Nothing humbles you more as a dev than seeing a layman struggle through an interface, getting increasingly frustrated and desperate because she can’t find the button she needs due to complexity and sensory overload due to a million tabs, buttons and text fields.
The worst of it is, you can see that she knows what she wants to do, but can’t translate that into the steps needed to get the computer to “understand” that, effectively making it feel as if it is trying to sabotage her. Something that would have taken 20 minutes with pen & paper suddenly takes 40 minutes digitally. Weren’t computers supposed to make us more efficient?
Considerately, screw your attitude. Eat some humble pie.
To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”
Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.
Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.
I've seen healthcare management software evolution due to my partner working with it. As in the worst management story, it's pitched to a boss that doesn't need or want to use it, offered to generally the lowest bidder, and then immediately outsourced in parts that rarely work well together taking years to develop.
The UI and workflows are designed by people that will never use it and are just plainly bad. The software/UI takes years to stabilize and reach feature parity to the same level it was before. During that time, it's pretty common to see staff having to use both systems and perform double data entry.
You're not learning to improve anything here. You're substituting a [shitty] tool with another one which does _exactly_ the same.
Sadly in IT this is pretty common. There's nothing special about healthcare.
I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. IMHO you should limit the cognitive overload but enable power users to increase it. See also Wikipedia, where the main editor is basic but if needed you can switch to the code editor and/or add plugins to make the interface a lot more powerful.
I work on a bunch of enterprise projects and therefore am sticking with the old design, because having more features available at a glance while also fitting as much of the code on screen as possible is definitely nice to have, in addition to my already established habits and knowledge of the UI.
But the new UI? It's also really sleek and pleasant, and a joy to use in the cases where I've toggled over to it. Plus, the fact that they worked on adding a compact mode to the new UI is also great to see! Definitely a good experience in my eyes.
I think the trick is in giving the user the choice on what to use, if there's no horrible incompatibility between the various iterations of something. For example, the day when the old Reddit UI (old.reddit.com) stops working is also the day when a bunch of people will stop hanging around the place. The problem is that companies often find the additional support needed to be a hassle and just optimize for the majority of users, not all of them - much the same how many games out there don't even have a Linux or Mac release, even in cases where the popular game engines make having one pretty easy!
The parent comment above yours is perhaps a bit more mean than it should be, though.
I had to fiddle with color schemes, add-ons for updated icon colors, etc. It's a mess.
And even if it's about reducing cognitive overload. The old interface had plenty of "features" and "configuration" to reduce the cognitive load as much as you wanted with both presentation mode and the ability to change the UI however you wanted.
My cynical take is that we just had two giant camps promoting this. One was the designers that wanted to have something to do. And the other camp was the VSCode pushers that just couldn't stand that a glorified (and order of magnitude inferior) text-editor is maintaining user-counts.
1. Stuff that benefits imparied users benefits others. Subtitles help both. You'll never operate always at peak capacity either.
2. You can design UI to be layered. Easy mode for beginners and more advanced options for advanced users.
3. Software that's easy to use sees bigger audience. Period.
A violin solo in a football stadium with the usual football audience is not an improvement over one in a recital room with the usual audience.
