I agree with this sentiment, but also feel like in some sense the whole point of an interface is to provide clear limits on what can and cannot be done.
Analogies: if you had a primitive form of direct brain-to-computer interfacing going on, that would probably actually make it harder to keep a project under control, the design would drift too easily. If our senses accessed reality directly, without interpretation by the brain, the world would make much less sense and thinking would be much more difficult -and more metabolically expensive.
To unify these two views, I think that cases where interfaces “get in the way” are cases where the interface lacks clear limits, so either the user is trying to do something that cannot be done with the program and hasn’t been made aware of that or the user is trying to do something but does not know what tools to use or what to avoid doing in their attempt. Clear limits make the insides of an interface easier to understand and use in ways that fill the breadth of the interface’s potential.
I think that cases where interfaces “get in the way” are cases where the interface lacks clear limits, so either the user is trying to do something that cannot be done with the program and hasn’t been made aware of that or the user is trying to do something but does not know what tools to use or what to avoid doing in their attempt.
I wish interfaces could only fail in one way. There’s also the interface that keeps making you do some non-obvious thing, but not often enough to make it easy to remember, and the interface with the related problem of making it hard to figure out how to get it to do what you want.
I agree with this sentiment, but also feel like in some sense the whole point of an interface is to provide clear limits on what can and cannot be done.
Analogies: if you had a primitive form of direct brain-to-computer interfacing going on, that would probably actually make it harder to keep a project under control, the design would drift too easily. If our senses accessed reality directly, without interpretation by the brain, the world would make much less sense and thinking would be much more difficult -and more metabolically expensive.
To unify these two views, I think that cases where interfaces “get in the way” are cases where the interface lacks clear limits, so either the user is trying to do something that cannot be done with the program and hasn’t been made aware of that or the user is trying to do something but does not know what tools to use or what to avoid doing in their attempt. Clear limits make the insides of an interface easier to understand and use in ways that fill the breadth of the interface’s potential.
I wish interfaces could only fail in one way. There’s also the interface that keeps making you do some non-obvious thing, but not often enough to make it easy to remember, and the interface with the related problem of making it hard to figure out how to get it to do what you want.