The reading was a good reminder for me how much a pain technology is for a lot of people. I remember thinking to myself a few times before, “If many of the tasks we accomplish with technology have not changed since years ago (e-mail, word processing, making a phone call), then why has it become harder/slower to accomplish these tasks?” The reading makes me realize that as we’ve found more (theoretically) efficient ways of doing things and more freedom in the design of what devices do them, (elecronics have gotten a lot smaller), more and more complexity has been introduced in the mix.
Look at a tape recorder. Mine has play, stop, rewind, fastforward, pause, and eject. Now look at your phone. You have an app for recording, which you need to navigate to, a record button if you’re not recording, a stop button of you are recording, and what you record gets stored as separate files which you have to navigate to.
