(2023-05-06) "User-friendly" is wrong
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For a brief moment, let us remember that the greatest evil on Earth is done
under the guise of good intentions. The generally approved concept of
"user-friendly" interfaces/software/hardware/whatever is one of not so
obvious examples of such evil. No, I'm not saying that being able to quickly
pick it up and start using it is a bad thing, not even remotely. It's just
what the general uninformed and uneducated public considers "user-friendly"
is the source of pretty much everything bad that has happened to the tech
industry throughout the recent 35 years or so.
Take a computer mouse, for example. It's a useful addon to any PC, even in
the form of a touchpad or a trackpoint, although I personally prefer
trackballs. It is useful when working with graphics software or playing
point-and-click quests. And that's what it has been for the entire time
since its invention, an addon. However, it was the introduction of Faildows,
and particularly starting with Faildows 95, that spawned an entire
generation of mouse-movers who no longer could work with CLI at all, nor did
they want to. Because, all of a sudden, CLI became less "user-friendly" for
them. Well, I understand that the CLI in DOS is far inferior to the CLI in
normal (Unix-like) OSes but it still is far more superior to any
mouse-driven general system GUI. The CLI is still really friendly to any
user who knows how to read and type. Similarly, capacitive touchscreens had
been around for quite a long time, but it was the introduction of certain
pseudo-smartphones that spawned an entire generation of screen-tappers. And
again, all of a sudden, pressing physical keys and even using a stylus
became too complicated for the brainwashed masses. Which, by the way, didn't
prevent the same global-scale scammers from reinventing a stylus and adding
it as a "pro" option to their products. Because, you know, pointing
precision still matters.
Now, even among those who know how to read and type, the amount of
"user-friendliness" bullshit still skyrockets. Almost all of them, for
instance, become hysterical when seeing vi or any of its derivatives (like
NeoVim that even has mouse support for some actions). Because "oh boy, it's
modal! And it doesn't have our beloved shorcuts we got used to! How do
people even use this archaic thing today?" It's not an exaggregation, I
heard real people (that I didn't have any reason to consider stupid before)
say this. Now, I'm not a vi expert in any way, and use almost no advanced
features that (Neo)Vim offers (except line numbering and syntax
highlighting), but I have been writing all my programs and posts like this
in it for a long time and don't feel any discomfort. Whenever I have to use
some other, non-modal software with more popular shortcuts, I often find
myself automatically typing Esc:w instead of Ctrl+S/Cmd+S. And yes, speaking
of Macbooks, vi-like editors are the only type of editors I can comfortably
use with that cut-down piece of a bitten apple of a keyboard. Yet they
convinced everyone a keyboard without Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Ins/Del is
"user-friendly"... Indeed, why have advanced cursor manipulation with a
single dedicated key for each action when you have Fn modifier and
multitouchpad? It's so much more convenient! (not really...) But yes, this
is their entire ideology: "if we didn't put it here, you don't need it even
if you think you do, we know better than you what you actually need, start
thinking different (but not different from us) and stop complaining".
When it comes to the notion of website "user-friendliness", it's a panoptikum
I won't even try reviewing, but the overall principle is about the same: "if
it doesn't look like mainstream resources, it's already not very friendly,
but if it requires us to manually enter something, it's a UX catastrophe to
us!" There might be more to it though. Some time ago, I even had received a
feedback about one of my BananaHackers subpages, I guess it was W2D, about
being "not very user-friendly". Damn, what?! It literally has a single
button! And it even tells you what to do instead if you press this button on
a non-KaiOS device! What else should I have done to satisfy whoever gave
such a feedback? If that was ca/in and not W2D, then it has three main
buttons to press, and again, I wasn't even obliged to create this page as a
corresponding CLI helper utility would be more appropriate.
No one can make software friendlier to users who themselves don't want to be
friendlier to the software to start with. And yes, please stop confusing
"user-friendly" with "illiterate dumbass-friendly", then every piece of the
story will fall into its place.
