Item — HN Reader

Stallman's website linked me to this article on UX that I thought was quite insightful:

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/

> The role of “experience” is to hide programmability or even customizability of the system, to minimize and channel users’ interaction with the system.

>UX fills awkward moments when AI fails. It brings “user illusion” to a level where users have to believe that there is no computer, no algorithms, no input.

> It is achieved by providing direct paths to anything a user might want to achive, by scripting the user and by making an effort on audiovisual and aesthetic levels to leave the computer behind.

> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”

> But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers, there only hidden ones. Until the moment when, like in the episode with The Guardian, the guts of the personal computer are exposed.

2 comments

> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”

This assumes intuitive UX forces you to use a product a certain way. There's no reason this has to be true. Good products can be used intuitively and can grant their users programmer-like powers.

Take Google Search, for example. It's easy to use; you can largely speak to it like you would to a human -- type "what time is giants game tonight" and you'll get the answer you're looking for. But you can also use operators and other power features to perform specific and precise searches. So good UX merely gives less savvy users a leg up; it doesn't force a mediocre experience on power users.

I read the linked article, it's great. And it does make a point that "experience" part of the UX isn't about being a conduit to experience, but about designers authoring an experience and guiding users through it.

Tools have always guided their usersas much as users guided their tools; UX is doubling down on the former.

Oh yeah. (Two short article quotes below.) Many of the most-valuable sites I traverse looking for valuable information* are 'primitive' in the good way this author is promoting.

On the other hand, there are the endless 'corporate glitz' sites which look great but convey no immediately useful content (e.g. RSS links). If they do have it, their slick emptiness endeavors to obscure it. [Disclosure: I admire Zeldman].

"So layouts, graphics, scripts, tools and solutions made by naïve users were neither seen as a heritage nor as valuable elements or structures for professional web productions."

"I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution."