Thought this was interesting coverage of a mix of different issues from inattentiveness, prompt resignation at slight effort, and tech and media illiteracy. It’s difficult to determine what all the contributors to these behaviors are across different age demographics, as you see it both with the young and the old in different forms.
There’s a sort of expectation from some of both to operate software more like simple machinery (appliances, more than applications) where you tap or click the buttons and it promptly and predictably responds (ideally), and when it doesn’t…To simply give up and try to find a different app that works as desired, or a person to help them.
On a very narrow section, for me, I’ve gotten really tired of crappy interfaces. Zero logic in how they are designed. No ability for the end user to use logic to figure out how to use it. Just blindly hit a bunch of keys and hope you get the result you want. Then memorize how you got there.
It just pisses me off.
I’m at the point where it works right and works logically or I’ll toss it/return it and find something that does work.
I used to the guy that people would ask, how does this work. Now I literally can’t figure it out most times without a ton of research.
Like I said, once I got to that point, I just said screw it.
Yeah, some interfaces have somehow contorted themselves to being utterly inaccessible in efforts to be maximally accessible.
Whether that’s removing any immediately visible buttons whatsoever, only displaying vague icons (with no text labels) only to be seen in that software, or weirdly expecting a certain degree of old/new tech familiarity that may be too old for younger people or too new to make sense for many to be that familiar with yet.
On desktop/laptop computers I call it “appifying”, a great example is Firefox, it used a classic customizable UI up untill version 29 when it launched a major redesign called Australis, making Firefox look like chrome, removing a LOT of cool and useful features, I hated it soo much I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, and only switched back to Firefox when they launched the Photon redesign a few years later.
