Posted by edent 2 days ago
Ha tell that to product managers who shove very useful reminders to enable notifications, sync contacts, auto upgrade, etc.
They offer all sorts of choices like remind me later, not now, i will do this later, don't remind me for one week, not now, tell me more etc ...
But never the option to "no, and never ask me again".
They play dumb in so many creative ways it is jarring.
Yeah.
"remind me later" is simple; you check if there are any children accounts, if no, ask to create one with probability p. There is no state. There is no setting. There is no "what if I accidentally clicked no but want to reverse that decision, where do I go" problem.
It’s much more simple: if a “permanently off” setting is worse for metrics, it won’t get built that way.
Yes there is, you now can't find the setting, because it doesn't exist, and you need to wait for it to reappear based on some unknown trigger.
Normally it would just be lazy design to annoy the shit out of your users with nags instead of giving them settings but this approach seems to be pervasive at companies that make billions off this software so I can only conclude that it’s intentional.
> The world doesn't revolve around children.
Well, that’s the thing. It kind of does. And these days there’s an argument to be made that the world doesn’t value children enough. As long as fertility is below 2.1 that’s objectively true. It means we’re dying out.
If the author wants to be able to retire, there needs to be kids, and the industrialised world has made that too undesirable.
Honestly this feels like a trifle compared to the many UX atrocities out there. Sometimes you have to make the UI more inconvenient for some to make it more convenient for others
But, as a parent of three kids, it’s very very obvious that modern western society is not really made for bringing up children in a good way. I could list multiple reasons, but IMO the most important one is that raising children with 1-2 parents, and not as a tribe or colocated big family, is super hard and a non-stop grind. It’s not possible to retrofit this kind of support with government mediated interventions, like gratis kindergarten, financial support, etc. You are always the first and last in line, as a typical, western parent. I can totally understand anyone who doesn’t want that kind of constant stress and often unhappiness in their lives.
But increasingly, society doesn’t give a shit about children. People value more their own individual autonomy, their vacations, their luxury goods, their comfort, over the responsibility and work involved in raising children. Children have lower value than ever in this world, reduced to units of potential future economic output, or accessories for your next instagram reel or photo.
We, as in humanity, are not dying out. While statisticians observe sinking fertility rates globally [1], reproduction is still going strong. In fact, humanity is still growing.
2.1 is considered to be replacement level.
The parts of the world that hold this number up don't produce people productive enough to support the social programs elderly people rely on in the west.
The kids should not have jobs of caring old generation lined up even before birth. My child is not going to born to take care for these olds.
Who’s watching TV? “Doodiehead” “Irrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr:7:?@“ “cars 3” or “+ New User”?
Rather, it’s a basic usability issue, with extra clicks/taps/whatever required, or an overly-complex presentation, requiring extra attention. Also, as noted in another comment, every UI element increases the opportunity for misfires.
In The Days of Yore, we used to “score” our UI, by how many taps/clicks it took, to accomplish tasks, or how long it took, to understand a screen. The lower, the better. I’m a bit of an anachronism, as I still do that.
My experience, is that implementing intuitive, low-interaction UI is really hard. I’m in the middle of designing a screen with drag-and-drop support for a matrix of icons. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, already, and probably have at least a couple more to go. Lot of work, for just one screen. It’s all about removing unnecessary interactions, and implementing subtle, intuitive affordances. Also, symbolic debugging of UICollectionView is a real bitch. The debugger borks the drag and drop, so I have to use a bunch of print() statements.
I think most software is done by folks that aren’t willing to “go the extra mile,” to design and implement truly intuitive UI.
I don't see how the existence of a children's profile bothers anyone so much. It's not extra work. You don't have to scroll past it or anything. It's just a nonoffensive thing that sits there if you ever need it on the initial profile page.
Stockholm syndrome in full force.
Why doesn't it log in to the last used profile automatically?
At the same time, the existing one is fine for people (like me) who only use one -- as GP says, on a TV it's just a double confirm, if designed well. That said, for accounts that only have a single profile, I'm not sure why you'd show the select in the first place. Hide it by default, show it when the user creates a sub profile. DOS didn't have a login prompt.
Indeed :)
But also it's just annoying. In some apps it's remembering what the heck you set the password to.
They're just sitting down for a relaxing movie or series and the first thing that comes up is the question: "You don't have kids right?"
They have an algorithm which can account for every micro-taste on the planet. What's the point of having computers if they can't properly account for the real world?
When your entire content is full of triggers for those who lost a child, what's one more trigger at the loading screen?
Because phenomenal experience of children exists unavoidably outside of Netflix
> They have an algorithm which can account for every micro-taste on the planet
Citation needed
They just need to add an option to hide the "kids" profile, which, as is being noted all over this comment thread, would be useful for a number of reasons.
Grief isn't linear.
Nobody said people should never be reminded of the existence of children, so not sure who you're arguing with.
Or have your parents?
Is this what you said to your spouse or parents when your child or sibling died?
>"you are asserting your own neuroses too much on the world and you should get it fixed and take responsibility for it I don't have patience for such childish reactions from supposed adults" -bowsamic
It’s a horrible, horrible UX and is a perfect example of PM’s going wild and not being pushed back on by other disciplines. It’s such a shame.
Get a $50 raspberry pi, NUC, or Android box.
> Get a <...> Android box.
Why are you ok for Google to spy on you but not LG?
There's absolutely 0 guarantee that a no name android box isn't doing the same, if not worse than what LG and Samsung are doing.
Another device adds another failure point, possibly another remote (lets be honest, HDMI-CEC is not reliable. It's been almost 20 years and device support is still spotty and bug ridden on both sides), extra complexity, extra space. You might want that choice and freedom, and that's absolutely fine, but I'd rather not thanks.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/preinstalled-...
My previous TV only had one CEC port, which was also the ARC port. I had a receiver that conencted via HDMI meaning that CEC was only usable on that device, and not on any other things that were connected to it.
Feature creep and scope creep are real, but if you want to add a feature for a kids profile then put «disable kids profile» as part of the scope for that task.
As someone with kids I find it really useful to have kids profiles. Netflix one is particularly good, I can configure a general age group and block individual shows.
Our national TV app comes in two flavours, a general app and a specific one for kids. Makes it easier to deploy features for kids without adding any nagging popups for adults.
Most adults I know could take it or leave netflix and think about cancelling it now and then.
I reckon the dirty secret of netflix is that the two primary use cases are actually sleep aid and child minding service.
That's how I read it at least
The last two paragraphs talk about "harried parents", and "world doesn't revolve around children." sounds like having kids is a burden and resentful of the impact of people having kids on his life.
Its quite a lengthy rant about a minor UI inconvenience.
There is also a problem with the "never ask again" option. How long is never? Someone who does not have children now might well in a few years time.
It's quite a lengthy rant about prioritizing everytime inconvenience over a setting switch that could be enabled once, after a few years time.
World doesn't revolve about your children (or mine. And yes, I have them and yes, this is one of these mildly infuriating UX decisions).
Putting it into a programming context. Imagine you're a C++ developer. Wouldn't it be annoying if your text editor asked you every time you opened a project if you actually wanted to use Python instead.
Checks out I guess.
Or, yeah, because if my child can access streaming without a child lock, they may not recover from what they see.
Looks like we should protect each other as much as we can, using UI!