Yeah, I've learned the smarter they try to make my device, car, etc. the more annoying it becomes in practice because of all the edge cases I seem to bump up against regularly.
Yeah, there's a growing cult-ish obsession in UX design that sees all customization, optionality and user choice as some kind of flaw in their perfect minimalist designs. Frankly, it's kind of bizarre. Our tech is powerful enough and our platforms flexible enough that every user should be able to "have it your way" (as Burger King liked to say).
What you're describing is the UI/UX design paradigm of prosumer tools like blender. Unfortunately, despite how important this class of software is, SV seems to have institutional blindness to how and why this kind of software is even built.
For example, we have the greatest opportunity in a generation for someone to build "photoshop for text" i.e. a proper GenAI based LLM tool with similar design choices. LMstudio is the only even close example of this, and they're not getting it in the way that blender does.
You dont notice them when they work as intended, but when something odd or annoying happens it leads quickly to disappointment.
For me its car's lane assistant, interfering with driving is big no for me. Asked my father to turn it off on their new mazda 3 too, 99% ok behavior is simply too low, even 99.9% would be.
Oh yes. This is a huge one for me. My wife bought a luxury car that's loaded with these new driving "assist" features and they're both annoying and extremely distracting to the driver. Worse, when they unexpectedly grab the wheel while I'm actively trying to steer, it's caused me to swerve while fighting to correct it. Fortunately no road incidents yet but these are clear safety issues. If it were a commercial aircraft instead of a car, pilots would be required to report them as incidents.
Of course, I always turn these stupid features off but, inexplicably, my wife likes them and keeps turning them back on. So when I happen to drive that car it continues to be a nasty surprise until I remember to turn it off. This also makes a separate UX failure even worse. Settings like seat position, enter/exit behavior, navigation and even entertainment options are stored and recalled in per-driver settings. These per driver settings can also be linked to each key fob. She has her fob and I have mine. Very nice - except these damn driver "assist" features are NOT stored in per-driver settings like they obviously should be!
Damn it, car UX designers - all user options should be stored per driver. It's a few KB for bit flags and single-byte values, it's not like we don't have the storage these days.
Lane assistance is fine, if it can be permanently disabled. But I've rented cars where it seemed to have been hard coded to default = ON for each trip. Every time I started the car, I had to go into the car config (great fun on a rental with a different GUI each time) and disable it before driving.
Otherwise, in city driving, it's like some paranoid front seat passenger grabs the wheel every 30 seconds.
Its a lawsuit waiting to happen. Yes it can be disabled on normal cars, but on rentals not consistently, they do sometimes lock down settings menus - driving with it around narrow Sicily roads was not pleasant at all, outright dangerous in few situations.
