[koliber]

Every UI presents an opinion. In many cases, that opinion is unclear, muddled, or counterintuitive. As developers and designers pay more attention to the UX, that opinion becomes more clear and unilateral. In the end, the decision to like a piece of software or website depends on how well your expectations align with the opinion that the UI expresses.

If you feel manipulated, it means that you did not want to do something, but the UI expressed its opinion in a way that was strong enough for you to notice it.

If the UI expresses its opinion in a way that aligns with your intentions, it gets called easy-to-use, unobtrussive, frictionless, and other nice-to-hear words.

[jerrre]

I think a big differences is between

a) tools for professionals/experts where the assumption is the user knows best what it wants, and will spend time figuring out how to reach it

b) the instagram/autotune etc kind of tools that make everyone feel like an expert without doing the work, by providing very nice results for very little effort, but as a user you will very quickly run into the limititions when you form your own opinion.

Many tools that used to be a) now are becoming b) which is nice because it can increase power and productivity for everyone, but the experts and pro's are left behind... What's even worse for them is these simplified tools are often not created by domain experts...

[maxxxxx]

And by becoming b) the designers of the tools can also inject their agenda which is probably often selling more ads or driving up some metric like engagement. The goal of computers used to be to empower people but now it seems just to push people into doing what companies want them to do.

That concerns me about the progress in AI. It won't be used to help us but mainly to manipulate us.

[TeMPOraL]

> which is nice because it can increase power and productivity for everyone, but the experts and pro's are left behind

It's not nice overall, because as those b) tools push out a) tools, it creates an artificial ceiling. Sure, it may be nice to enable a random person to do a new thing for the first time in their lives, but it's not nice if your software prevents those who want to do that thing more than once from being able to do it faster and better. Toys are more approachable than tools, but good works happens with tools; when almost all software tools become toy-like, we have a problem.

[PavlovsCat]

> If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar.

-- Alan Kay

[ryandrake]

Look at the path “configuration defaults” have taken. Whenever software has settings or can do things multiple ways, there is usually a default out-of-the-box setting.

Long time ago, the default was often whatever was easiest to program or took up the fewest compute resources: the variable is zero initialized by the OS, so therefore the setting will default to off.

Then, the rule became: the default should be the way most users will want to use the software.

Now, it’s: the default should be whatever causes the user to take the action that the developer wants them to take.

We are also seeing software with fewer and fewer settings. Developers are simply taking away the option and forcing users to do it the way the developer wants. This trend is aided and abetted by the current crop of ‘minimalist’ UI designers who insist that settings are bad and nothing should be user configurable.

[mental1896]

On the bright side, the more restrictive these apps become, the more susceptible they become to competition.

[maxxxxx]

That doesn't really seem to happen though.

[netcan]

These are soft concepts, so I don't think we can be totally right or wrong about them. That said, I think there's more than opinion here. There's agenda too. When a browser or search engine wants to update your defaults, that's more agenda than opinion.

With a lot of modern software (FB is the big example) has an agenda. A list of stuff labeled KPI on a whiteboard.. stuff FB would like people to do.