As an echo to our recent discussion about fun, learning and design, here is an article that talks about hiding too much complexity makes us less resilient and having a bit less simplicity empower people and can be fun. https://ralphammer.com/make-me-think/

This is beautiful, and I couldn't agree more with the moral. Simplicity has become the worst sort of fashion, removed of meaningful purpose and applied thoughtlessly because it's "the right thing to do". As I've said before, "incidental complexity" is a resource to be carefully spent, not an evil to be purged.

I think this was a great article. I t would have been great to see more real world examples though. A lot of the time we see utopian examples, but not enough use cases

I agree it is frustrating not to see real world examples. But at least, the article shows in an elegant way what is important (at least for me) and difficult in the design of tools for thought and programming: as their chore material is complexity, how to find the balance between showing it (for understanding, fun and empowerment) and hiding it (for ease of use). It is the tricky part, and it must be a "first class" concern for those tools. Even if I didn't realized at that time, it was what I was after with my mixed text and box/arrow programming tool.

more and more products are based on the promise to make our lives easier by using increasingly complex technologies with ever simpler interfaces

I don’t know… have we really reached peak UX yet? I don’t think so. Good UX is still rare, and before I begin to worry that we take it too far I hope we are going to take it much further. Have you booked a flight recently? Bought an event ticket? Tried to figure out opening times of a restaurant? All these use cases could be much simpler and there’s lots of work to do. I’m also not sure if I really need to know what happens, if I push a button to order something. There are use cases where convenience is what it’s all about. You want all the complexity hidden. That’s the whole point. Ok, I’d want some transparency to be sure the service is legal, ethical, ecological, etc., but that’s doesn’t necessarily mean revealing how it works and honestly I think I’m part of a minority requesting even such things. I can see what he’s trying to say, and I’d love to see more tools that are not just hiding as much complexity as possible, giving people the means to understand technology where it is useful. This is limited to specific domains though and the article generalizes that too much for my taste. There will be people who want to learn a language and will embrace a well-designed tool that helps them with that. There will also be people who just want something translated and don’t care one bit about learning the language. We should have tools for both kinds of people. And we shouldn’t force the person looking for convenience to learn as we shouldn’t limit the person wanting to learn. That said, these are some beautiful illustrations!

Nice article. Reminds me in many ways of Ivan Illich's classic "Tools for conviviality"

I agree with Ivan that this is a lovely article, but I also agree with Stefan that it has a lot of bad takes. There's no problem with user-centered design. There's no zero sum game being played by translation software and language learning software. People fail just as hard as technological systems when their jobs become too complex. And burdening someone with the knowledge of video conferencing network protocols doesn't make them less angry about dropped calls. It's certainly a failure of the way user-centered design is practiced that designers so often neglect a person's need to be empowered to learn, a person's need to be resilient in the case of failure, and a person's need to understand the consequences of their actions. But if you find yourself practicing user-centered design for FoC, you're going to be thinking about those needs just by the nature of your project, and there's no reason you couldn't take those same biases with you to any other project, or convince other designers that they're important. Also, black boxes are not the problem to be solved, and complicated → simple → too simple is not just a matter of complexity changing hands. If you made some translation software and were concerned about a person's need to wean themself off of it and have fun by actually learning the language, it doesn't matter that the translation happens in a black box. No fraction of exposed translation technology is going to empower them to learn the language. To do a good job, you're going to invent wholly new complexity in the form of a language learning system for which some of the complexity is in the user's hands and some is in the designer's. Nothing about black boxes prevents you from satisfying that need. Similarly, car engines are too complicated for everyone to understand, but designers address your need for resilience to engine failure not by exposing parts of the engine, but by adding a totally separate backup system that's easily understood: the hooks that allow you to attach your car to another. So I wouldn't jump immediately to making white box systems. If you're consciously reacting to a person's needs, chances are that you'll think of more ways to do that than exposing the system's guts. I did really like the article. I just don't think there's anything I could add to the parts I agree with. 🙂

@ogadaki I guess there is the same analogy of "The design of a telephone was basically a hull around a machine." with laptops and screens. We use screens so we mold our IDE UI to the screen, which is so unnatural, as most people see with a much larger field of view with their eyes

It’s funny how as we move closer to AR, many limitations we accept today without even thinking much about them, can potentially fall away and be replaced by more natural interfaces. Wider field of view, peripheral vision, direct manipulation of real and virtual objects, more natural and embodied interfaces, etc. That’s why I’m constantly questioning the ways we work today, because there is so much opportunity to break free of assumptions and limitations that we might not even be aware of just because we’re so used to them. It’s so hard to imagine today, but it’s at least possible that one day we will look back and think “pressing physical keys on a keyboard — how primitive and barbaric we’ve been back then…” or whatever you think today when you see punch cards or programming binary by flipping individual switches on a computer that filled a whole room. Ah the irony, when we’re all playing an ENIAC simulator game in our AR worlds, flipping switches, switching tubes, and removing actual bugs that cause bugs… 😆

@Stefan I have already thought for years that pressing physical keys on a keyboard is barbaric. I think we are in the stone age of software. Yes, I think that AR is a possible future. What is an AR headset that I could buy today to start experimenting with this?

@Zubairq I don't think there are any consumer AR headsets available right now. There's Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap, but depending on what exactly you want to experiment with, you might either want to look into VR instead and get a VR headset, or do the awkward AR thing on mobile platforms, where you still need at least one of your hands to hold your device as a window into the AR world. Experimenting with AR still requires a lot of imagination as the primary interaction model is still pretty much undefined. Lots of approaches and ideas, but still lacking the polish of something you'd want to sell in high volume to consumers. My strategy is to wait and let Apple figure it out and then be ready with applications when they are looking for them. I think one can take an educated guess which interaction models they're aiming for… What kinds of experiments would you like to do with AR?

@Stefan Ok, good info, thanks. I already have a few VR headsets, and can already build VR apps for Facebook oculus GO with Yazz Pilot, but it is just too limitedan environment since it is so hard to type in that environment so I never continued with building an IDE view in VR https://yazz.com/app/oculus_go.html

oculus quest is probably your best bet if you want to jump in right now—it would be a hack but you do get a camera feed from inside out tracking and it’s “only” $400

@Garth Goldwater I didn’t know that. Have you tried oculus quest yourself?

i haven’t—i have a regular old rift. however it’s been getting absolutely fantastic reviews from pretty much every trusted source on a price-to-performance ratio

Oha! I didn't know about the live camera feed either and that could potentially make it the best AR headset available today.

Ok, I'm sold. I'm gonna buy one...

it’s a byproduct of the fact that it uses inside-out tracking. definitely check my work on this one—not sure how accessible it is