It’s been a time. I have been talking a bit on social media but mostly just out and about trying to be useful. Everyone’s going through it. I’ve been getting to the point where I’ve got a bit of capacity and have been cleaning off my real and virtual desktops and came across this bit of a shared talk I gave with a friend for Public Philosophy Week back in April. He did the hardware stuff, talking about the tool that is a computer, and how it can really only do what it was designed to do (abbreviated POSIWID – the purpose of a system is what it does). I did the other part. Very few slides but you can view the ones we used here they’re mostly not necessary to the talk but some of them are fun. Here is the part of the talk that I gave.
A user interface is basically any way of interacting with a computer. A command line is a user interface it’s just not a GRAPHICAL one….
The user interface is where the humans get to decide how much you’re allowed to interact with the program. What buttons or links or sliders are going to be part of the thing. For many people, this is where things go wrong. You’re looking for a button and you get a link. You want to get to the next page but you can’t find the function to do that. You’re trying to submit a form but it says your phone number isn’t your phone number. Or maybe you put in your zip code and it says you live in Brookfield not Randolph, or Orange and not Topsham.
When I used to teach computer classes at RTCC’s Adult Education program, usually about using Word or Facebook, we’d call it “Where are the tiny triangles that are hiding all my stuff?” These tiny triangles that opened menus would hide not just rarely-used features but also features they don’t want you to see like changing your privacy settings or saying you didn’t want “targeted” advertising.
And these tiny triangles or other what we call “small targets” are small for a number of reasons but one of them is that the people who build these things are, to a large degree, under 40 with most of the ones who work in startups more like under 30. This means better vision, mostly able-bodied, grew up with tech their whole lives. Many of them have no mental model of novice technology users, like someone who doesn’t know the difference between a one-time login code, and a password, and a screen lock, and a laptop password. I was helping a woman get her iPad calendar to sync with her laptop and we needed ALL FOUR of these. A user interface can be thought of as doing two major things… helping the user do things, and helping the company make money (explain examples)
Because ultimately, apps are businesses, nearly always.
An aside: I follow a lot of blind technologists on social media. Assistive technology can be a real boon to them as users but as developers they’re often left out of the conversation because many people see accessibility as what we call a “nice to have” and not a necessary (even legally necessary) part of software. And accessible options don’t just help people with visual impairments or hearing impairments, they help everyone. Maybe you’ve got a shaky hand and they give you a bigger space to click. Or maybe you find blinky features can give you headaches, you can turn those off.
But what we find is that applications and websites are interested in economies of scale. Build a thing and then have it grow 10, 100, 10000 times bigger without you having to make that much more of an investment. Three people can use a website as easily as one can. But can 3,000,000??? This isn’t even getting to things like “the algo” which thinks I might want to follow the Vice President on social media (I don’t) or thinks I SHOULD follow the Vice President (I won’t) or this stupid feature from the Shaw’s [local grocery store] app that tells me about my all-grain diet after it tried to sell me Sirius-XM and a new credit card while I waited for my groceries in the curbside pick up slot. News for you Shaw’s, dairy is also protein. Plus I was stocking up on oatmeal.
And some of this is that the tech is trying to take analog things we know (taxis are now uber, hotels are now airbnb, movies are now netflix – except here in 1974 where we have all agreed that we live) and like and make them worse and more complicated. Like… I work at the library and this is how we used to give you a book. I mean not exactly but close!
Now we have a LOT more books available thanks to ebooks being available through Libby and the Palace Project BUT…. it’s a total headache to get them. Some of this is just because there’s one more technology step but a LOT of it is because the ebook market is controlled by the publishers who would very much like libraries to not lend ebooks. So they make them difficult to get (so you don’t steal them) and this makes me very conflicted (because I know how to steal them, and I know it’s a lot simpler, but this is the game we are playing and what does it mean to be a librarian in 2025 anyhow) and this is mostly by making the technology difficult.
And when I see people in the library who are having trouble getting an ebook, 90% of the time, they think it’s their fault, that they can’t figure out the technology, that they are somehow not tech smart enough, that everyone else knows it and they don’t. The ads make it look easy.
Well I’m here to tell you, everyone DOES not know how to do this and that’s partly because it’s made hard to know how to do. Though it’s improving, but not fast enough. It’s not a can’t thing, it’s a won’t thing. Which means if you want to make it work for you, there are some things you can try…
I will say that ebooks have been much easier to access than they were at the beginning. I remember (and it wasn’t THAT long ago) when you had to know your Adobe number to check out an ebook from the library.