[HN Gopher] UX and the Civilizing Process
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UX and the Civilizing Process
Author : agmm
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-04-12 20:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (meltingasphalt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (meltingasphalt.com)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I, for one, prefer that the computers I interact with be honest
| about being computers, and not put on a persona (mask) of poorly
| simulating a human. I think that's why, as a screen reader user,
| I prefer speech synthesizers that, while highly intelligible and
| listenable, don't try too hard to emulate natural speech (usually
| by using recordings of an actual human voice). Today my cofounder
| talked with me about possibly using some kind of chatbot for
| customer service, and I'm strongly opposed. But I suppose I'm in
| the shrinking minority.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > These were instructions aimed at the rich nobility. Among serfs
| out in the villages, standards were even less refined.
|
| Now _that_ needs a citation, and embeds a whole bundle of
| assumptions in itself. It 's necessarily true, because the rich
| decided what "refined" meant and defined it as what they did.
|
| But primary record from many times and places show this sort of
| disgust going both ways. A lot of "uncivilized" behavior has been
| direct response to material conditions, and "civilized" or
| "refined" behavior was defined _in opposition to those needs_.
| The classic example is bathing: if you spend your time up to your
| waist in clay forming bricks, you 're gonna need to wash it off
| every day. A clear way to signal that you don't do that is to not
| bathe.
|
| From the perspective of wealthy city dwellers, I'm sure the
| habits of rural serfs were disgusting. On some specific habits
| I'm sure I would agree. But that they were _generally_ , across
| time and place, more disgusting than the wealthy? mmm idk.
| mrob wrote:
| I disagree that software should be thought of as a person, even
| if it's a polite person. Software is and should be thought of as
| a tool. For routine operations by an experienced user, a tool
| feels like it's part of your own body. It's like riding a
| bicycle. Most people who ride are not aware of countersteering,
| but they countersteer regardless, because the bicycle has become
| effectively a prosthetic body part. This is the ideal way to
| operate software.
|
| But unfortunately, this feeling is fragile. The requirements are
| stricter than mere politeness. E.g. latency is very important.
| Any kind of delay (including animations) breaks the feeling of
| software being part of your own body. There is already a built in
| delay/animation: the movement of your own fingers. This is the
| only natural delay. Any additional delay on top of it breaks the
| connection between tool and human body, and and removes the
| feeling of merging of the two.
|
| And any kind of automatic behavior breaks the feeling. I'm
| opposed to autosaving, because it's a reminder that the software
| is not literally a part of my body. It's better to cultivate a
| habit of manual saving. Predictability is as important as
| responsiveness. Tools are not "smart".
|
| I've never felt this kind of man/machine unity from a mobile UI.
| Maybe it's possible in theory, but touch screen UIs focus on
| dragging, which makes latency even more obvious, by translating
| time delays into spatial displacements. And it's only possible
| with experience, which designers constantly fight against by
| making UI changes. It's likely that the majority of computer
| users have never felt it at all, and that is a real pity.
| masswerk wrote:
| There are many sides to this. E.g., a couple of days ago, I had a
| conversation with the owner of the next-door pizza shop. He
| doesn't use computers or the internet. Years ago, he had
| participated in a course, but found it frustrating. He wanted to
| understand the grammar of this, how it worked, and how things
| were related and connected to each other. (He was actually using
| the term "language".) Unable to do so, he turned his back to
| computers.
|
| You could call his a civilizatory demand. Compare modern UX to
| this, it's more like, "here's your hand, use it for everything,
| just try, don't think about it (we won't make you think,
| promise)." Which might be closer to what figures as "medieval
| barbarism" in the article.
|
| Also, the bit on the "Mother of All Demos" may be a bit unfair:
| The system relied on multiple users' views rendered on a single
| screen and respective portions of this being relayed to the user
| via CCTV, and, for this particular event, input and output were
| miles away from the machine that ran the demo, connected via a
| network bridge. Modern videos on social media showing a person
| manipulating their smartphone can be messy in appearance, as
| well... (On the other hand, Engelbart's real ambition, the
| "bootstrapping" process of symbol manipulating minds and symbol
| processing machines elevating each other to levels never imagined
| before, a project very much civilizatory in nature, probably
| never became a reality. And this may be due to interfaces, which
| teach us how to think about this process and the systems
| involved.)
|
| Edit: Another early "civilizatory" approach may have been J.C.R
| Licklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis", where human and machine
| meet on a shared, common ground (the interface), instructing each
| other by suggestion, thus eventually reaching a goal of refined
| understanding and problem insight.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Present day UX grew out of Englebart and co's notions of
| computer interfaces for children. They were meant to be
| discoverable. They weren't meant to avoid thinking. That's
| still the guiding spirit in it.
|
| One could argue that children are "barbaric," but I really
| don't think it's useful framing.
| masswerk wrote:
| Alan Kay's work is very much about children, but Engelbart's
| project was about (qualified) grownups and future
| civilization. (Children at the age of about 10-12 were
| especially interesting to Alan Kay, because they're at in a
| transitional state from visual dominance to symbolic
| dominance in thinking, following the work of Piaget and in
| the updated version by Jerome Brunner.) Regarding, what is
| discoverable, the civilizing aspect may be well in what is
| shown and in what way. E.g., Licklider's examples are
| actually conversations about constraints, without verbalising
| constraints specifically.
|
| Edit: One notable "relict" of Engelbart's project is the
| outline view in MS Word (which, out of context, may not
| appear to be that remarkable, while it was much about how
| texts should be organized and understood).
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