After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.
Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great… if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.
As a matter of fact I don’t believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don’t ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn’t have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn’t have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn’t use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.
But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.
I agree with everything you wrote, except as a designer I wanted to point out that the lack of scope limitation is not usually due to design, but rather product and marketing who drive new features, because their job is to increase new customers, and improving life for existing customers is a far second – only so far as potential new customers may be impacted (reviews, comparisons with competitors, or churn). So long as they can mostly keep existing customers they will always fight against spending development time on improving their experience, when they could add a new point to the feature list for marketing.
The issue is the drive for infinite growth is counter to a human-usable quality-focused UX (with a focused scope and focused target audience).
Something like the Linux philosophy of doing 1 thing and doing it well comes to mind. FOSS no less.
LibreOffice is also a mess though
Just cos it’s Foss doesn’t mean it follows the Linux philosophy
That’s the UNIX philosophy, not the Linux philosophy. That idea predates Linux by like a decade.
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That’s going away with people like poettering running the show.
What show?
We have been trained to hoard apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any intuitive or easy way to organize them. And their solution isn’t to make things more organized or usable. No, our technological overlords have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift through the mess.
Ugh. Who’s the teen writing for Scientific American?
This same complaint was made back in the oughts about search. “Everyone should just categorize and properly tag documents!”
Turns out users hate that.
I’ve actually tried to do that with pictures/art, but none of the tools I have to do so make it easy. The Windows photo viewer from Windows XP, which I can’t seem to get anymore, was actually pretty okay at it.
But the truth is that even then it required more effort than I was willing to put in, and I was never able to anticipate every tag I would eventually want. If I didn’t feel like tagging something the moment I saved it, it generally never got tagged.
At this point an AI to do it would be amazing. I have thousands and thousands of pieces of potential character art, but when I want something with specific features it’s not easy to find.
I don’t blame you. Even in a professional setting tagging is mind numbing and tedious. The only difference is without tagging you might miss an image that can be licensed and the business opportunity that needed it.
You should still be able to use the photo viewer:
https://winaero.com/how-to-enable-windows-photo-viewer-in-windows-11/amp/
(Unless I misunderstood and there was a photo organization tool in XP that I forgot about)
The one that can still be enabled is still not the original version that had the tools I’m thinking of; I’ve tried several guides to re-enable it and it does give me an older photo viewer, but never quite the one I had back in XP.
I don’t even organize my physical mail. Ain’t no way I’m organizing my email.
The time spent manually organizing things was low hanging fruitb to automate away. I’m glad it’s mostly unnecessary now. The need to manually organize apps is the single biggest reason I never switched to iOS. (The search feature really doesn’t eliminate that need, IMO, whereas on Android it’s never been important).
Ugh. Who’s the teen writing for Scientific American?
Note that it’s an opinion piece. It simply expresses the opinion of the author.
It’s about time someone pointed this out. Look at all the things phones got rid of in their UI:
- Clustering of icons on a desktop
- Application windowing
- Preferences located inside an application
(It also gives up a lot of context-based right-clicking, but I personally consider the right-click a bad UI design choice.)
Some things, like folders, are only barely implemented, with a host of features that we’ve had for decades removed. Ever tried to sort a phone group by creation date?
I’m writing this on an iPad, which I would love to use as my daily driver, but because it runs iPad OS, there are so many productivity and organizational features missing relative to Mac OS that I do most important things on the laptop.
Hate to break it to you, but these concerns are pretty specifically about iOS. Pretty much all of them have been addressed since the beginning and continue to be addressed today adequately on Android
File management is still horrendous on android.
I can do every single one of those things in my pixel (or just about any Android phone) if these things actually mattered you would have switched ages ago.
This article is seriously complaining that Apple added search to the iPhone? The device consumers increasingly expect to do everything for them, instantly? He’s mad that Google is summarizing search results now because it’s so dominant that everyone tries to game their results algorithm? Writing this article was the only bad, broken choice here.
Yeah I thought the complaints about iOS were a bit weird as well. It seemed like they didn’t like that smartphones got more capable. Of course there’s going to be a million apps and a million settings when (as you put it) consumers increasingly expect their devices to do everything
Complaining about AI in all the wrong ways to complain about AI. AI is definitely a poor substitute for actually well thought out feature implementations. But it has nothing to do with why your iPhone sucks to navigate on.
I wonder when they’ll use AI in response to missing headphone jacks. (dropping them was like if you amputated your legs just because cars and electric wheelchairs exist)
