[GMoromisato]

Not in this article, but Don Norman also frequently rails against complex conceptual models.

The other day, my mom was complaining that her phone was not ringing and it took me forever to figure it out. I had to go to Google to find a troubleshooting guide.

The problem is that there are multiple ways to prevent a phone call from ringing. You can switch the hardware button (silent mode), you can set focus mode on (or have it set automatically), and you can mute individual people in the address book. Or you can add people to a group so that they ring even if the phone is in focus mode (but not in silent mode). There are probably other ways I've forgotten.

Already we've introduced a bunch of concepts: silent mode, focus mode, muting individual people, exceptions to focus mode, etc. And the user has to figure out these concepts just from looking at the UI. But if you don't understand the entire conceptual model, you may not know why something is not working.

This problem can't be solved with better affordances or more text labels, unfortunately. Maybe LLMs will eventually save us. Instead of the user having to figure out the capabilities and UI of the device, the device tries to figure out the intent of the user.

[Jtsummers]

https://www.pamelazave.com/faq.html - FAQ Sheet on Feature Interaction

> What is a feature interaction?

> A feature interaction is some way in which a feature or features modify or influence another feature in defining overall system behavior. Feature interactions are especially common in telecommunications, because all features are modifying or enhancing the same basic service, which is real-time communication among people.

> Features are popular because they are easy to add and change. The dark side of features is feature interaction, which is implicit in feature composition and therefore difficult to understand. [emphasis added]

[smcin]

...whereas in data science or statistics, a "feature interaction" is the influence of a combination of features on the target variable, e.g. "age 55+, baseball fan and living in zipcodes X tend to exhibit behavior Y".

Since part of this thread is complaining about the overuse and lack of universality of jargon.

[sillywalk]

This 'rings' with me, when you have to do root-cause-analysis to find out why your phone doesn't ring.

Conceptual complexity aside, for this case I wonder if it's almost a cultural/social problem. Before ubiquitous cell phones, you could be "disconnected", and this was normal.

Now, it may seem weird to say, 'don't call unless it's an emergency'.

[tim333]

Yeah that stuff's pretty bad and worse on my iphone it just appeared without warning during some updates. The phone used to work fine in a simple way and then they nag you to update to ios whatever and then the slip in focus mode etc without warning you. I'm wary of even trying to figure all the stuff before the muck it all around again on some other update. As a work around I've figured putting it on 'work' mode makes it behave like a phone again.

[SoftTalker]

The problem is one device responsible for too many different things. At some point it gets confusing, and sensible "affordances" become impossible with so many modes of operation.