Source: Apple Developer Documentation Archive
Has making things simple for the user actually made it so everything is just… too stupid? There seems to be a gap in technological literacy that many people older than myself like to point out in younger generations.
From reading pages 11-18 of Don’t Make Me Think, I found myself agreeing with the main point being made of not making things confusing if you can help it. Buttons should be buttons and links should be links, and you typically shouldn’t feel the need to reinvent either of them. People don’t want to think too much when they’re browsing the internet. And designers want to reduce as much of the cognitive load of browsing on the user’s half as possible. Though this is a book that was published for the 2006 web, which predates the first iPhone, that still seems to be true after 20 years.
However, it had me thinking about how, apparently, nobody knows how to use the computer anymore despite being glued to technology for 20 hours a day. And it may just be because of the “don’t make things convoluted” idea.
Example: The fundamental difference between the iOS Files app (an abstraction of the actual structure) and a hierarchy based file system you see on Android or Windows/Mac/Linux. It prioritizes convenience by stripping away the need to think about where anything is saved at all. It’s probably right there in the folder of the app it belongs to instead of reflecting its true location on the disk. Photos you took are in the Photos app, not also in Files, and there’s no easily accessible “Internal storage/DCIM” like on Android. However, this leaves people sorely unprepared for navigating anything outside of that environment, although not really from their own fault. It’s short-term convenience that doesn’t provide much in terms of transferrable knowledge.
The less friction there is between the user getting a fresh new hit of content, the more time people are going to be spend sitting there rerolling for it, which is what we want as the entity benefitting from “people spending as much time as possible on our product” right? It’s not even something you really have to explain, everybody knows about the TikTok For You page. You don’t have to search for anything. It’s just there, and you’ll probably enjoy it. Searching and navigating are optional, and unfortunately, this only makes people good at consuming while active discovery is neglected.
I think what I’m getting at is that like most things, there is a pleasant middle ground. One where you don’t have to need an instruction book to do everything, but also not one so oversimplified that we start forgetting how to do anything ever. There’s nothing wrong with what the book is saying, I do agree with it heavily, but it did make me think about how it can be reframed against our current landscape.
