Stan Carey poses a question: What would serve as an apt compound modifier for the opposite of user-friendly ?
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October 5: From a television commercial for Paycom: “My HR app is user-unfriendly.”
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[As I wrote in a comment on Stan’s post, user-unfriendly sounds best to my ear. I hear in it a touch of wit, a quick negation of the more familiar term.]
Monday, September 16, 2019
Adventures in hyphenation
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comments: 7
I don't see the need. We have frustrating, awkward, cumbersome, counterintuitive.
True, but if you read Stan’s post, you’ll see that it’s about how one might form a tricky compound modifier.
I agree with Stan that the various options imply degrees of unfriendliness. User-friendly is kind of a yes/no, whereas unfriendly can be anything from thoughtlessly not friendly to overtly hostile.
Now I’m thinking about what would count as user-hostile (and not merely careless). Facebook’s procedures for unsubscribing? App Store subscription tricks? Not poorly designed but malevolently designed.
I too thought of "user-hostile."
Trying to unsubscribe from a user-hostile site is a great example!
One can’t swipe between stories on the iPad’s NYT app anymore. The reader must return to some kind of base page and select a new story. That seems user-hostile to me.
And how. I read the paper only in the browser, and always wait as the details of the lower sections open to reveal themselves as I scroll down. Not really hostile, but standoffish.
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