Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything with a battery should have an off switch

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 613 posts

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#441

Post by titzer »

sandworm101 wrote: post #423

Cars. Cars are ubiquitous. They are everywhere. We all relate to them without thinking. Cars run on batteries. Even IC runs various systems using battery power when parked. But do cars have an off switch? To turn them truly off, such as when storing for a long period, the procedure is take a wrench and physically disconnect the 12v battery. So I disagree with the author. At least some battery-powered products are doi…

My car's entertainment system is stuck in a crash loop 24/7. It is slowly draining the battery, to the point where I worry my car won't start if it has been off for more than a week or two.

And I don't agree that "consumers have spoken". Consumers don't design cars; their feedback loop is long, lossy, and easily ignored. Profitability drives car design, not what consumers want.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#442

Post by robonerd »

gumby wrote: post #424
zippergz wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also not see the point of art?

Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.

> But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore.

That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#443

Post by justin_oaks »

marcosdumay wrote: post #388
vsareto wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you're pissed, but there's plenty of technology that you seemingly forget about (being pissed off makes you a bit irrational) that works most of the time. Saying nothing ever fucking works is just a dumb take

Hum... Nothing that was redesigned on the last few decades works. From cars and elevators to software. Anything that interaction designers touched is broken.

Yes. Change for changes sake. It's hard to improve on something that already works fine.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#444

Post by wbsss4412 »

infogulch wrote: post #433
kemayo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate person around them that could assist them if they could in fact identify the problem. It sounds like your complaint isn't with the advice from the book, but rather that Apple didn't follow it. They did hide away the error messages, but th…

If you have to say "Oh it's good advice but you have to interpret it right," when the advice has an obvious misinterpretation pothole that clearly wrecks many prominent applications of it, maybe that reflects poorly on the original advice and indicates that it shouldn't be offered without the necessary critical context.

It’s perfectly reasonable to point out the second half of the sentence. “It says to provide help and insight” isn’t law school levels of interpretation.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#445

Post by justin_oaks »

marcosdumay wrote: post #397
httpsterio wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird take. First off, Norman wasn't schooled at Apple, he basically created the HCI guidelines with Nielsen. Apple's design guidelines have long been based o years what Norman worked on so you have it the other way around. In no part of the book does it say that engineers shouldn't be part of the design process. What the book advocates is that if engineers are entrusted with design, they should at lea…

Hum... He clearly says that engineers have ideas that are antagonistic to interaction design. There is an implied message that they can learn not to, but one message is explicit, the other is implicit. And it gets much worse in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", that says engineers shouldn't do design right in the title, on the most sensationalist way possible. Later he toned down that message a lot. Nothing from…

Regardless of what the book says, anyone too close to the product during its development will have difficulty designing it appropriately for the user.

If you know how the product works then you already have a mental model of interacting with it. That mental model is NOT the same as the user will have, and thus an engineer will think that something is obvious even though it is not obvious to the user.

The same goes with anyone else who is close to it during the development.

You need outside users to make it clear how people new to a product can understand and interact with it.

Unless you're an engineer who can forget everything they know about their own product, you shouldn't try to design everything yourself with no outside feedback.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#446

Post by DonHopkins »

kyaghmour wrote: post #210
andreareina wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a book actually: The Design of Everyday Things

That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst part is that comments like these make it come off as the go-to reference to actually solving these problems. The reasons it's the worst design guidance out there is that it teaches: 1) that engineers should NOT be entrusted/involved with user design. 2) to conceptualize users as blissful idiots. 3) that obs…

I had a funny discussion with Don Norman about pie menus and SimCity, in which I blamed the nuclear meltdown on the linear pull-down "Disaster" menu, and blamed round pie menus for putting out fires quickly but ultimately leading to urban sprawl:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0

Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop

Talks by Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop. Organized and introduced by Ted Selker. Talks and demonstrations by Don Hopkins and Don Norman.

Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his way."

Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round menus put the fires out."

Norman: "What caused the meltdown?"

Hopkins: "It was the linear menus."

Norman: "The linear menus?"

Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the meltdown."

Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?"

(laughter)

Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they make it really easy to build a city really fast without thinking about it."

(laughter)

Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern Virginia!"

Normal: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the various complexities of controlling a city."

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#447

Post by oauea »

RHSeeger wrote: post #206
thaumasiotes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've lost track of the number of times I've lamented "did anyone actually use this?" We have a combination oven and microwave (yes...) that seems to have been designed with the primary purpose of enraging the owner. The microwave can only be set in 15 second increments. But you can fine-tune it, in five-second increments, by spinning a dial. Except that you can't do that while the oven is on. The microwave makes a…

> by spinning a dial When we moved into our current house, it had a microwave like that. When we replaced it, my primary requirements were 1. multiple fan speeds, and 2. a nice, simple touch pad for entering the time; preferably one where you didn't need to press a button before starting to enter the cooking time. The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better,…

High quality dials with adaptive increments are amazing and much faster & easier to use than a touch pad.

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#448

Post by efitz »

robonerd wrote: post #435
donmcronald wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sometimes really is as simple as folks who think they know better than anyone who uses their product; people who refused to dogfood or even touch the thing they ostensibly work on, in any given day. The default white title bars that blend seamlessly into any white content behind them is a perfect example of this and so many people don't even realize they can change it. Windows usability has declined since Windows…

> Compare it to Linux UIs where you often have to grab a single pixel border on a 4k monitor to resize a window. On Linux you hold the super/windows key and click/drag anywhere on the window to move it, or right-click/drag anywhere on the window to resize it. It's much easier than using thick borders. Discoverability is admittedly not great, but this feature easily coexists with window borders. Microsoft could keep t…

Translation:

“Don’t do it the way everyone else does it or the way you’ve always done it; our designer decided to make that hard for and instead we offer this hard-to-discover non-idiomatic workaround.

“You will grow to love the workaround because it doesn’t hurt nearly as much, kind of like stopping after you’ve been hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.”

Re: Everything with a battery should have an off switch

#449

Post by wk_end »

robonerd wrote: post #442
gumby wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. And I understand the now obsolete technical show-off value of the tower at its time. But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. I think most people disagree with me so I don't think it's going anywhere. But that's my view of it.

> But now I think it's just a humdrum industrial eyesore. That was a popular opinion when it was built. Eventually it became iconic, but nevertheless I don't see many cities rushing to build their own.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_de...
Post reply on HN