Research Proving People Don't RTFM, Resent 'Over-Featured' Products, Wins Ig Nobel Prize (improbable.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Thursday the humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research held their 28th annual ceremony recognizing the real (but unusual) scientific research papers "that make people laugh, then think." And winning this year's coveted Literature prize was a paper titled "Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products," which concluded that most people really, truly don't read the manual, "and most do not use all the features of the products that they own and use regularly..."

"Over-featuring and being forced to consult manuals also appears to cause negative emotional experiences."

Another team measured "the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile," which won them the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Other topics of research included self-colonoscopies, removing kidney stones with roller coasters, and (theoretical) cannibalism. "Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds," reports Ars Technica, "strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl nicknamed 'Miss Sweetie-Poo,' who will interrupt those who exceed the time limit by repeating, 'Please stop. I'm bored.' Until they stop."
You can watch the whole wacky ceremony on YouTube. The awards are presented by actual Nobel Prize laureates -- and at least one past winner of an Ig Nobel Prize later went on to win an actual Nobel Prize.

Comments

Research like this is why software is crap

[Ashthon]

Research like this is causing software to be increasingly dumbed down to a point where it is extremely difficult to use. In the past you could configure software to work in a way you found desirable and productive, but now all the sophisticated is being removed and you're forced to work the way the UX designers dictate. Take Firefox:

• You used to be able to enable or disable the status bar depending on your preference, but the UX designs thought such an option was confusing so they removed the status bar entirely.
• You used to have a usable search box with a drop down list of search engines, but the UX designers though words were confusing so they turned the search box into an unusable mess, and now it's easier to visit the site and perform a search than deal with the search box.
• You used to be able to have the tabs above or below the address bar, but the UX designs decided to force everyone to have the tabs at the top (you can still get them at the bottom via userChrome.css).
• The easy to access menu bars are slowly being replaced by the cumbersome hamburger button which can't even be hidden without resorting to userChrome.css.
• Bookmarks used to default to the Bookmarks Menu, but now they default to "Other Bookmarks" which causes them to be unfindable. You have to use an extension just to get the bookmarks to be saved where you want.

I could go on all day with Firefox, but dumbing down of the browser by removing features and options has turned it into a nightmare to use. The same is very much true of Windows 10 which is an absolute train wreck. I've found myself increasingly moving away from commercial software produced by UX designers to FOSS produced by programmers simply because I want software that works.

The thing is, it's not just technical users who hate what UX designers are doing to software, and casual users I speak to also hate the constant UI changes, the hiding of features and the removal of options. Now here we have some worthless 'intellectuals' being given a Nobel Prize for telling people to fuck up their software.

It's little wonder we're moving to a world where computes are becoming less sophisticated and turning into machines for running 'apps' that you can only get from a curated store that bans anything remotely useful. With the direction computing is headed, I think I'll just go and live in a cave.

Intuitive UI

[Kokuyo]

Yes, well... Is it a surprise when they've tossed all that we've learned about UI making?

Clickable objects are no longer clearly marked as such. Different kinds of content are no longer clearly distinguished from one another. Contectual information on mouse-over or right click or even F1 is hit and miss, but usually miss.

And be honest, how often do you go "What kind of moron from Bizarro Land would name this function that and put it there??!!".

Or lists... on one frame, it's exportable on the second it's sortable and on the third you can do multi-selection. But not one of them can do all three.

Not to forget that if whatever you are using happens to have multi-platform apps, GUIs or whatever, you can bet your ass they won't have been developed by the same team. So you not only need to handle each and every single app with a lot of TLC for them to even remotely do what you want, you'll have to learn to do it differently on your MacOS laptop, on your Android phone and on your Windows desktop. If you're especially lucky, the online interface will behave differently depending on the browser too.

And let's be exceptionally frank here, writing a good manual is an artform few have ever mastered. 90% of my use cases I find my answers on some message board online and certainly not in a manual.

OR, as it's the case with our current backup software, the manual is easily 1000 pages. Now, if I were tasked solely with pampering our backup software, you could argue that that is doable and you'd be right. But I also have to pamper the storage environment (with several products, of course), the Cisco UCS, SAN infrastructure and Vmware Virtualization as a cherry on top.

And in order to not kill motherfuckers daily, I strictly adhere to my 8 hour work days, except for emergencies and maintenance tasks that cannot be done on hours.

So imagine this new-fangled dohicky coming along expecting me to forego everything I thought I knew about gadgets and do it their way now because reasons. Yeaaah, no. Go fuck yourself, would you kindly?