Skip to main content

Search

Items tagged with: hci


When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer


# #

i'm derek, he/him. currently in central california and have lived in new york for a bit too

originally went through # school up through # (lol i'd be surprised if that hashtag actually worked and referred to doctor of musical arts) studying # with aspirations of being a "new music" percussionist but didn't stick the landing in music academia. i got a # degree somewhere along the way and had been getting heavily into # and # sorts of things working at a media lab during the dma so when covid, hit decided to go back to (online) grad school studying computer science. things i'm really into studying cs-wise are #/#ml things (more leaning on the ai-side but we'll see) and "soft-cs"/"extra-cs" sorta intersectional things like # and # and starting to read about # and other things. not sure where my cs studies will go yet but it'd be nice be able to research ai things more. also, i'm really into # / # sorta things.

other things i'm into are anime and manga (mostly iyashikei, mecha, and ikuhara things), video games, riichi mahjong, animals (mostly cats, sea otters and puffins), stars are cool, and also vast desolate expanses.

think my website better sums up things: https://derekxkwan.com/