep his head cool and his fingers typing - could tolerate. I'm honestly getting to the stage where I think the only reliable way to make new code, is to control the hardware from the bottom up, and do the software from the bottom up. Every single middleware provider is another layer of shifting maps, that I have to war with, to make some new tech that works from top to bottom. And then I'd have to release that code into an environment where my competitors can open up my assets and copy-paste out the novel bits into their own products (or minds) and jiggle the appearance of the code enough for it to look like they made it. I simply cannot do that. It is not allowed under my rules and I have the scar tissue to prove that I can't overcome my own 'programming', my own Duty.. in that regard. Programming.. I don't think itma for me, even though my novel concepts would make a difference. The industry is just hostile for people who 'think differently' as it is colloquially said to be, but I really mean, the industry is not for people who have a subjective structure they wish to provide as a gift for organizing knowledge. The "shape" of programming is to be that Shelf on the factory floor that everybody wars over the ever-changing maps on the Shelves. The maps fail to provide coverage of the entire, ever-changing factory itself, and are constantly updated and their meaning constantly changes. I can not.