Post #2597315

2025-11-05 18:04 UTC

"You just point and click and drag everyone knows that" you spent hundreds of hours training to "just" point and click and drag, but you didn't call it training, you called it solitaire and minesweeper. You practised. Today, if we want a better user interface for any computing - and I think we do, and it's possible - we have two choices. Entirely 100% new - clean-break, fresh-start new - tech or to acknowledge and own that we're going to spend some time fighting reflexes honed over decades.

Replies (8)

@mhoye@mastodon.social 2025-11-05 18:20

This is not an "it's the user's fault" or "it's never the user's fault" argument. There's not "fault" here, there is responsibility. There's an implicit social contract in computing, in navigating change that matters when we are using the tools we rely on. Change is an _accessibility problem_ that demands assistive technologies to navigate, and building that tech is the responsibility of the developer. "We put a 2nd floor on your house", great! "Climb a rope to get there", excuse me what.

Open ##2597316
@Osmose@digipres.club 2025-11-05 18:13

@mhoye@mastodon.social wait wait hold on is "Minesweeper as an educational tool for building muscle memory for using a mouse" a known thing already / intentional? Because I've never heard of it before and it seems brilliant

Open ##2597326
@neal@social.typica.us 2025-11-05 18:29

@mhoye@mastodon.social I still remember the Hypercard stack that came with my first Mac that goes through things like point, click, drag, feed the fish. Big paper manuals full of screenshots were also a thing and they assumed far less familiarity with operational concepts. These days I feel like I could use one of those just to know what capabilities have been hidden behind invisible gestures.

Open ##2597389
@aredridel@kolektiva.social 2025-11-05 19:04

@mhoye@mastodon.social Anyone who thinks "just drag" is intuitive has never tried to help an 85 year old do it. Weak muscles, shaky arms, sticky old mouse, a bit of a tremor... it's actually _very_ hard to describe the motion they need to make and then all of that!

Open ##2597391
@trurl@mastodon.sdf.org 2025-11-05 21:38

@mhoye@mastodon.social I'm dusting off old MS-DOS games for the kids, and it's interesting how many of the games are, at their core, training on how to interface with a computer

Open ##2597395
@emmy@transfem.social 2025-11-06 04:54

@mhoye@mastodon.social This is off-topic, but that explains why my late grandfather never liked drag and drop. He was an avid player of FreeCell, not Solitaire! He probably played thousands of hours of FreeCell over the years. Microsoft FreeCell did not allow dragging cards. You had to click on a card then click on the destination. It was updated to drag and drop in Windows Vista. When my grandfather got a new computer that had Windows 7, he simply couldn't play it. Luckily the FreeCell files from Windows XP still worked on Windows 7 so he could continue playing.

Open ##2597396
@boredzo@mastodon.social 2025-11-06 16:10

@mhoye@mastodon.social In the first decade or so of the Mac, there was even explicit training. Early Macs came with a “guided tour” split across a training program and an *audio cassette*: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iTNDm-LC_Js Because in 1984, nobody expected you to know how to use a mouse and GUI, but you did probably have some idea of how to use a tape player. And with that, and a good tutorial with practice sections, you could learn.

Open ##2597397
@sn@mastodon.ping.de 2025-11-06 20:36

@mhoye@mastodon.social fighting reflexes, like when Apple inverted the scroll direction? If you think there are no intuitive UIs, watch little children use an iPad.

Open ##2597398