Me: Agrees with title but decides to read the post before commenting
WOAH my eyes!
Aha, there's a dark-mode switch. Maybe if I click that I'll be able to read this blinding page
* CLICK *
Nope
People expect technology to suck because it sucks
61–70 of 437 posts
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#62I kind of agree, but calling it technology is pretty broad (article it's mostly app related). Technology-wise, I also expect things ranging from a flashlight to a CT scan to not suck , and they usually do not. Edit: flashlight instead of torchlight.
Consumer technology would be a better qualification. Or at least computers.
- The whole current USB ports fiasco; - Just look at any wireless headset and you'll find at least 2 major bugs, between connectivity, quality, or general usability; - Smart TVs suck terribly even at the high-ish level, both performance, image quality and usability; - Touchscreen stovetops get triggered by food splatter; And so on
Basically anything that has a microprocessor anywhere is bound to go haywire somehow at some point.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#63I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…
Yeah, but then you'd have to raise the price to pay for the testing and the jokers a block down the street who YOLO'd their competing product into the marketplace without testing would grab all your sales. You'd be out of business and your competitors would be laughing their way to the bank while the customers still suffered constantly from a broken product.
If it were only for novel products this would be a reasonable argument. See Netscape's rush to release their browser as an example of what you're talk about.
But the worst part is that this is an issue with established products that have secured their market, and will even receive money every year from their customers. They have both the money and the time to pace themselves and test things properly, but they don't.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#64It's interesting that he uses "Phone at 5% brightness" as an example of a problem that needs urgent fixing. My phone has a perfectly functioning brightness slider and the only time I feel a need to put it brighter than 10% is when I'm using it outside on a sunny day. >60% indoors on a cloudy day or evening is obnoxiously bright.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#65I couldn’t agree more - for better or worse, the expectation for a perfect “it just works” solution (of course, being relative to the exact use case) is at an all time high ( in my opinion anyway) - I’m very interested to how incumbents respond (or don’t respond) to this dynamic in the coming few years...
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#66Ironic how on his own blog the night mode feature doesn't work correctly (the embedded videos are not affected)
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#67This made me realize that my default expectations for anything tech related are very low and when something works the way it should, I'm amazed... I guess it should be the other way around. The amount of bullshit I have to deal with all kind of tech made me pretty much numb to it, I have no hope of things getting better so I just deal with it. What's even more sad is that in many aspects tech has become so much worse…
On the other hand I don't want to go back to the time where I had to re-install Windows every 6 months because the registry was falling over or watching macOS kernel panic because I unplugged a USB stick.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#68This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic. Almost 50 years later…
Being grateful for technology that didn't exist 20 years is not incompatible with criticizing real, large, and avoidable failures that are infused with all the tech we use. Likewise, I can criticize a car model that is constantly breaking down because of owner-hostile choices made by the manufacturer even though it's better to live now than 200 years ago when there were no cars.
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#69It seems we had it right around 2006-2010 or so, then decided it's too boring and perfection doesn't bring in money anyway.
What do you think we had "right" in the time period and what made it "right"?
Mac OS 10.6, Ubuntu 10.04, Firefox, a pluralistic web based on progressive enhancement, music downloads, even Windows 7, all came to work towards what people actually wanted around that time. Then came the iPhone (not bad per se, but creating the mobile web crisis), AWS, Google dominance, fscking big data
Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks
#70Me: Agrees with title but decides to read the post before commenting WOAH my eyes! Aha, there's a dark-mode switch. Maybe if I click that I'll be able to read this blinding page * CLICK * Nope
I should add: I do appreciate the creativity of the page design (and especially of the switch). But on an article about software UX... well.