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0 pointsnoodlenotes5y ago0 comments

Being tech savvy can be a burden when it comes to discovering new features because you're afraid of making a "stupid" mistake. Accidentally posting to Facebook is something the tech illiterate do, not us, so why would we click a random icon when we're not sure if it will do something embarrassing?

I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when

1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and

2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.

0 comments

temporallobe5y ago

> It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.

This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.

SilasX5y ago

Yes! I've lost count of how many times I've e.g. opened Google Calendar from my current Gmail window and have it pull up the calendar on a different account with no warning that it's doing that. (If I'm not logged in on the other, it asks me to log in with no option to go to the original.)

Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.

apetresc5y ago

It's actually worse than that - the account is indicated in the URL, but it's expressed as an offset into a list of accounts in the order you signed into them!

So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.

SilasX5y ago

Interesting! I'd love to ask them what they think the U in URL stands for...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsnoodlenotes5y ago0 comments

I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when

1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and

2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.

0 comments

temporallobe5y ago

> It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.

SilasX5y ago

Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.

apetresc5y ago

It's actually worse than that - the account is indicated in the URL, but it's expressed as an offset into a list of accounts in the order you signed into them!

I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.

SilasX5y ago

Interesting! I'd love to ask them what they think the U in URL stands for...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse