
Not Smart Is Not Stupid - tbirdz
http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/not-smart-is-not-stupid
======
SeanDav
I am in favour of software that tries to make your life easier, but hate, with
a passion, developers that are so in love with their helpful feature X, that
they ram it down your throat (You WILL use this feature and LIKE it!) and give
you no easy way, or often, no way at all, to bypass or disable said
"helpful"/"smart" feature.

Case in point: I recently bought an excellent large(ish) Dell monitor. Lovely
bit of kit, but after a few days had me wanting to throw it out of the window.
The reason was the power saving mode. The monitor is supposed to have the
ability to "intelligently" understand you are not using it, switch the screen
off and go into a sleep mode. All good and well until one discovers that the
specific combination of graphics card, multiple monitor setup and video
connectors one is using confuses the poor beast and it will happily shut your
monitor down while you are actively using it.

The kicker that was driving me crazy was, of course, there is no way to
disable this particular functionality!

~~~
mrweasel
Personally I really hate Youtubes "annotations", which made me think about
when a feature is a good one. My rule of sorts is: If this was disabled by
default, would you turn it on?

A surprisingly number of times the answer is "No, I would not only not turn it
on, I would also not miss it".

~~~
vitd
Annotations and autoplay. 2 features that I literally _never_ want. It might
make sense when watching a series of videos, maybe. But 9 times out of 10,
it's "here's some other random video that has nothing to do with this one that
you watched." Why would I want that?

------
dclowd9901
> They really double downed on making the list feature a pain by autoplaying
> every movie upon selection. Now I can’t add or remove a movie without
> playing the beginning. Fortunately, I don’t have a data cap at home, but it
> still causes my receiver to switch audio modes, leading to annoying clicks
> and pops as it settles in. Not appreciated. My thumb was already on the OK
> button. If I really did want to watch the movie, pressing it twice isn’t so
> hard. In exchange for convenience nobody could possibly need, I’m forced to
> deal with aggravation I can’t avoid.

Boy isn't this annoying in Netflix too? I notice if you go to look at a show's
information more closely (selecting it from the main screen), it automatically
starts playing the first episode. I don't want that! I can manage that,
really! Thank you!

I think we're hitting a critical mass of UX, where we're trying to dumbly pre-
suppose behavior. There's ways to do this _correctly_ (via machine learning),
but blanketing behaviors for all users is just downright stupid.

~~~
amelius
> There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning)

Please no. The actual users using an account may change over time (and rather
frequently), e.g. in a family situation.

Also, in general, I like my systems to be predictable, and I prefer if they
don't try to be smart.

~~~
masklinn
> > There's ways to do this correctly (via machine learning)

> Please no.

Indeed, that's the second coming of Office 2000's "adaptive menus". It was an
awful idea then, it's an awful idea now.

Even if the account has a single unchanging user _and_ the feature actually
works correctly _and_ it doesn't impair initial discoverability, changes in
software behaviour will break muscle memory and at least annoy.

~~~
blakeyrat
Gmail does the Windows 2000 "adaptive menu" by hiding the folders you don't
use often behind an expando.

I hate it. Hate hate hate hate hate it.

Naturally, there appears to be no way to override and say, "just show ALL my
folders ALL the time! If I didn't want to see a folder, I'd delete it!"

But I don't expect a lot from Google, which seemly has zero UX experts and I'm
not even 100% sure its products are developed by human beings. (See: Buzz,
Wave.)

~~~
asddubs
also for reasons I don't understand, when I search google, the links to
"images, maps, shopping" etc. are in a completely random order. They will
literally switch between searches. WHY?

------
epalmer
>If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end
up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of
users and impossible for another. This is not an improvement.

This resonates with me. Sadly I think this happens more often.

~~~
jacobush
Darn, I feel this way often - I guess this makes me an old curmudgeon but I
find Spotify on mobile, and Snapchat, and many other apps, very confusing and
hard to use.

~~~
mkane848
In your defense, the Spotify app is a mess and it seems like they're adjusting
their own UI enough to suggest that they don't quite have usability down quite
yet. Don't get me started on how often it hangs or crashes, or how the timing
is eerily close to when it tries to transition into/out of ads...

Snapchat just has a bad habit of introducing a feature you need to perform a
gesture for and only telling you once and nowhere else.

I wouldn't blame your age on it, I just don't think a lot of these popular
apps have particularly good design but get by because the service is solid and
hits "good enough" for your average (usually non-technical) user.

------
xiaopingguo
I think one of the failures is that UX is designed by people who are
comfortable with the abstract, we (usually) know about what is happening in
the background, and can figure how action A leads to result B, but most people
are just not good at this stuff. For them, the UX has to be way more concrete,
since they just do not have a clear picture of what is going on.

This also leads to some tech anxiety, an example of which was an acquaintance
not long ago being unable to save a missed call into her contacts list on a
Samsung/Android and worried that she was somehow too dumb to use the (very
costly) "smartphone". Just a huge collective failure of the "smartest" people
around to account for other people who are very different.

~~~
vanderZwan
I'm a colourblind, left-handed and hard of hearing interaction designer. Oddly
enough, this is almost a benefit in this context, because I have a much easier
time noticing "intuitive" redesigns that fuck up accessibility in favour of
the latest graphic design fad.

More generally, any UX design that does not involve user testing (ideally with
both new and experienced users) inevitably leads to the designers missing
things. If there's one field where co-design is crucial to decent results,
it's IxD.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design)

~~~
csours
I bring up these issues in every design session I'm involved in, but people
just don't seem to get it. How can you make people care about colorblindness,
etc?

~~~
mrweasel
We almost that exact discussion at work yesterday. The question from one of my
colleagues in customer service was: How is the customer suppose to know if the
product is in stock, when they're on the checkout page?

Apparently our UI design decided to indicate that with red and green dots on
the order line. If he had though about color blind users, normal users
wouldn't have issues either.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _If he had though about color blind users, normal users wouldn 't have
> issues either._

That's what you meant, right?

Anyway, that's exactly the argument I always bring up: if you design for the
colour blind, the deaf, don't assume righthandedness, etc, and you do it well,
the interface will end up more user-friendly for _everyone_.

In your example, adding a hint based on shape/position/lightness (or all three
even) as well as a colour is easier to read _for everyone_. Similarly, using
some verion of Cubehelix[0] is the more readable option for heatmap-scales,
and again not just for the colourblind but for everyone.

[0] [http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/05/cubehelix-or-how-i-
learned...](http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/05/cubehelix-or-how-i-learned-to-
love.html)

~~~
mrweasel
>That's what you meant, right?

Yes, exactly.

------
vog
_> A minor time saving feature designed to spare users the indignity of [...]
now meant they were unable to browse the web at all. That’s some serious time
savings!_

Although this is was meant ironically, there's a lot of truth in it.

------
danielweber
That link to the Xerox copier that changed digits in your copy gave me chills.
It's like the dark dystopian hacker future, brought to us today by
incompetence.

~~~
teh_klev
Have you seen Brazil?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

------
gpvos
This tendency to show suggestions more prominently than other, more useful, UI
is most likely because this enables Netflix, Amazon, et al. to make more
money, i.e., payola.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's not payola if you're paying yourself for placement. That's just a
placement decision.

On a tangential note, I've never understood why payola was supposed to be a
bad thing.

~~~
cortesoft
Because the airwaves are public and regulated by the FCC.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I don't follow you. So what?

