> The final, particularly strong, objection from the tech community is "don't touch my stuff". People get angry when they have worked hard to get their desktop environment just as they like it and something changes to disrupt that.
Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.
Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.
> Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
Sure, sometimes, when we have the time and surplus to deal with changes to things that already work well enough, and are not essential to doing our actual job.
That should be something you can opt in to.
Changing things for someone who's actually doing real work on top of the existing setup, is an undesired hurdle.
People are change-averse because they've been taught that change is costly, and they completely rationally ask "what's in it for me?".
You want them to buy in to the change, you better give a good answer to that, one which is a more than negligible benefit in a few cases that the user may not care about.
"Good enough" is good _enough_, it doesn't _need_ changes. Any change has to pay for its own retraining cost, in time and mental effort, otherwise it's a net negative for that user.
Being change-averse is the rational default behavior. Ignoring that, or even belittling it, is disrespecting your users.
WCSTombs · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.
Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.
reichstein · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, sometimes, when we have the time and surplus to deal with changes to things that already work well enough, and are not essential to doing our actual job.
That should be something you can opt in to.
Changing things for someone who's actually doing real work on top of the existing setup, is an undesired hurdle.
People are change-averse because they've been taught that change is costly, and they completely rationally ask "what's in it for me?". You want them to buy in to the change, you better give a good answer to that, one which is a more than negligible benefit in a few cases that the user may not care about. "Good enough" is good _enough_, it doesn't _need_ changes. Any change has to pay for its own retraining cost, in time and mental effort, otherwise it's a net negative for that user.
Being change-averse is the rational default behavior. Ignoring that, or even belittling it, is disrespecting your users.