You make me think of QWERTY keyboards and how they remain the most common format globally in spite of being intentionally designed to be inefficient.
Some people seem to believe in an "ideal world" and let that interfere with interacting with actual reality in a practical way. Things need to be backwards compatible with user experience to succeed. New designs sometimes simply are not that.
There is plenty of evidence that points to it being inefficient, however. Regardless of the various QWERTY origin stories, it's not a very good touch-typing layout compared to Dvorak or Colemak.
On the contrary, QWERTY is a great example to contradict the above comment. If things worked as we want them to, we should have moved to more efficient layouts a long time ago, right? Net productivity would be dramatically higher even if there was an initial lull, and the earlier we had done that the better off we'd be in aggregate.
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
QWERTY's initial design was for typewriters. To prevent jamming of typebars, commonly used letter pairs were not placed together.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
Comments
You make me think of QWERTY keyboards and how they remain the most common format globally in spite of being intentionally designed to be inefficient.
Some people seem to believe in an "ideal world" and let that interfere with interacting with actual reality in a practical way. Things need to be backwards compatible with user experience to succeed. New designs sometimes simply are not that.
There is no evidence that points to QWERTY being designed to be inefficient.
http://www.economist.com/node/196071
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...
There is plenty of evidence that points to it being inefficient, however. Regardless of the various QWERTY origin stories, it's not a very good touch-typing layout compared to Dvorak or Colemak.
On the contrary, QWERTY is a great example to contradict the above comment. If things worked as we want them to, we should have moved to more efficient layouts a long time ago, right? Net productivity would be dramatically higher even if there was an initial lull, and the earlier we had done that the better off we'd be in aggregate.
In other words, the ubiquity of QWERTY represents a failure of the current mode, where "the market" is behaving with an irrational obsession with the short term. Likewise, preserving a worse facebook design indefinitely because it might require effort to adapt to seems obviously misguided.
I suspect that the issue here is what is and isn't better. I don't know if I buy that previous changes that sparked outrage were improvements, and I think it's possible that people really were reacting to liking the new system less, not just that it was unfamiliar.
QWERTY was intentionally designed to be inefficient? I thought it was based on statistics of common letters or something. Care to shed some light?
QWERTY's initial design was for typewriters. To prevent jamming of typebars, commonly used letter pairs were not placed together.
Saying that it was designed to be inefficient is wrong, however it's fair to say that preventing typewriter jams overrode typing efficiency as a design consideration.
Rather, it sped up typing by preventing jams.