My employer (a large university) recently adopted a new parking portal. To pay for parking every morning, I have to open my browser, navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app), and tap eleven times to pay for parking:
1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
iOS has App Clips which theoretically are supposed to do this - just tap on NFC, app clip opens up and lets you pay, and sticks around to allow you to re-up while your meter is going.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
The app was only necessary as a one click bypass for the original bad UX. Im not the author but would likely develop an automation of sorts for such a pointless daily friction. And it doesn’t really matter what’s bundled as (app, script, etc) as long as it gets compressed/reduced to one click.
why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing. everything that happens once inside the app or website is just normal UX design - no reason to do it 'worse' on a website.
> why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
the complaint wasn't about the 'discovery and install experience', it was about the UX of paying for parking every day. There are definitely things that the app store experience brings to the table for distribution of apps - trust being the main thing I think. I really don't like the barriers that iOS specifically puts in place for web apps - they're intentionally making it harder than it needs to be, in order to protect their walled garden and the $$ that brings them.
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
I really hate this bullshit "security". Why on earth do I have to log in every single day? If anything, it gives an attacker more chances to either steal my password, or makes me more likely to be phished because logging in is so automatic now.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
It's also crazy that as far as technology has advanced, the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent. Passkeys are sort of changing things, it all still feels decidedly low-tech.
Edit: Can you get a Yubikey as an RFID implant? ...asking for a friend.
What is really crazy is that things that should be just an application locally installed on the device (such as PowerPoint) need a login at all.
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
Username/password is the easiest way to log in, assuming there is no stupid format requirements. It's just two strings stored in your password manager. The most retarded way to implement log in is actually magic email link, which requires opening your email client, waiting for the email to arrive, and copying the code. If you want to make it even worse, you can require that to be done using the same browser that is trying to log into the account.
Then connect the browser directly to the secure element of the device, so the session cookie is cryptographically signed by something you are physically in possession of.
I actually did this for my small saas Ive sold to a couple dozen companies, and while all my programming friends at the coworking office said I was crazy, Gmail and facebook were my go to answers. If they can do it safely, I might as well try.
Logging and alerting the user that their account is being used from a new context and requiring reauthentication when accessing the account from an unfamiliar IP/user agent would mitigate this to some extent.
The alternative is offering offline versions of apps to students and allow students to open downloaded items off the cloud locally. It also means students don't require internet access when off campus.
I'll take that risk, especially since I've basically never heard of a successful attack hinging on a stolen session cookie being used for months. Either you do what you'll do within a few minutes, or you never do.
That's a great way for someone to siphon a lot of session tokens and then auction them off to a black hat.
It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.
In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.
It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.
I don't remember the last time I had a workday that didn't involve logging into something that I definitely logged into not very long ago, that I use every single day, and it's so, so, so fucking tedious.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft professionally, but anything Xbox related is also such a massive pain. More than 3 times now I've tried to login and got into an endless login loop.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
> lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
The night before delivering my talk I thought it was a good idea to change my slides.
After an hour of work I close the deck and go to upload it on the organisers’s platform.
“Mh the file size is the same, that’s odd”.
PowerPoint on iPad did not save any change.
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.
I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Yeah, I used an iPad and an Apple Pencil all through college. Lifesaver, I did all my homework on it and skipped paper completely.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
First, I only said that "back then, printing all that stuff seemed like a waste". I didn't say anything about the iPad.
Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...
I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing. I go out as-a-fox to do all sorts of things such as photography and ritual leadership [1] and tarot readings and I always have a “fox-in-a-box” kit for each activity.
Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.
So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.
[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”
I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.
Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
Clever is garbage. They claim it's free for the school, but end up charging vendors for connecting. So vendors increase their prices, but Clever doesn't allow vendors to say that's why they increased their price or charged an extra fee.
The complaint is entirely about the school's software stack including "Clever" and Canvas:
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Administrators are the ones making purchasing decisions. IT might make recommendations, but it's someone in administration (or multiple someones) who makes the final decision on what software the district buys for its many students.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
Getting a keyboard and touchpad case setup totally changed my view on them for productivity. As a primary driver I'd still opt for a laptop but they work great when traveling.
The price and weight of an iPad with all the accessories is approaching a laptop anyway, while still remaining an inferior alternative. And there’s no guarantee you won’t have to replace a keyboard case after you upgrade an iPad due to intentional physical incompatibility between the models
I remember bashing out papers on my iPod Touch while I rode the bus to school, then emailing them to my student address and printing them out in the library. For a master procrastinator, it felt like the future.
I remember doing similar on a Palm TX (with @dmitrygr's patched Graffiti 1.999) and some version of Documents to Go. That was a painful experience in hindsight!
Security has gotten weird these days. I work for a fairly large (but not yet public) company, so we have would be considered "standard" corp security.
To get to a dashboard, I have to jump through four or five websites for different parts of the auth and security checks (and sometimes provide a biometric check too).
At least in my case my browser mostly jumps through the hoops for me (although I usually have to click at least twice and present my finger).
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
Remember when we used to write specs and we said, “the screen will respond to the user in 2 seconds or less”? I often think about that when I’m waiting for a page to load or struggling through some painful login sequence that takes waaaay longer than 2s. This is the truth in an age that talks about usability and accessibility. At the end of our days we will account for all those lost seconds and find we’ve spent weeks waiting for computers to respond. Literally wasted time and no compensation. Sad thought really
Mazda used to have a bunch of guidelines for their customer facing technology. Stuff like the number of interactions to do things, responsiveness, etc.
It was really nice until ~2015 when they threw out that rulebook and went cheap.
Do you mean the iOS YT app? It's at most three, two if you allow a swipe. Swipe down on the video (moves it to a smaller view in the lower-right) > tap the X in the upper right of the video. Or tap the video (to bring up controls) > tap the down-arrow in the upper left (moves to the same smaller view) > tap the same X in the corner.
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video.
what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
This is basically rage bait, posted by a (supposed) teacher to Reddit, and now reposted here to HN. I flagged it.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
I was literally browsing the Teachers sub while procrastinating on studying for a midterm, read that post, and was curious what people would have to say about it on HN (in all fairness, I suppose at least part of me was also like "Wow this would do numbers on HN).
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
I do not know what this thing is about and the reason for posting, possibly it is fake and attention hungry whatever, but why then sounds the suffer so familiar to me not even close to learning/teaching on iPad? Must be coincidence or hallucinations then.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
I’ve joked about that a couple of times as well :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
This feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
It reminds me of the emails I get from my kids' school. For example, an email from a teacher about the upcoming bake sale contains the first sentence or so, then a link read the rest. Click the link. Website with a login. Enter username and password. Then it requires 2FA. Asks if it should remember this computer (I say yes every time and it asks every time). Navigate through the website to the correct class. Find the email that was sent today. Click that email. Click on attachments. Get a PDF of the email.
Great, now I know the bake sale starts at 6:30.
Long term result, I no longer read emails from my kids' school.
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
We’ve got to start using the word “harassment” to describe common user interface tropes such as excessively complex login systems (funny the people who are experts at logging into your account without your permissions absolutely thrive in this environment), cookie popups, cloudflare popups, etc.
I dunno how much of this comes out of being based in the Bay Area where it is normalized that you’ll stay in your conference hotel and never leave the arcology because otherwise you’ll get harassed. I wonder if people realize that you could go to like Ohio or something and it doesn’t have to be that way.
The amount of failed digitization in primary/secondary education is astounding. It's a tax on parenthood in favor of the school system. Deficits are paid for out of the children's education. Each new system that comes along is just https://xkcd.com/927/.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
Seeing reddit pushed hard on the front page after its become a login online site I wonder if this is yet another push to try and make the site relevant again after a decade of mismanagement, stackoverflow 2.0 if you'd like.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
Every work day I have to login to Personio. It is 15 clicks, because it has email and password and otp on separate pages and somehow defeats the password manager required by my employer (who also choose Personio).
Also, Tailscale silently starts failing to connect during the day, invariably in the middle of debugging something, so I have to debug Tailscale instead.
Everything is stupid and broken and I'm counting the days until I retire, buy a goat, and walk until my phone loses signal.
> Teacher forces student to go through 16 clicks to open a powerpoint on an iPad instead of printing said powerpoint or projecting it for the whole class.
Maybe, but other UXs are notably worse. Capitalism may not be the best, but it's the best we've come up with so far. Unfortunately, at least in the US, it's crony capitalism.
