4 ms·

I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. HyperCard, vb, and other easy to use and accessible builders are dead even though thi

I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. HyperCard, vb, and other easy to use and accessible builders are dead even though this what people really want. If I want a blue menu bar, I need to code markup!?!, but to stop me from creating blue menu bars, today I am forbidden from having a menu bar anyways. Crazy ideas and creatively built prototypes seem to have no place in the private ManagerFactoryClass. One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear).

bob1029 1y ago
> I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. I don't know how the incentives really play out anymore. It's definitely self-interest in a lot of places. I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns. The UI/UX for Azure instantly comes to mind as an example. By the time I've been able to ascertain that my VM is actually running, I have forgotten about the five other things I wanted to verify wrt billing, etc. Eventual consistency for something like this appears to me as an intentionally user-hostile design choice, especially in the case of Microsoft with their vast experience and talent pools.
- rustcleaner 1y ago
  >I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns. Sounds like bullshit... I believe it!
- bloomca 1y ago
  The thing about MS I recently realized is that whatever they do (and most of the technologies they output), they target it from the enterprise angle. So they check boxes with features, they just need to make sure they are available/usable, but they don't particularly care how nice they are to use. So it is indeed an intentional choice just to make a good enough product and move on to something else. They never want to polish whatever they have.

bob1029 1y ago

> I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. I don't know how the incentives really play out anymore. It's definitely self-interest in a lot of places. I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns. The UI/UX for Azure instantly comes to mind as an example. By the time I've been able to ascertain that my VM is actually running, I have forgotten about the five other things I wanted to verify wrt billing, etc. Eventual consistency for something like this appears to me as an intentionally user-hostile design choice, especially in the case of Microsoft with their vast experience and talent pools.

rustcleaner 1y ago
>I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns. Sounds like bullshit... I believe it!
bloomca 1y ago
The thing about MS I recently realized is that whatever they do (and most of the technologies they output), they target it from the enterprise angle. So they check boxes with features, they just need to make sure they are available/usable, but they don't particularly care how nice they are to use. So it is indeed an intentional choice just to make a good enough product and move on to something else. They never want to polish whatever they have.