Age of the Geek

Not Our Earth Logic

     Aliens exist, and I can prove it.

     Just look at your smart phone, tablet, or computer the next time it updates to the next “new and improved” user interface design. These UIs prove that aliens are among us because nobody familiar with our Earth logic would ever make the decisions that go into their design.

     Last week, if I wanted to adjust the brightness on my tablet or lock the screen rotation, all I had to do was swipe down on the upper right corner of my screen and press the correct icon. But on Thursday, my tablet’s operating system automatically updated. Now that process involves swiping down from the top of the screen, then swiping down again to get to the appropriate menu.

     In other words, the number of swipes it takes to adjust the brightness on my tablet saw a 100 percent increase overnight.

     If this seems like a small thing, you’re right. It is a small thing, but that’s not the point.

     Somebody, somewhere, in the depths of Google HQ, went out of their way to make their UI objectively worse. They made a conscious decision to make it harder to use, even by the smallest degree. Who does that? What kind of person looks at a user interface and says, “You know… I think we should make this more complicated for our customers. Why let them do something in two steps when we can make them do it in three?”

     This is hardly an isolated incident. Quite the contrary. The tech world seems to be overrun with people who have utterly failed to grasp how real human beings think.

     Last year I was forced to upgrade from Adobe Premiere Elements 10 to 12 for my video editing needs. Everything was fine, for the most part, until I needed to artificially lengthen a clip and discovered that the “time stretch” tool was missing.

     At some point between version 10 and version 12, Adobe decided that this really handy tool was something they didn’t want their users to have. So now what used to take a simple click and drag now involves a multi-step process of calculating length and manually adjusting video clips down to the 1/30th of a second.

     And this is supposed to be an upgrade?

     When I got my laptop, which came with Windows 8 inflicted on it, I had to download a third party program because Microsoft decided that they no longer wanted their users to be able to minimize Windows Live Mail to the system tray.

     Minimizing to the system tray was a feature introduced for Windows Vista. It was a hidden feature for Windows 7, but at least you could still do it. At least, you could until Windows 8, which removed the feature all together.

     Again, who goes into developing a program asking, “What features can I take away from people?”

     I know I’m not alone on this. You’ve experienced this too. Somewhere down the line you have “upgraded” to a new program and been baffled by design choices that seem to serve no purpose other than to make life more difficult.

     I would like to believe that there is a rational and logical reason for why these developers do what they do, but I’ve yet to come across one. In speaking with people from Adobe or Microsoft, generally PR people rather than the designers themselves, the standard response is generally a shrug and a hand wave. Sometimes they point me at a completely different feature that doesn’t do what I want. Other times they smugly imply that I’m wrong for wanting the feature in the first place, as though they know what I want out of a program more than I do.

     I’ve yet to hear a good reason why upgrading to a new version of a program regularly results in a loss of functionality, which leads me to one conclusion.

     Aliens.

     Whatever science is used to turn ones and zeros into graphic displays did not come from Earth. There are no human programmers. Our Earth logic is incomprehensible to the people who design our computer programs. In their world, three is less than two and fewer options make for a better program.

     If there is a better explanation out there, I’d love to hear it.

     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and there's a reason this column was written on Microsoft Word 2003.