My employer (a large university) recently adopted a new parking portal. To pay for parking every morning, I have to open my browser, navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app), and tap eleven times to pay for parking:
1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
There's nothing about "pay for parking" that screams "app" to me. This is just a case of no one caring about UX, like at all.
Screams "data surveillance" to me. https://www.wsmv.com/2024/12/19/4-class-action-lawsuits-file...
iOS has App Clips which theoretically are supposed to do this - just tap on NFC, app clip opens up and lets you pay, and sticks around to allow you to re-up while your meter is going.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
The app was only necessary as a one click bypass for the original bad UX. Im not the author but would likely develop an automation of sorts for such a pointless daily friction. And it doesn’t really matter what’s bundled as (app, script, etc) as long as it gets compressed/reduced to one click.
I think GP was responding to "navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app)"
An app is more convenient for something you do every day.
It’s paying for parking.
It was a solved problem long before smart phones.
Technology is supposed to improve the experience not make it worse.
What’s your actual point?
why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing. everything that happens once inside the app or website is just normal UX design - no reason to do it 'worse' on a website.
> why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
the complaint wasn't about the 'discovery and install experience', it was about the UX of paying for parking every day. There are definitely things that the app store experience brings to the table for distribution of apps - trust being the main thing I think. I really don't like the barriers that iOS specifically puts in place for web apps - they're intentionally making it harder than it needs to be, in order to protect their walled garden and the $$ that brings them.
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
I really hate this bullshit "security". Why on earth do I have to log in every single day? If anything, it gives an attacker more chances to either steal my password, or makes me more likely to be phished because logging in is so automatic now.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
It's also crazy that as far as technology has advanced, the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent. Passkeys are sort of changing things, it all still feels decidedly low-tech. Edit: Can you get a Yubikey as an RFID implant? ...asking for a friend.
What is really crazy is that things that should be just an application locally installed on the device (such as PowerPoint) need a login at all.
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
Username/password is the easiest way to log in, assuming there is no stupid format requirements. It's just two strings stored in your password manager. The most retarded way to implement log in is actually magic email link, which requires opening your email client, waiting for the email to arrive, and copying the code. If you want to make it even worse, you can require that to be done using the same browser that is trying to log into the account.
Because everything is sitting out on the public internet now, only protected by those things.
Because the alternative is that a very long or unlimited session cookie can be stolen and used for months to impersonate you. That’s the tradeoff
Then connect the browser directly to the secure element of the device, so the session cookie is cryptographically signed by something you are physically in possession of.
When was the last time that happened to a Gmail account? It has unlimited cookie sessions.
I actually did this for my small saas Ive sold to a couple dozen companies, and while all my programming friends at the coworking office said I was crazy, Gmail and facebook were my go to answers. If they can do it safely, I might as well try.
Logging and alerting the user that their account is being used from a new context and requiring reauthentication when accessing the account from an unfamiliar IP/user agent would mitigate this to some extent.
TPMs / secure enclaves can (in theory) prevent sessions or cookies from being stolen. Not claiming there aren't other attack vectors though.
The alternative is offering offline versions of apps to students and allow students to open downloaded items off the cloud locally. It also means students don't require internet access when off campus.
I'll take that risk, especially since I've basically never heard of a successful attack hinging on a stolen session cookie being used for months. Either you do what you'll do within a few minutes, or you never do.
That's a great way for someone to siphon a lot of session tokens and then auction them off to a black hat.
It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.
In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.
It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.
I don't remember the last time I had a workday that didn't involve logging into something that I definitely logged into not very long ago, that I use every single day, and it's so, so, so fucking tedious.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft professionally, but anything Xbox related is also such a massive pain. More than 3 times now I've tried to login and got into an endless login loop.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
> lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
The night before delivering my talk I thought it was a good idea to change my slides. After an hour of work I close the deck and go to upload it on the organisers’s platform. “Mh the file size is the same, that’s odd”. PowerPoint on iPad did not save any change.
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.
...you know, being "digital native" means today actually being able to use an app on your smartphone and swipe into the correct direction :-D
Does any of this lead to better outcomes for the students?
Screens in general tend to produce less desirable outcomes. Learning goes down, retention, attention, etc.
It doesn't just have to be at school. Screens after school affect learning in school.
I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Yeah, I used an iPad and an Apple Pencil all through college. Lifesaver, I did all my homework on it and skipped paper completely.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
Fascinating to call printing a few hundred pages a "waste of paper" but buying a $1000 device to act as paper is somehow not a waste.
