After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.
Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great… if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.
As a matter of fact I don’t believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don’t ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn’t have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn’t have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn’t use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.
But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.
I agree with everything you wrote, except as a designer I wanted to point out that the lack of scope limitation is not usually due to design, but rather product and marketing who drive new features, because their job is to increase new customers, and improving life for existing customers is a far second – only so far as potential new customers may be impacted (reviews, comparisons with competitors, or churn). So long as they can mostly keep existing customers they will always fight against spending development time on improving their experience, when they could add a new point to the feature list for marketing.
The issue is the drive for infinite growth is counter to a human-usable quality-focused UX (with a focused scope and focused target audience).
Something like the
Linuxunix philosophy of doing 1 thing and doing it well comes to mind. FOSS no less.deleted by creator
Just cos it’s Foss doesn’t mean it follows the
Linuxunix philosophyI honestly think it’s mostly a problem with the idea that the Office apps are extremely bloated, kitchen sink apps. No one should be looking at Word or Libre Writer and thinking “I’m going to build a contracting system for my clients out of that” or “I bet I could make an inventory system in there” and yet…
Yep.
People try to use Word as a desktop publishing app then complain how it shifts images around. Thats because it’s for documents, which flow page to page.
Use Publisher for DTP, or a real, industry app. Same problem of using Excel for a database purpose.
Yeah this is a better example. Thanks!
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Begs the question for gui’s then or?
I always wonder what another interaction scheme would look like if it weren’t for “click”, I’ve always wondered about tunnels or roads, like we do in real life, to continuously travel toward a destination, rather than discretely click.
Didn’t have to be this way. CLI is underrated as any computer dev knows, power is in the knowledge. How about we apply the AI search problem to cli commands, what happens then?
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Sweet, thanks for the write up. Do you play with anything tool wise on this, I mean I constantly ask chatgpt for bash and python programs / logic, but that HTML idea sounds sorta fun. Where would that lead? Should it be even more standadized?
You have any other such methodologies that you seem to hold onto other than Unix, that are atomic and simple? Any fun blogs etc? I love stuff like this.
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So glad I asked. Thanks a lot, right up my alley!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Steve Jobs NextStep tour
Eagle Mode - Zoomable Interface Software
The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963
Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols
Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s the UNIX philosophy, not the Linux philosophy. That idea predates Linux by like a decade.
Apologies, but I’ll also take it since Linux is a subset of Unix. But right you are, it originates there… But is Linux the most interaction we have with Unix like OS in this day and age?
Probably. Mac is Unix like but basically all server infrastructure is running on Linux.
That’s going away with people like poettering running the show.
What show?
There’s a lot to dislike about systemd, and some things to like. Most big Linux distributions are using it now; in regards to this comment though, systemd is a fast executable trying to handle many core system jobs at once. Instead of Cron, openRC startup scripts, networkmanager for networking… Systemd is trying to do it all.