Contra the previous post, just spotted this “Same settings, new look!” callout in Firefox, on a page I have never visited before, talking about a feature I have never used:

I mentioned this once – when you get someplace new, everything is new. This redesign announcement’s conditions were engineered poorly, because they didn’t even consider people who didn’t use the feature before the redesign.

I keep thinking of the very old computers from the 1940s, 1950s, and even 1960s, where the challenge wasn’t what to do with the computer, but with keeping the computer running. There was a machine called JOHNNIAC which gained a nickname “pneumoniac” because it refused to work on a warm day. On many other computers, there was a daily ritual of finding which of the vacuum tubes blew up and had to be replaced. Some teams had a literal downtime tax; they knew and communicated in advance that 40% of the days the machine would not be up to the task, consumed by tweaks and repairs to bring it just to the state of being ready to do work.

When I look at those kinds of pop-ups and callouts, I think how we’re unwillingly recreating the very same conditions. I deeply believe people are exhausted not just by changes in software, but also constant questions, pop-ups, unnecessary notifications, “STOP 2 END,” emails to unsubscribe from, unsubscribes that don’t work the first time, and so on.

Software should not require the user to occasionally click on buttons just to keep it running.