I believe they are working on other functions for the device. Don't quote me on that.
They are, but each function takes 16 clicks.
First, I only said that "back then, printing all that stuff seemed like a waste". I didn't say anything about the iPad.
Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...
I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing. I go out as-a-fox to do all sorts of things such as photography and ritual leadership [1] and tarot readings and I always have a “fox-in-a-box” kit for each activity.
Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.
So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.
[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”
I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.
Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.
I'm not a parent and none of my friends are. what's the benefit they're supposed to be providing?
Is it just grading and parental access?
It isn't for learning, it's for spying. Edutech in American schools are very much into surveillance.
All it takes is two decades of relentless lobbying by some of the richest companies in history
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
Clever is garbage. They claim it's free for the school, but end up charging vendors for connecting. So vendors increase their prices, but Clever doesn't allow vendors to say that's why they increased their price or charged an extra fee.
The complaint is entirely about the school's software stack including "Clever" and Canvas:
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Administrators are the ones making purchasing decisions. IT might make recommendations, but it's someone in administration (or multiple someones) who makes the final decision on what software the district buys for its many students.
Glad I skipped out on this by being older. All the kids I know hate Clever and IXL. They are basically curse words to them.
That's the crazy thing, it looks like Clever is a SSO solution that's making it take much longer to sign in.
Clever is the portal. It sits behind the Google SSO after you've authenticated. It holds classrooms and links to other things.
The idea one needs to log in to anything is pretty absurd in this particular environment
Back in my day we double clicked a ppt on a flash drive, and we liked it!
Well, that tracks.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
Aren't the new NeoBooks exactly that? A tablet with MacOS (and a keyboard)?
No touch or tablet mode unfortunately, otherwise it would be pretty perfect as an educational device.
It doesn't seem the iPad fault this time. On a normal iPad a tap on a ppt file will open PowerPoint, and that's it.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
Does not track, isn’t true. Click a file in Files or an attachment in email and the relevant app opens. No complication.
The example in this story is to do with other cruft that schools have installed.
Getting a keyboard and touchpad case setup totally changed my view on them for productivity. As a primary driver I'd still opt for a laptop but they work great when traveling.
The price and weight of an iPad with all the accessories is approaching a laptop anyway, while still remaining an inferior alternative. And there’s no guarantee you won’t have to replace a keyboard case after you upgrade an iPad due to intentional physical incompatibility between the models
I remember bashing out papers on my iPod Touch while I rode the bus to school, then emailing them to my student address and printing them out in the library. For a master procrastinator, it felt like the future.
I remember doing similar on a Palm TX (with @dmitrygr's patched Graffiti 1.999) and some version of Documents to Go. That was a painful experience in hindsight!
Security has gotten weird these days. I work for a fairly large (but not yet public) company, so we have would be considered "standard" corp security.
To get to a dashboard, I have to jump through four or five websites for different parts of the auth and security checks (and sometimes provide a biometric check too).
At least in my case my browser mostly jumps through the hoops for me (although I usually have to click at least twice and present my finger).
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
Remember when we used to write specs and we said, “the screen will respond to the user in 2 seconds or less”? I often think about that when I’m waiting for a page to load or struggling through some painful login sequence that takes waaaay longer than 2s. This is the truth in an age that talks about usability and accessibility. At the end of our days we will account for all those lost seconds and find we’ve spent weeks waiting for computers to respond. Literally wasted time and no compensation. Sad thought really
Mazda used to have a bunch of guidelines for their customer facing technology. Stuff like the number of interactions to do things, responsiveness, etc.
It was really nice until ~2015 when they threw out that rulebook and went cheap.
Seems like as much of an indictment on the services stack the school chose as it is a problem inherent to the iPad.
5 clicks/touches on YT mobile to close a video. iOS version, but I assume others are the same. I use the mobile app a whole lot less because of it.
16 is insane, though.
Do you mean the iOS YT app? It's at most three, two if you allow a swipe. Swipe down on the video (moves it to a smaller view in the lower-right) > tap the X in the upper right of the video. Or tap the video (to bring up controls) > tap the down-arrow in the upper left (moves to the same smaller view) > tap the same X in the corner.
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video. what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
On the Android app it takes two touches.
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
The School based chromebook horror show is something else.
