While reading I was constantly thinking that the author is being too sensitive about the intricacies. “If I were at his place I would have Ignored and moved”. But after some giving it a thought later and looking at things around me. I kinda see the point. I would obviously appreciate if the the buttons on my headphones were easily navigatable. I understand that there should be ease along side utility but that is kinda of contrary to modern development. Techonology wants to pack everything in a box and give it to humanity like a phone. Will it be easy to use? Probably not. Beacause of its range of functionalities. Lets take the example of the washing machine with all those buttons. Now what will be HDC?, all functions in one button or one button for each functions. It clicked me when the author said “accumulation of poorly designed interactions”. This is indeed evident in the realm of computer science. For example, I open chatgpt and it gives a list of model to choose from. It is marketed as choose the one based on your work. I believe it to be an inconvenicence as the engineers believe that I have and memorised the up to knowledge of Large Language Models.
This makes me question whether human-centered design is always about reducing complexity, or if it is more about organizing complexity in a way that makes sense. In interactive media especially, I think designers should focus less on adding features and more on clear mapping and feedback, so users understand what their actions are doing. The reading changed my perspective in a way that I have been noticing how often modern technology expects me to adapt to machines instead of machines adapting to me. At the same time, as an engineer I think, is bad design inevitable? or its just a result of race era we are in, in which we focus on developing, when we get to pause and we will start working on the design