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Don Norman: I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.
The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.
Don Norman on how design fails older consumers[^]
Don Norman via article: Take the screen design for Apple’s phones. The designers at Apple apparently believe that text is ugly, so it should either be eliminated entirely or made as invisible as possible. Bruce Tognazzini and I, both former employees of Apple, wrote a long article on Apple’s usability sins ,which has been read by hundreds of thousands of people. Once Apple products could be used without ever reading a manual. Today, Apple’s products violate all the fundamental rules of design for understanding and usability, many of which Tognazzini and I had helped develop. As a result, even a manual is not enough: all the arbitrary gestures that control tablets, phones, and computers have to be memorized. Everything has to be memorized.
Quote: Everyone needs better design
Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone.
Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases. Closed captions are used in noisy bars. As Kat Holmes points out in her book Mismatch, all of us are disabled now and then. Some of us have permanent disabilities, but all of us have suffered from situational and temporary problems. When outside in the sun, the text message that just arrived is unreadable: wouldn’t it be nice if the display, whether cellphone, watch, or tablet, could switch to large, higher contrast lettering? Are elderly people handicapped? Maybe, but so is a young, athletic parent while carrying a baby on one arm and a bag of groceries in the other (and perhaps trying to open their car door). Ride-share bicycles and scooters cannot be used by people who need to carry bulky packages. Everyone has difficulty hearing people in noisy environments. Noise-canceling headphones are for everyone, not just the elderly. Almost anything that will help the elderly population will end up helping everyone.
modified 10-May-19 9:08am.
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Can't argue with any of that.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Preach it, brother/sister!
When I was first starting with WPF, I heard about Expression Blend. I downloaded and installed it. The app was completely unusable. Monochrome icons and gray text on a darker gray background. I couldn't see anything in the app. Switching themes did no good, as they all had the same low contrast "oh, don't have anything distract from the work" design. I complained on Microsoft Connect about the app's usability. They closed and deleted my issue immediately with no response.
And I only used the phrase "age-ist pricks" once.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: They closed and deleted my issue immediately with no response.
That's interesting because that's the 7th level of pain/annoyance that these kinds of frustrating issues create: you can't even report the issue because they just close them since it cannot be true that their design is terrible.
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I don't bother reporting issues to Microsoft any longer. Every time I have they've either responded with a form response ("did you try rebooting?"  ), or closed the issue with no comment. My experience has been that they treat most developers with nothing but contempt.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I agree with you. Not sure why they have that attitude about it but that's the same experience I've had in reporting issues to them.
I've reported a couple of real bugs with Visual Studio a couple of times and provided details and screen shots so they can reproduce and they just post back, "not a bug" and close or even delete the issue. The one I had reported was reported by a large number of users and they closed it anyways.
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Same here. That feeling is very much mutual.
PS - not toward you, toward them. 
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I hate problems like that.
Here I need to group these by common prefix so that this:
test -> expr
expr -> ambig1 ambig2 ambig3
expr -> ambig1 ambig2 ambig4
expr -> ambig1 ambig2
expr2 -> ambig2 ambig3
expr2 -> ambig2
becomes
test -> expr
expr -> ambig1 ambig2 ambig3
expr -> ambig1 ambig2 ambig4
expr -> ambig1 ambig2
expr2 -> ambig2 ambig3
expr2 -> ambig2
Maybe it *is* easy.
This isn't really a programming question, more a complaint, but if anyone has any ideas I'll listen
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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i posted that question after I posted this.
because i decided to ask it.
at first I wasn't intending to. I just wanted to vent about it. 
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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The fun thing about problems like this is to figure out what makes it easy for you. We are really good at categorizing / grouping recursively without thinking, and computers have to be programmed to do this stuff.
So, why is this easy for the brain to figure out? How do you capture that ease in an algorithm?
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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ha, i just posted something similar to this "Mindfulness and coding" up top of the lounge
GMTA
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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as far as how, visually I can see the groups. The common prefixes jump out at me as I scan the list, but now I'm drilling down into how my eyes are moving across the data
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I think our brain is "used to" to spot differences by identifying some features
and comparing them. This enabled me to understand "your problem"  ,
but at first I was lost …
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it's an unusual problem for sure.
I've given up on LALR parsing for now because my tables are off - for some grammars - and i can't figure out why.
So instead what I'm doing is improving my LL(1) parser with automatic grammar refactoring so you can use grammars that are not intrinsically LL(1) - LL(1) being very limiting in terms of expressive power.
And this is part of the process. The full process is explained here at the link below, fortunately I got accustomed to understanding heavy Indian accents and Indian-English vernacular while at Microsoft. =)
Left Factoring[^]
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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I can't even tell what you're trying to communicate to the reader.
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here. Consider this as flat strings (same problem)
abbc
aaab
dbba
dc
aab
dbbc
should be split into the following groups and sorted based on common prefix
abbc
aab
aaab
dbba
dbbc
dc
however, if there are more common prefixes, they need to be further grouped so
aab
aaab
becomes it's own subgroup.
the result ultimately becomes a tree.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Similar to a Word Search Tree (Spell Check Tree) ?
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anyway, I'm not looking for a solution here.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Sure, but you still need to clearly communicate your rant.
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meh. i already solved it so it's no longer renting space in my head.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Do naughty programmers dress up in Loungerie?
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
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That question is just pants.
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Speaking only for myself... no.
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... who posts those dumb questions. I was watching the film "Jason Bourne" last night (yes, I know). At the beginning was the usual scene, a darkened room with a few people controlling the world from their laptops. As their fingers were playing over the keys I heard someone say "Use SQL to corrupt their database(s)".
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