Please stop infantilising your users.
Hat-tip to Maddox who did the actual research for the first part here — https://twitter.com/maddoxrules
(Also, please note that this is tagged ‘Old man yells at cloud’ - I know I’m probably on a losing battle here).
DJs — that is, actual beatmatching underground music DJs, not just people who hit play on a playlist — generally hate requests. It’s not that they don’t want to play music that people want to listen to. After all, everyone wants a crowded dancefloor. It’s that the requests are usually inappropriate and/or vague.
It’s either “HAVE YOU GOT ANY KATY PERRY?” in the middle of a jungle set, or “HEY, COULD YOU PLAY SOMETHING THAT’S, LIKE, YOU KNOW, A BIT MORE CRAZY? BUT NOT TOO CRAZY? LIKE, WILD BUT MELLOW?”
Yes, I had to write it in caps, it’s always shouted. Usually while drunk.
Likewise, anyone who’s ever tried assist people who THINK they’re creative knows the horror of a vague brief. You dream of the day you get a set of logical, reasonable boundaries to work within and a clear set of targets to work towards. Instead it’s “can you make something that’s like The Matrix but not so 90's?”, or requests to be more like a colour on anything non-visual. I’m not talking about synaesthesia — I mean “I don’t like the mood, can we make it more crimson?”
Once you start to get even slightly capable in a particular field, one of the initial frustrations can come from being stuck within a small number of presets, unable to change variables with the precision that you want, or having to randomly skip through until you find what you’re after. I found that when going from full photo-editing software to the built-in filters on an old phone. Stop making me choose between ‘vintage’ and ‘sepia’ and just give me a bloody saturation slider!
But software makers don’t want to do that any more. Apparently, using actual values puts people off — it’s less inviting if there’s any kind of learning curve to go through. Which is why stuff like this happens:
You might think this is a design issue more than a comms/marketing one, but I guarantee you that no designer ever thought this was appropriate. It’s not like it was even an either/or choice! The MP3 options on my copy of Audacity are currently just a list of numbers, but it used to have something to the effect of:
Low — 96kbps
Medium — 128kbps
High — 256kbps
EXTREME — 320kbps
So why has this been done? Adobe have taken a lot of stick for their move to a subscription model, but that’s what’s required from a late-capitalist system focused on endless growth. They’re the industry standard, so they’re probably at the limit of what they can do in terms of sales to professionals. They know the amateur/novice level are either going to use open source alternatives or cracked versions, so no point trying to recruit any of those. They also know that the average boomer facebook-photo-uploader probably has the cash for a Photoshop subscription, but is put off by the complexity.
Bear in mind, this ‘complexity’ i.e. the ability to actually make precise changes is the whole purpose for using Photoshop in the first place. They’re not so dumb as to remove functionality in order to sell more copies. Not yet.
No, some marketing arsehole took a momentary break from sandblasting his already paper-thin septum with another gram of laxative adulterated with coke, took a look at the screen and went ‘Yeah, too many numbers. Get rid of the numbers. Facebookers hate numbers, none of them were any good at maths. Get rid of the numbers and it’ll sell a few more copies. That’s excellent. In fact, it’s better than excellent, it’s GREAT. Right, I’m off to the bogs, get it done.”
At least, that’s how I picture it happening.
Let’s be fair — it’s not only Adobe that have been doing this. My long-suffering partner has gotten used to the particular sigh I make, always followed by the same sentence. “I just wish these dickheads would stop trying to be helpful,they’re just getting in the way.” You’ve all experienced it. Pop-ups that get in the way of the button you’re about to click. Instructions that make a simple task more complicated than it needed to be. Your phone auto-correcting to Duck for the 10,000th time.
The above sat in my drafts for a week or two. I knew the concept annoyed me, but was waiting to find the most suitable example I could to summarise my annoyance. Then I read a fascinating article in The Verge by Monica Chin. Read it if you haven’t yet, but the general theme is that young people these days are so used to working within modern computer frameworks that they’re unfamiliar with the file/directory/tree concept that those of us who grew up on Windows 95 are used to. When they reach degree level, this starts to cause problems, as they’re then unable to use the programmes created for higher level work:
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
(It’s a genuinely brilliant article, please read it if you haven’t).
So far, so straightforward. I was able to shake my head and curse-the-kids-of-today just as every generation before me has. Naturally, someone then came along to give an opposing viewpoint that seemed to made things a bit more complex. Joshua Barretto has an insightful Twitter thread where he points out that computers don’t actually care about file hierarchies, and that “tree-oriented filesystems are far from universal”. Thijs Niks, product manager at WhatsApp, had a slightly more sneering take, implying that this is ‘great design’ and that anyone who disagreed was ‘precious about Ancient Computer Truths’.
As far as I can see, the issue here is not about developing new approaches, or replacing hierarchical systems with something new. ‘The Zoomers’ aren’t the ones killing file systems. They’re using whichever systems are being given to them and learning within those.
The problem is that ‘file systems’, like the precision on that Photoshop export, are being killed and replaced with nothing.
Around 3 years ago, I was assisting with an amateur podcasting studio. For various reasons, the studio was buried away behind concrete walls and out of reach of a decent Wi-Fi or 5G signal. It wasn’t a serious problem — I just had to remember to take a USB drive with me. Once the initial recordings were made, I would take them off by USB and either put them straight onto the laptop of the people doing the recording, or take them to my (fully connected) work computer and send from there.