If the airwaves _weren 't_ regulated by the FCC, why would payola suddenly
stop being a bad thing?

~~~
cortesoft
Paying someone to promote your work isn't bad on its own. People do it all the
time, and no laws are broken.

The reason it is bad over public airwaves is because the airwaves are communal
property. The spectrum is licensed by the FCC so that all of society can
benefit from the limited resource. The FCC therefore sets fair usage rules for
the use of those airwaves, and one of the rules is that you can't pay to get
airplay.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You can pay to get airplay. That's the entire business model of radio
stations. We call it "commercials".

Assuming you're not in the business of producing music, you can even pay to
have your stuff included in public broadcasts as part of the main programming
rather than the commercials. This is called "product placement". (If your
stuff was music, it would be "payola".)

You have yet to advance _any_ argument that payola is a bad thing; you've
limited yourself to "it's against the rules".

------
CaptSpify
This is the new design paradigm that I've been seeing for a long time: Make a
minimal UI, and take away the "advanced" features (/me glares angrily at
chromium and FF). There should _always_ be a way to revert settings you don't
want. Sure, make the user type "I understand that I'm disabling
$important_feature, and the developer thinks that's a _really bad idea_ , but
I need to anyway", but at least have the option.

------
fhood
That mention of VMware sent little bubbles of rage burbling up through me. On
a mbp VMware forces use of the discrete gpu if available. This destroys any
hope of using the virtual machine without your computer plugged in, and worse,
some programs I need (gazebo) don't play nice with nvidia cards (on Ubuntu at
least). I could fix this with some hacky solution (you have to do some weird
stuff involving gfxcardstatus) or I could just execute my script over and over
and hope that the powers that be smile on me, and this won't be the time it
decides to shit the bed permanently. Oh and also wtf gazebo? Is the idea of an
nvidia card so shocking you suddenly have a stroke 5 out of 6 times?

Sorry about the rant. I realized I'm going to have to work with gazebo again
soon and preemptive frustration is already building.

------
kordless
See Jevon'ss Paradox:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox),
A.K.A. Wirth's Law, Gate's Law, Page's Law, or May's Law.

Fun fact: there's a non-linear corollary between the growth of compute speed
and the growth of network speed. Network speeds do increase, but they are not
doing so as quickly as compute and storage.

I have observed that interns at corporations are usually tasked with things
nobody wants to do or thinks can't be done. I wonder if there is a correlation
between Wirth's Law and interns (the process of learning).

------
awalGarg
Excuse my ignorance, but is the second "not" in the title left associative or
right?

~~~
biot
I read it as "(not smart) is (not stupid)" and thought the article was going
to be about how intelligence is overrated.

~~~
Anthony-G
I found the title to be difficult and unintuitive to interpret. After starting
to read it, I figured this was the intended meaning.

------
nickpsecurity
Overall a good article. I especially hate features that are aggravating and I
can't turn off. The auto-play is somewhere high on my list. Although, I think
it's to get more ads shown than for convenience.

Fun part though is that similar arguments could've been made against the tech
behind his "plastic circles" or logistics of receiving them in the mail. ;)

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
> If we naively squish the curve, as if by pressing down with a finger, we end
> up with a bimodal distribution, where the task is now easy for one group of
> users and impossible for another.

How do you convince people not to be naive though?

------
bpicolo
> Apple screwed up Universal Links something fierce

One note that I'm not sure how many others hit - iPhones have been especially
effective at DDoSing websites for apple-site-association.

------
frik
Many of these "smart" devices are actually very dump, are of bad quality and
actually harm the end users privacy. Some negative examples from recent news:
"smart meters", "smart thermostats", "smart refrigerators", "smart TVs".

On the otherhand, devices and products that are not advertises as "smart" are
often better and actually use very sophisticated algorithm.

------
enriquto
And, by transposition, Stupid is Smart!

------
oldmanjay
Why do all the comments use language indicating that people are forced to use
software features they don't like? Are people truly so weak willed that the
mere existence of something causes enslavement to it? There is always the
option to walk away. In light of that fact, all this whining is just unseemly.

~~~
jimrandomh
Because in many of the examples people are, in fact, literally forced to use
software features they don't like. The ability to turn off broken/misguided
features only exists if the developer included a special option for that
(rare) or if the software is open source (also rare).

------
shkesar
The arising bugs in most softwares I use daily seem like a result of features
bloating. I post some idiosyncrasies i stumble on my twitter @shkesar feed as
a reminder that I won't follow the same misdirected belief.

~~~
jimmaswell
Features and bugs is a much better situation than no features and no bugs,
which seems to have been the unfortunate trend in recent years. Post-
minimalism can't come soon enough.

