Comment by DrewADesign

IMO ipv6 is a perfect example of why interface designers can be valuable on technical projects. One of the genius things about ipv4 is it’s a pre-chunked number you can shout across the room or keep in your head as you run down the hall to your keyboard. IPv6 addresses simply don’t have that feature. If they had kept the 4-chunk format and made it alphanumeric, or added a chunk and made it hexadecimal, or something along those lines, I think they could have reasonably alleviated the problem of running out of addresses while not making the addresses SO unfriendly to remember.

But when designers bring things like that up, you get “it’s really not that complicated,” or “I explained this to my 200 year old grandmother over tea/my 16 month old child over the course of a diaper change/my non-technical wife that I intellectually respect less than I should/etc. and they wrote a book on it the next day,” kind of crap. Human factors engineering. Ergonomics matter in technical products.