I’ve been thinking about the arguments that are increasingly common when dealing with tech: “it’s too complicated” and “I just want something that works”.
My father gifted a used computer to me and my brother when we were kids. Ours to use, ours to take care. He would pay for the eventual screw up, but we had to walk several blocks carrying the tower to get assistance.
I messed up a lot over the years, mostly because I wanted to explore the little that I knew and learn more. I had some magazines that expected everything to go well if instructions were followed and no access to internet forums to ask for help. I was limited to just one language as well. I had to find a way out. Nowadays things are much more simple and really just work, until they don’t and I can’t really fix them.
In this world, what people can do is complain. Or offer a report of how things went wrong and wait patiently. It’s not even that common for people in general to just go back to the version that worked. There’s no version, only the app we use or can’t use and it’s not our responsibility any kind of maintenance.
I have to confess I was going in another direction when I started, but things are really limited from a consumer’s point of view. In part, it’s our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge, it inevitably takes the control away from us, but big tech really approves and incentives this behavior.
As with so many problems I see in the world, education is the solution. And educating ourselves might be the only dependable option.
I kind of get where you’re coming from with “it’s our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge,” but it feels a little bit like blaming people for not being superhuman. One person can’t always learn everything. It’s my fault for not knowing how to fix every single thing that can go wrong with a house, because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of plumbing, electricity, and carpentry. It’s my fault I can’t cure myself and have to rely on a doctor because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of medicine and surgery. It’s my fault I have to buy food from the store because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of gardening and agriculture.
Not everyone wants to spend time learning about something they don’t have an interest in when there are other ways to take care of it. We’re not all Renaissance folk (in the sense of having knowledge about everything) and sometimes we need a little help from other people. Sometimes certain topics are legitimately hard for some people to understand. Sometimes people figure that it doesn’t benefit them to learn the ins and outs of something that they can have someone else fix for them—they have other things they need to do that are more pressing.
As a non-car-enthusiast, I think it’s okay for me to want a car that “just works”. As a person who isn’t a plumber, electrician, or carpenter I think it’s okay to want a house that “just works”. If I weren’t a somewhat-tech person, I would probably want my technology to “just work”. We all want things that we’re not experts in to just work, to not have to acquire expert knowledge to use it at all.
This all comes from a place of me trying not to be condescending to people who don’t have knowledge that I have. I am an arrogant person with little patience. So I usually have to argue against my own “do you seriously not know this, what idiot doesn’t” tendencies, both to be a better person and to avoid the social consequences of being an arrogant jerk. So I may have swung a little too hard towards no user accountability or responsibility to learn about the thing you’re using.
Agreed. Making tools easier to use increases our capacity and capabilities without themselves being a burden (or that’s usually the goal). If a computer is easy enough to use that someone with no interest in computers can use one to learn about something they ARE interested in, that’s a win.
I believe the solution is a balance of people spending a little more time learning and companies not making so hard for people to fix/change stuff.
I see this a lot around me. People are convinced that nothing can changed or be fixed. And if you just turn to people with knowledge in general you get the complete opposite picture.
Knowledge gives power to the people and takes away all the desperation they have. You don’t have to know specific technicalities but enough to know where to look to change what you want, and enough to get the feeling that you can actually change anything you want.
It’s important for the average user to ask for well designed products. A lot of so called “human errors” are really design mistakes in disguise.
It’s important as well for the tech community to ask for repairability and control. It’s a matter of owning the object you bought and of reducing waste. Most industries pushed hard against this and practically killed the local repairman.
You can have it all too. You don’t need to sacrifice one in order to have the other. Those two things went in opposite directions in the last decades but I’m not so sure they are that strongly correlated.
I’m a bit torn on this one.
On the one hand, enabling non-technical users to use technical things is an incredibly fantastic expansion of their possibilities and what they can do.
On the other hand, personally I wish computers in particular (including smartphones) were harder to use.
There are three reasons for that:
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Requiring a minimum effort to learn how to use the internet is a great idiot filter. Being online (or, going back further, on FidoNet or a BBS) used to mean that the person in question has demonstrated at least rudimentary reading and comprehension skills. But what’s more important is that it also makes the experience of being online - or using a device in general - ‘worth’ more to that person - much as a thing that cost something is often treated better that the exact same thing for free.
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I blame easy-to-use smartphones for a lot of ignorance in other places. The expectation that every idiot can press a few buttons and instantly get what they want is in many ways a dangerous mindset. Case in point - in the two years that our oldest kid (I truly love her, but sometimes …) has had her driving licence, she’s slashed four front tyres on kerbstones, drove around with the brake warning light on for at least two weeks, nearly ripped away the front bumper twice, and drove through a major city with a flat tyre. I shit you not. And according to her it’s all the car’s fault, because a) it hasn’t got 360° cameras for parking, and b) it’s supposed to tell her everything that’s wrong and where to have it fixed. In short, she has no idea how a car works, and she doesn’t care, because her expectation is that it should all magically fix itself just as on her phone.
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Idiot-proof products effectively incapacitate many of its users. In order for a product to be easier to use, it has to take away decisions from you, or even the information that a decision exists. A minimum of knowledge gives you a lot more control over that thing you want to use.
Finally, as any software developer will be able to confirm, “make it idiot-proof and the universe will invent a better idiot.”
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