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The UX on this small child is terrible

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#62

The things children are born not knowing is crazy. The pre-programming is limited ! You have to teach them how to blow their nose. "Don't eat your boogers." Holds finger out to me. I wipe it off. "Don't pick your nose, blow it instead. No, don't pick my nose either."

Hang on, genuine question - do some people consider blowing their nose vs. picking their nose to be an all-or-nothing choice?

If it's dry, I can't blow my nose... Unless there is some method I am not aware of.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#63
post #47

This makes me wonder about the opposite--taking cues from humans' instinctual child-rearing behavior in product design. Not being a parent though that thought started and ended with using infant crying sounds for emergency notifications, which would probably just disturb most people. Does anyone with experience have ideas?

Sending the product manager out for a timeout is unlikely to produce a positive change in behavior.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#64
As someone who's gone through this five times (ok, going through it for the fifth):

My experience has been that once I understood it it became very simple, but learning it was hard since none of the documentation is complete and it often only covers the small child that the author of said document had.

One piece of very practical advice that I picked up from some docs somewhere though:

For some reason adults easily understand that kids needs to learn to eat, learn to walk and learn to speak and later write.

For some reason however many of us think that kids just should know how to sleep.

Most kids however doesn't know how to get a good nights sleep however.

Some general advice in that regard:

- Don't let kids over a year fall asleep with anything they cannot keep during the night (food, parents by their side, music, film etc.) We all wake up about once an hour to see that things are still OK. This is good thing. For small kids this check seems to be mostly that things are exactly as they were when they fell asleep. Not knowing about this mechanism can drive a good hearted parent mad since they'll go to extreme lengths to make sure their kids are happy - including waking up once an hour to help the kid fall asleep again. (Case in point: I did this for months until I realized my kid woke up once an hour because she always fell asleep with a bottle of milk and consequently woke up once an hour the rest of the night to tell us things weren't right until she could have some more milk in her bottle.)

- Some people recommend letting one year olds crying themselves to sleep until they "learn to sleep". I recommend against it. What small kids seems to be afraid of is that parents disappear. Training the kid to realize that parents are there and will check back even if they don't cry seems to help a lot. In other words: if kid cries, pop your head in and say the some very few carefully selected nice words, but more importantly and somewhat counterintuitively if the kid does not cry, have a timer on short intervals and make it boringly predictable to the kid that you will show up even if they don't cry. What I found out was that as soon as my kids realized I would come back with boring precision even if they just played with their toys they stopped shouting or crying: I cannot know what they think but I guess somewhere along the lines of "no need to bother crying if dad shows up in exacly 2 minutes 40 seconds since he was here 20 seconds ago"

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#65

How do I get new features added to the roadmap? I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround for over a year, no response, yet in the same time frame I’ve seen things like “climb top-heavy bookshelf” and “unfurl entire toilet paper roll” deployed… who is asking for these features??

>I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround

Perhaps "not eating vegetables" shouldn't have been presented as an option, but instead "we eat what is on offer today, there is no special menu".

More often than not, it's spoiling the kid with sweets, pizza, or perhaps just cooking their favorite dishes on demand every time (as opposed to as a love gesture once in a while), that prevents them from enjoying and appreciating a wider range of food.

Once somebody has been hooked on the quick-fix of a burger, for example, it's difficult to learn to appreciate the deeper textures, tastes, etc. of vegetables and other more refined recipes.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#66
Just wait until the automatic over-the-air updates kick in and the Small Child becomes Teenage Child without your consent.

All your favorite Small Child features are now buried 5-layers deep under confusing menus that are apparently different on each version.

I found it under:

Late Night -> Food -> Sugary Foods -> Milkshakes -> Make Your Own -> Enable Small Child Fun Mode

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#68

The antivirus isn't great, either. This is a critical issue, because the networking process inevitably results in numerous breaches which frequently affect other stakeholder systems. Those networking operations critical to a successful eventual deployment of the small child, but the number of bugs experienced is simply inconceivable to users accustomed to good security hygiene.

The trouble we find is our v2 model, which we had hoped could have made improvements over v1, frequents the same unsavoury places that v1 did initially and continues to be compromised by the same vulnerabilities. It seems later versions are destined to make the same mistakes again. The only comfort though is that you have become accustomed to how to address the bug reports when they are filed. Fortunately our V2 has…

The maintenance of several products in different lifecycle phases is a huge issue for us. Different failure modes, different protocols for providing feedback, and different basic maintenance needs. For example, v1 requires the users to manage reading homework, the v2 requires bedtime stories, v3 requires diaper changes and milk, all simultaneously. This adds a lot of operational complexity for our already overwhelmed team, since they have to triage several different issue streams and context switch between them.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#69

How do I get new features added to the roadmap? I’ve been asking for an “eat vegetables” interface without the “offer dessert in exchange” workaround for over a year, no response, yet in the same time frame I’ve seen things like “climb top-heavy bookshelf” and “unfurl entire toilet paper roll” deployed… who is asking for these features??

Can somebody explain the "won't eat vegetables" thing? The only place I've heard about this being in issue is in America.

If everything is saturated with salt/sugar/artificial ehnahced flavors/refined everything/fried/etc with "instant hook"-overcranked-at-11 taste, and it's all targeting the lowest common denominator palette, good luck then trying to teach a person to appreciate tomoatoes, brocolli, asparagus, mushrooms, cheeses, and so on...

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#70
post #3

This small child has a better UX than many things I have been forced to implement. At least as it iterates, improvements occur that make the UX better and provide a more pleasant experience.

"At least as it iterates, improvements occur that make the UX better and provide a more pleasant experience."

Certainly more interesting features get activated. But at least with my model, the error reporting got a lot more complicated and the input acceptance rate dropped considerably around the time the product turned 15 years old.

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