One of our podcasters was using the studio to record some pick-up lines, and I mentioned the need to ‘always have a USB drive with me’. She looked me dead in the eyes, and with the look you’d give to a pensioner who was confused about all these new TV channels, said:
“Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever used one of those in my life”
She explained that, since she’d been doing her GCSE’s, she’d been able to just email or transfer any files she’d been working on that way. She never had any need to physically move something from one computer to another, she’d just sent it over the cloud.
So, isn’t that great? Isn’t it just better that we can all do that now?
No, I don’t think so. Because that isn’t always possible in every situation. For example — that old podcast studio. For another, if you’re working with incredibly large files (say, from working on videos or high-resolution audio files) it might not be so easy to transfer. My Google Drive usually has between 2–4GB of free space. Many a time I’ve had to carry over a Terabyte of video files from some multi-camera full length recording. I’m not waiting for that to transfer over shitty TalkTalk internet. Equally, when I’m DJing, I want to be able to carry a USB, or even some CDs or ‘gasp’ Vinyl, because then I know exactly what I have and where I have it. You can now, on some systems, rely on automatically downloading the tracks you want from Beatport while you play. Great — as long as the connection doesn’t go down, and it has all the tracks you want, and your data doesn’t run out. But do you really want to be searching fresh every time?
More importantly — I don’t see what the gain is here. Both Joshua and Thijs talk about using tag-based systems, and allowing people to search for things rather than needing a folder-based system to organise them. Joshua even says that ‘computers don’t care how we organise files’. I get that. I frequently use searches rather than going through folders, because with well tagged files it can be quicker.
But take a look at something like Traktor — my current DJing software of choice. I can search through Traktor for any term I want and it’ll bring up the file I’m asking for, but those files are still stored in a folder-based system. If I want to work out where my MP3s are in order to copy them to a USB for a gig, I can do that! I don’t have to rely on a search function to tell me where they are, I can find them logically.
It seems like we’re removing the directory system and replacing it with nothing. All that does is create a system where the user no longer has the power to find things without the aid of the operating system.
I can take my external HD to a friend’s house, plug it into a different system (say Serato, or Mixxx) and still know where everything is. A person who only organises their files using a proprietary system — like, say, Rekordbox — needs to continue to pay a subscription to maintain that organised system.
Think of how easy it is, or isn’t, to search through your emails. To look up past invoices, or draft versions of documents, or whatever the type of file you use them most. How would you feel if, one day, you suddenly started to need to pay £10 a month to keep doing that? Then £20? Then £50?
So many systems — Mac OS, iPhones, Google — are presented to us as ‘just working’, and that’s great when they do. As soon as you need to do something outside of their accepted framework, you find out just how difficult it is. Ever tried syncing an android phone to a MacBook? It’s (almost) impossible. Numbers and precise terms and clear, transparent systems may seem weird and confusing to novices but they exist for a reason.
Can you imagine a Photoshop user, having created their new design, being asked by a printer “can you send us the file in at least 300dpi resolution, exactly 155mm by 170mm in size” and replying “umm, no, I can do ‘Awesomesauce’ quality on ‘super mega t-shirt’ size? Is that the same?”
To try and make a less facetious argument: I spent many hours having to learn to write by hand — joined-up writing, or ‘cursive’ as I believe Americans call it. Most of my writing now is done on a keyboard. Was that time learning to write wasted? Maybe, maybe not — but it’s worth pointing out that I know handwriting is a thing, and I can still read handwritten notes. What we seem to be doing is replacing both the ability to write by hand, and the knowledge that writing was ever done that way.
Everyone is at pains to point out that these students are not stupid, they’re just doing things a different way. They will develop their own tools and approaches. In Monica Chin’s article, Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, notes that his students have technical and computer skills that he doesn’t. To wit:
Guarín-Zapata, for all his knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as his students do, despite having had an account for a year. He’s had students try to explain the app in detail, but “I still can’t figure it out,” he complains.
“They use a computer one way, and we use a computer another way,” Guarin-Zapata emphasizes. “That’s where the problem is starting.”
There are still computers doing functional work in this world, running off Windows XP. For example, the diplomatic link between North and South Korea. The US Navy still uses some computers from the 70’s because THEY DO THE JOB FINE. The kids understand Instagram better? Well, I understood Friendster better than my lecturers did. Friendster is dead, and the academics are still here.
As I write this, it’s Monday 4th October, and it seems like half of the internet (including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Coinbase and many other systems) have all gone down simultaneously. Everyone jokingly mocked themselves on Twitter because…well, Twitter was still up. “OMG, what next? Am I actually going to have to phone people?”.
Would that be a problem? If you can’t communicate without these newer, company-owned systems, what happens when they’re not available? How much control over your own communication do you really have?
I’ve no issue with people using as many or as few forms of media as they wish — in fact, in general, the more they can use the better — and I really don’t want to become one of those old ‘kids today can’t even read a book’ cretins. But this relentless desire for ease and convenience, of ‘letting the software make the decisions for you’, whether that’s Photoshop infantilising its quality levels, or TikTok’s algorithm deciding what you want to watch, or Instagram letting you communicate without having to say anything or reveal anything real about yourself… it’s not helping you. All it’s doing is removing your ability to do anything else.
And once you’ve lost the ability to do things any other way, then the company who were so helpful to you can basically do whatever they want.
And at that point, maybe you’ll wish that, as well as being able to use Instagram and WhatsApp, someone had taught you how to use the phone, or write in cursive.
Or how to use a folder-based system.
