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The UX on this small child is terrible

mcsweeneys.net

101–110 of 366 posts

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#101
As an owner of a fairly new one of these, I sometimes dream of someone coming up with an accessory that converts the audio notifications into light notifications. A small LED would do. I realize different colors for different desires are too much to ask (unless the colors would be picked at random I guess), but I would be more than happy if it just showed intensity of desire via intensity of light.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#102

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??

Genuinely curious as a vegetarian: aren't vegetables considered a part of daily meals in your household? I've been asked this question by a couple of friends and in my experience, it depends on how the veggies are cooked (there are a million ways to make them tasty), and if the kids actually see adults eat veggies regularly.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#105
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?

Crying infant has a quite specific frequency range that makes my wife jump immediately. Our cat has figured out that meowing at that frequency is very effective.

So you may be on to something for high priority / safety alerts...

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least you’re working with versioned releases. I’ve recently acquired a new model and it’s definitely still in beta. There’s no documentation, conflicting user training and undefined behaviours everywhere. As soon as you discover workflows that meet your needs there appears to be a background update that while introducing new features, completely changes the behaviour of previous ones. Oh and don’t get me started o…

They're really different product lines because each one is a complete rewrite; each has its own patch stream, which, like yours, change wildly without warning, as if the developers are just trying random stuff out. And nothing is ever backported between the products. While our different products have wildly different operational characteristics (and even move into different lifecycle phases at different times), the good news is that our team has gotten better at managing the constant flow of UX inconsistencies and changes.

For example, my advice on sleep mode failures is to use the Erlang method: let it crash. We don't even look at the monitoring dashboards for our newest product anymore.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#107
post #100

I have a slightly ageing model (my co-developer is adamant there will be no upgrades, please do not suggest) and my problem is that it appears to have defaulted to ICT time (we are at GMT +11). I hear it performing operations well into the early morning, but booting from a cold start any earlier than 9am leads to all sorts of unexpected behaviour and system errors.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

My parents tried that when I was the model in question. They discovered that at best, forcing a reboot triggers unpredictable output from the model's emotional processing unit. At worst, the sneak process starts running with full privileges over the system.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We were concerned about trying to manage more than two of these products at once and so, as the Assistant to the VP of Reproduction, have made certain permanent operational changes to the equipment to ensure no further acquisitions are possible.

My cofounder and I were doing a recent retrospective on our most recent acquisition, and while we're very proud of the product, we considered that your approach may have been more sound.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#109
post #100

I have a slightly ageing model (my co-developer is adamant there will be no upgrades, please do not suggest) and my problem is that it appears to have defaulted to ICT time (we are at GMT +11). I hear it performing operations well into the early morning, but booting from a cold start any earlier than 9am leads to all sorts of unexpected behaviour and system errors.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I don't know where you are, but the right to repair movement here is nowhere near that advanced.

Re: The UX on this small child is terrible

#110
post #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 u…

Yeah sleep is something that you quickly learn as a parent doesn't come all that naturally. Training my daughter to sleep properly is one of the most valuable things I did. I used the Ferber method which is similar to the method you mentioned. Where you visit them in intervals but the time between intervals increases over time. It took about 3 days but since then she sleeps 10-12 hours every night.
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