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1. Embed this notice
   Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:06:25 JST Paul Cantrell

   (whispers: the original iPhone was in many ways a superior user experience) https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/113162083054623081

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:11:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     Yes, yes, yes, modern phones are far more capable in many ways, many flaws fixed, etc etc.

     but

     I could hand a first-gen iPhone to a nontechnical person who’d never once in their life used a smart phone of any kind, or any UI remotely like it, and they would •just figure it out•.

     “Wait, how do I ____?” “Just try it.” And they would. And they •always• got it. I did this experiment multiple times just to watch it replay. It was uncanny.

     I don’t think you could say that of a modern phone.

   • Embed this notice
     Jeff Miller (orange hatband) (jmeowmeow@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:17:20 JST Jeff Miller (orange hatband)

     in reply to

     @inthehands My first experience with an iPhone was so terrible that I never wanted to use a touchscreen again. I can observe that this is not the common experience; the UI has been a grand and general success.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:19:37 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     In many ways, modern phones are power user devices. People use the interface all day every day — and are more or less stuck with using it. Two results: (1) Users get extremely frustrated over minor points of friction in frequently repeated processes. (2) It’s reasonable to expect huge (semi-involuntary) time investment from users to overcome steep learning curves.

     Result: a UI overstuffed with semi-hidden affordances designed for repeated workflow, not for learning or for low cognitive burden.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:22:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     People often lament how everything always seems to get worse (and I’m saddened by the semantic drift of “enshittification” to mean this vague sentiment instead of its far crisper and important original meaning).

     I don’t think it’s as simple as that, though. There’s a real tradeoff here. Perhaps it’s the right call for phones to serve expert workflows. That does make a lot of sense. Still…

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:25:21 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     …I look at the modern phone, an invisible labyrinth of gestural Easter eggs, and wonder:

     What would it look like to move toward a phone design that’s meant to •disappear• instead of constantly demanding our attention and our cognitive investment?

     What wildly different set of incentives would push things in that direction?

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:26:46 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jeff Miller (orange hatband)

     @jmeowmeow
     Yeah, that’s very clearly not the general experience.

     The one thing that clearly sucked about the original iPhone was typing, which was good only if compared to T9. Then again, I •still• think typing on phones is terrible…so.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:30:09 JST Paul Cantrell

     • Stu

     @tehstu
     “Minimalism” is •part• of the story, yes. “Clean” was something we desperately needed in 90s/00s days of flame animations behind main menus. I’m glad we shed that junk. The babies that went out with the bathwater, however, were (1) visible affordances and (2) clear visual hierarchy.

     OTOH, I don’t think modern phone interfaces are minimal. They’re overstuffed: so many states, so many transitions, so many modes of interaction. Stripped down graphic design, overstuffed state machine.

   • Embed this notice
     Joe Groff (joe@f.duriansoftware.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:30:31 JST Joe Groff

     in reply to

     @inthehands this seems to be a general pattern with how human systems evolve, whether they be hardware, software, bureaucracy, spoken language, etc. once you have experts in the system, it becomes costly to change their learned workflows even if it would lead to an overall simpler, easier-to-use, or more efficient design, so new capabilities get pushed into weirder and weirder niches

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:36:40 JST Paul Cantrell

     • Miah Johnson

     @miah
     Yup. Thing was, this was pointedly not true of iOS prior to ~2010 or so.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:39:22 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Joe Groff

     @joe
     Indeed. I wonder if anyone’s done a credible survey of histories of complicated human systems becoming simpler and more uniform?

     First examples I think of are centralized or lead by a central figure: Spanish and Korean get tidy orthographies, Luther’s bible establishes Hochdeutsch, Dijkstra vs GOTO. But then there are organic movements (European music baroque → classical). Isolation/separation seems to matter (phonemically limited Polynesian languages). What else? hmm

   • Embed this notice
     Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:42:51 JST Jeremy Kahn

     in reply to

     @inthehands

     💚 to the idea of "self-effacing personal technology"

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:43:03 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jeremy Kahn

     @trochee
     The “self-effacing” phrase is yours, and I love it.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:45:41 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     P.S. If you’re wondering about my gripe about semantic drift above, the original meaning of “enshittifcation” was a situation where one middle player comes to control both the buyer and seller side of a market in such a way that they can go all in on extracting value from the whole system without having to care about making things worse for everyone else. Traditional anti-trust view focus on the seller side (monopoly/cartel); enshittifcation points to a semi-distinct •intermediary• pattern.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:49:27 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Tobias Frisch

     @thejackimonster
     I haven’t used one, no. I am interested in the PureOS effort.

     iPhones are in fact super good at not asking for attention unless allowed…if people undertake the considerable effort to actually use those features! But it’s not a default.

   • Embed this notice
     Tobias Frisch (thejackimonster@wehavecookies.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:49:28 JST Tobias Frisch

     in reply to

     @inthehands Did you ever try using a Linux phone like the Librem 5 yet?

     I mean it only asks for attention if I allow it and I'm okay with it to do so. Still it more seems like your concept of a tool for specialists.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:52:38 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Greg Titus
     • Joe Groff

     @gregtitus @joe
     Yeah, it’s a real tradeoff.