Google Docs/Slides/Sheets masquerading as EdTech
This is basically rage bait, posted by a (supposed) teacher to Reddit, and now reposted here to HN. I flagged it.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
I was literally browsing the Teachers sub while procrastinating on studying for a midterm, read that post, and was curious what people would have to say about it on HN (in all fairness, I suppose at least part of me was also like "Wow this would do numbers on HN).
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
I do not know what this thing is about and the reason for posting, possibly it is fake and attention hungry whatever, but why then sounds the suffer so familiar to me not even close to learning/teaching on iPad? Must be coincidence or hallucinations then.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
Is this a state school? Government rules [1] say:
> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:
> [...]
> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...
It’s an academy.
Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.
It’d be like giving a monkey a machine gun.
Most of what people do with it is muscle memory. Everyone would be instantly broken. They are if anyone changes or moves anything already.
I sincerely hope this comment was made in jest.
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
> I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)
I’ve joked about that a couple of times as well :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
Teachers have been teaching kids to read and write for 5000 years.
But I suppose education is a business and they need to keep inventing new "methods".
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
The walled corporate garden - time to switch away from big tech.
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
This feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
It reminds me of the emails I get from my kids' school. For example, an email from a teacher about the upcoming bake sale contains the first sentence or so, then a link read the rest. Click the link. Website with a login. Enter username and password. Then it requires 2FA. Asks if it should remember this computer (I say yes every time and it asks every time). Navigate through the website to the correct class. Find the email that was sent today. Click that email. Click on attachments. Get a PDF of the email.
Great, now I know the bake sale starts at 6:30.
Long term result, I no longer read emails from my kids' school.
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
On the flip side, I’m sure students appreciate not having to carry around multiple textbooks and binders full of papers.
We’ve got to start using the word “harassment” to describe common user interface tropes such as excessively complex login systems (funny the people who are experts at logging into your account without your permissions absolutely thrive in this environment), cookie popups, cloudflare popups, etc.
I dunno how much of this comes out of being based in the Bay Area where it is normalized that you’ll stay in your conference hotel and never leave the arcology because otherwise you’ll get harassed. I wonder if people realize that you could go to like Ohio or something and it doesn’t have to be that way.
The amount of failed digitization in primary/secondary education is astounding. It's a tax on parenthood in favor of the school system. Deficits are paid for out of the children's education. Each new system that comes along is just https://xkcd.com/927/.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
https://www.ueddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1xuup7a/technolog...
Seeing reddit pushed hard on the front page after its become a login online site I wonder if this is yet another push to try and make the site relevant again after a decade of mismanagement, stackoverflow 2.0 if you'd like.
Why is any login required at all? Is this sensitive information that needs authentication?
Students use the same platform to submit homework.
it's to a school account. so yeah, it need authentication.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
Another “fun” procedure:
1. Open canvas on laptop
2. Open canvas quiz
3. Write answers on paper
4. Scan paper with office lens
5. Export document from office lens
6. Upload document to google drive
7. Open google drive on laptop
8. Download document from google drive
9. Upload document to canvas
10. Realize you forgot to write your student id on page 2, write and go back to step 4
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
Every work day I have to login to Personio. It is 15 clicks, because it has email and password and otp on separate pages and somehow defeats the password manager required by my employer (who also choose Personio).
Also, Tailscale silently starts failing to connect during the day, invariably in the middle of debugging something, so I have to debug Tailscale instead.
Everything is stupid and broken and I'm counting the days until I retire, buy a goat, and walk until my phone loses signal.
> Teacher forces student to go through 16 clicks to open a powerpoint on an iPad instead of printing said powerpoint or projecting it for the whole class.
There you go.
When I was in school we had computers without any of this "school" software. They worked fine. That entire industry is a dead weight loss.
I find it harder and harder to make good use of tablets. Is it just me?
It’s like, they are right in the middle of the tech gadget spectrum, and they want to be a bit of everything but are not really good at anything.
PCs, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches all have the right form factor for what their use is. Tablets? Meh.
This example shows that capitalism is great for innovation but it can suck for creating a streamlined UX.
Maybe, but other UXs are notably worse. Capitalism may not be the best, but it's the best we've come up with so far. Unfortunately, at least in the US, it's crony capitalism.
Big Tech eventually enshittifies everything; it has to for the financial scaling economics to work out.