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When the push button was new, people were freaked

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Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#81

Post by RobRivera »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #68
cercatrova wrote: post #60

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…

How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?

I remember when Amun-Ra personally attacked me the first time. What with the calendar and the clock, oye nothings ever enough for the schmuck. He'd have my legs for their ability to atrophy my arm strength if he'd have his way, making me look like a Glukkon

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#82

Post by CobrastanJorji »

MereInterest wrote: post #72
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?

It depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin, then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though also an increased risk of mind control. For me, I draw the b…

Your system of distinguishing "me" from "not-me" via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a binary. Human reaction time for hands is a bit faster than feet. Are my hands more "me" than my feet? Well, that kind of intuitively checks out to me. But reflex reactions, like blinking, have less than half the latency of conscious reactions. Are my reflex reactions more me than my conscious decisions?

Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#83

Post by atoav »

The problem with Push Buttons is that they are (magnitudes!) cheaper than sometimes more suitable input devices like knobs, switches, etc.

This is why they are used everywhere.

Sometimes other electromechanical devices would have been the better choice tho.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#84

Post by veltas »

noirbot wrote: post #52
mikewarot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they are associated with the lower class workers. The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.

Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for your body a lot of the time.

Class isn't all about money.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#85

Post by buescher »

I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with internal sequence "programs".

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#86

Post by SilasX »

cercatrova wrote: post #80
SilasX wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the top? I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.

> people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#87

Post by NonNefarious »

contextfree wrote: post #73
NonNefarious wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.

I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)

Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust.

The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you

A. This is a button. B. The button is "pressed."

At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed.

This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF!

There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective).

Conclusion: Windows 95 nailed it.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#88

Post by plurinshael »

SilasX wrote: post #86
cercatrova wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?

Lighten up, Francis.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#89

Post by yamtaddle »

SilasX wrote: post #86
cercatrova wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?

I think the reference is cliché to the point that I usually hate to see it, but did understand the original post's intent in context (that is, the context provided by skimming the linked article to which the post is a reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that it was anything other than plain.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#90

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

veltas wrote: post #84
noirbot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for your body a lot of the time.

Class isn't all about money.

And being a clerk instead of a workman isn't a ticket to the aristocracy either ...
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