"Friendly" User Interfaces

Saturday, September 11, 2010 - 02:07 in Mathematics & Economics

It’s long been a peeve of mine that some computer programs are programmed to try to sound friendly, cheerful, or just colloquial. It seems out of place to me, forced, overly artificial. I don’t mean that I want all the output from computers to sound like the stilted science-fiction stuff, saying “affirmative” instead of “yes”, and the like. But neither do I ever want to see (or hear) things like “Oops!”, “Hurray!”, nor even “I’m sorry,” coming from my laptop, mobile phone, car, or washing machine.Some examples:It’s common when you’ve finished installing new software on your computer for the installation package to wrap up with a message like, “Congratulations! read more

Read the whole article on

More from

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net