     Spending so much of my time teaching programming to beginners has brought this tradeoff into sharp focus for me: I’m constantly forced to re-see things that had become so familiar to me as to be invisible. Half the time I’m in awe at the collective structure we’ve built, the other half in awe at the collective mess. For example, I don’t think I truly, deeply understood what was wrong with null/nil until I taught.

   • Embed this notice
     Greg Titus (gregtitus@social.coop)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:52:42 JST Greg Titus

     in reply to

     • Joe Groff

     @joe @inthehands I don't disagree, but there's a positive side to this. Like technical vocabularies in many disciplines, where you can express more in shorter words and more exactly, but a layman will be confused.

     Similarly most consumers of smart phones are now domain experts in smart phones, so we get interfaces that depend on this knowledge to do more, at the expense of confusion to those who are unfamiliar.

   • Embed this notice
     Brian Hawthorne (bhawthorne@infosec.exchange)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:54:59 JST Brian Hawthorne

     in reply to

     • Scott Francis

     @inthehands @darkuncle Well, a Gen 1 iPhone had no AppStore and no way of installing software beyond the carefully coordinated set of Apple apps. Non-Apple software was limited to web apps. In retrospect, perhaps Steve Jobs was right.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:54:59 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Scott Francis
     • Brian Hawthorne

     @bhawthorne @darkuncle
     It’s a thought I hear regularly, and I do think there’s something to it — but looking at the history, it doesn’t seem to me that 3rd party apps are the line where things shifted. That “just pick it up and you can figure it out” phenomenon was alive until 2010 at least, in the heyday of third-party apps.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:57:10 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Jeremy Kahn

     @trochee
     That’s an important insight!

   • Embed this notice
     Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:57:12 JST Jeremy Kahn

     in reply to

     @inthehands

     The "impersonal" technology — "cloud" computing, for example — is carefully designed to direct attention elsewhere (& thereby hides its redistribution of externalities)

     The personal tools that don't self-aggrandize don't get considered as "technology"

     - the paper notebook
     - the seatbelt
     - the filling cabinet

   • Embed this notice
     Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:57:14 JST Jeremy Kahn

     in reply to

     @inthehands

     I just stuck a catchy name on your fundamentally new-to-us-in-this-timeline idea

     Almost all our "personal technology" — from phones to "smart" houses and cars — draws attention to itself.

     But it seems important to consider that it's both "personal" and "technology" that is self-aggrandizing

     1/2

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:58:51 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Greg Titus
     • Joe Groff

     @joe @gregtitus
     Yes. Something we don’t tell students nearly enough is that all these things were made by actual people, and they were solving real problems. Sometimes even solving them well!

   • Embed this notice
     Joe Groff (joe@f.duriansoftware.com)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 00:58:53 JST Joe Groff

     in reply to

     • Greg Titus

     @inthehands @gregtitus it's also not always obvious when there's load-bearing "structure" hidden in the "mess"

   • Embed this notice
     Dave Ackley (livcomp@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 01:15:31 JST Dave Ackley

     in reply to

     @inthehands
     incentives for the phone
     to be loyal to its owner
     not its manufacturer

   • Embed this notice
     Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 01:48:47 JST Raven667

     in reply to

     • Stu

     @inthehands @tehstu While I don't think strict skeumorphism actually makes UX better, the (Jony Ive?) era at Apple where they ripped the graphical design out and replaced it with minimalist flat color, also ripped out a bunch of context on what was an interactive element and what was UI chrome, to the detriment of usability.

     To make the UI usable it needs to do less and demand less state tracking by the user, esp when your brain doesn't have a 14-element working-memory

   • Embed this notice
     Raven667 (raven667@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 01:53:28 JST Raven667

     in reply to

     @inthehands I wonder how much the need to keep the dev team busy with visible "features" and trying to be all things to all people drive this MS Word level of feature creep away from a simple tool which does simple things. If there were a more competitive market with 6+ viable phone/tablet OS companies you would have a better chance at finding an OS with an interface that fits your usage, as each fights for a different overlapping set of users with different needs. Duopoly can't produce that.

   • Embed this notice
     Lisa (medievalist@writing.exchange)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 03:53:45 JST Lisa

     in reply to

     @inthehands In a related observation, UI chages to basic intersactions mean I spen dseveral weeks helpin residents in my mom's senior community figure out how to do basic tasls that no longer work the way they did

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 03:56:21 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Lisa

     @medievalist
     In my very strong opinion, software folks and designers of all stripes should give sustained and serious attention to the moment-to-moment experiences of beginners, the elderly, and other groups likely to experience usability friction — not just for the benefit of those people, which is reason enough, but because it will frequently improve the experience for everyone. Universal design ftw!

   • Embed this notice
     Lindsey 🐲 (lindsey@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 23-Sep-2024 00:01:32 JST Lindsey 🐲

     in reply to

     @inthehands
     While it might seem counterintuitive, I think having a physical keyboard made it much easier to not only not constantly have to look at phones, but also meant it was easier for people to pick up and start using then. Once we got away from physical parts of the phone, we started making the screen and specific UIs way more important and knowledge of them far more necessary.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 23-Sep-2024 00:01:32 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Lindsey 🐲

     @lindsey
     My experience watching people learn phone UIs was very much the opposite: the first iPhone was usable in a way that other contemporary smartphones like the Blackberry and the Razr simply were not. But it’s also true that that the keyboard was the weakest part of the original iPhone UI!