Is tech getting any easier?
It should be, right? Right?
It sure is easy to snap a pic nowadays. Not only take one, but edit it and share it with anyone (or the world), in an instant. That’s magic, especially if you reflect back on the traditional film photography process it evolved from.
Here’s the ultimate usability test - hand your phone over to a complete stranger on the street, and ask them to take your picture. They won’t hesitate and they’ll do a great job without any direction from you. Now that’s ease of use.
But is tech easier overall? Is it trending easier or is it still too complicated?
Many would argue we are not in the Golden Age of Technology. Take Apple - they recently revamped their photos app - the place you go to find all the pictures you took.
Consensus is, it sucks:
How to Make the iOS 18 Photos App Suck Less
The sucking is sneaky because all of a sudden you can’t find your pics. Where did my folders go? What even are collections? Where did search go? Did I just get stupid?
You didn’t - the app just updated and no one told you.
Most apps have a way to show you how to use them or to highlight new features. Called first run experience or FRE, it’s meant to help you out doing a task the first time. Then there’s user experience or UX, which is an entire disciple devoted to make the flow and placement of screens and controls natural and intuitive.
Apple is usually good at this stuff - stickers are an example of a new feature that delights and is easily discovered without interrupting the users flow. Tap a picture and the person is highlighted in a glowy outline with a text overlay you tap to create a sticker, which then gets added into your own personal sticker gallery. Who wouldn’t want to try that!
It’s easier to introduce a new feature than to redesign an old one.
My daughter is a product designer so there’s a little joke in our family whenever anything tech is hard - bad UX! I still see it all the time on websites, but it used to be rampant.
If you were born before 2000, you remember browsing stores like Blockbuster, filled with VHS tapes. Little libraries of home movie magic.
While VHS tapes launched the wonder of watching movies at home, it also gave us the biggest FRE or setup Fail of all time.
I’m talking about the VCR. The machine that ate the tapes and played the tapes. While it blazed the way into a new era of consumer electronics, the VCR was an abomination to set up, with clunky remotes, rows of tiny switches, and byzantine instructions.
Most users gave up trying to set the clock. On-and-on it flashed 12:00, forever a badge of shame.
This rendered the ability to record anything on a schedule useless. This most epic fail has been noted in the annals of history (or at least Wikipedia), as a seminal lesson for product designers - never again.
It would get even more frustrating before it got better.
The Onion said it best:
While some of this persists; device setup is sooooo much better.
JFran got an Apple Watch for Christmas; JFran has low tech tolerance; JFran is happy.
Great setup experience, pretty good first run experience - it’s got a lot of features so she’ll still get the odd notification or tooltip telling her how to use it. Impressive for a device with the teeniest of screens, a scroll wheel and a button.
But you can still muck up user experience pretty good. There are plenty of awful apps with frustrating, enshittified, ad riddled user experiences.
I’m not saying any of this is easy, but now we have the experience and the tools to make amazing user experiences. Facebook is an example of a company with all the resources in the world, yet their app is forever awful.
Sonos (whose speakers I love) updated their app with disastrous results and now they’re firing their CEO and a bunch of staff attempting a do-over to win back customers.
A year ago at peak AI hype, word was we didn't need good setup or user experience anymore. AI speech interfaces would take over and when speech is the user experience, things look (sound?) a lot different.
Interesting idea; haven’t seen it.
What I do see is a lot of people that still struggle with their tech. Don’t blame yourself, it’s on the hardware and software companies to make it work for you. There’s no excuse for poor UX anymore.
How’s your tech treating you?
If you took the poll, share your love (or hate) story.
best, Andrew
I'm here for the talking to robots bit. The good thing is that I can actually do that a little bit every day - first with text, then later with my voice.
I think I made more VHS copies than nearly anyone alive from about 1997 through 2004, give or take. It was certainly a big part of how I learned jiu jitsu, during a time before internet video or very good local instruction. Much more to say on videotapes and that whole world, but to the point today: Sonos spearers sucked when we installed them in 2019, and they continue to frustrate us today.
That Onion Sony video is one of the funniest things I ever saw. I think I shared it with everybody I knew when it came out 15 years ago. 😂