5 ms·

Time To Get Out Of The Bubble And Design For The Average User

23 points by sthomps 17y ago

mdasen 17y ago
It's true that users don't care if you're using RoR or have load balanced servers or or replicated databases or anything like that. However, users do care about what those things provide. Load balanced servers means their requests are likely to be met without large slowdowns. Replicated databases means your application will have better uptime. RoR could mean that you're able to add features more easily. We care about this technology because it allows us to provide a better end result. We talk about it internally because we want to share our successes and failures so that we can educate and learn from our peers and create better end results for the average user. I don't care why my house stays up, but I'm glad that there are people (line engineers and architects) who do so that I have a wonderful, stable home. We're the architects of the web.
- sthomps 17y ago
  I agree. I am also grateful for engineers that keep websites running properly and quickly. I can't stand it when a website is slow or doesn't work. I have an equal appreciation for those engineers as well as the ones that allow us to have a roof that stays up or a bridge that doesn't collapse. Engineers to engineers of course need to care about the technology. However, in terms of design, so many products seem to forget about the core user of their product and their needs.
- jdietrich 17y ago
  I think the real point of the article is that almost all of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but how often do we talk about users? Keep a tally yourself and I think you'll see my point - I counted more HN articles in the past week about Haskell than about users. I would expect that the majority of us here at HN can easily build stable, reasonably scalable applications quite easily. I would expect that far fewer of us really understand the needs, desires and abilities of the average user. To me, it seems ridiculous that we continue to worry about marginal, incremental improvements in the technology when it is readily apparent that "technically better" solutions are easily beaten in the market by solutions that resonate better with users. To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry about whether or not a house will stay up, because they have mature processes and frameworks in place to guarantee the soundness of the design. The real work of architects, the part that separates the likes of Foster and Gehry from everyone else, is of aesthetics and usability. What makes an architect great is not their ability to build cheaper or stronger or bigger buildings, but their ability to build beautiful and elegant ones. We have a great deal to learn from them.
  - sthomps 17y ago
    Thank you for that wonderful response. The analogy about the architects is spot on. The technology debate is always raging about which platform and language to use. The people present in the tech world can easily forget about the users with all of the technology present. The last statement in your second paragraph is especially wise, and the ability to resonate with users is the absolute key.
  - rue 17y ago
    > I think the real point of the article is that almost all > of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We > spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django > and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but > how often do we talk about users? Frankly, I do not see any shortage of talk about "users" or "delivering" or any other of hundreds of similar terms. I think this line of reasoning overlooks some pretty crucial factors: - Arguing about X vs. Y beyond a certain point often has nothing to do with "productivity" or some other undefinable metric. It is entertainment. Not ha-ha entertainment, but something to pass the time - trading quips, debating and so on. - New paradigms, languages, frameworks and applications - as well as hardware and architecture - certainly affect users. Some directly, some by providing developers the ability to concentrate on the essence rather than the unnecessary boilerplate obstacles. It often seems that the people writing the "stop language wars" posts and the like are the ones most emotionally invested in the topic. > To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry > about whether or not a house will stay up, because they > have mature processes and frameworks in place to > guarantee the soundness of the design. Yeah, and those processes did not just spring up from nothing. There have been centuries, millennia, of development - and you can be sure there were more than a few "pyramid vs. cube" and "vaulted vs. flat" debates in there.
  - aswanson 17y ago
    I've thought about this on a parallel track. It seems to me that each iteration of a technology makes it easier to create and deploy, until it reaches a point where the only thing that matters are aesthetic capabilities.
jdietrich 17y ago
Yes, yes, a million times yes. This is the great challenge and the great opportunity of our era. A yawning chasm has opened up between 'techies' and everyone else, but we have the tools and the technologies to bridge that gap. For most of us in this industry, the challenge is no longer the technology itself - it is to humanise technology and make it accessible and useful for the mass of the people. I strongly believe that we are in a new industrial revolution.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- sthomps 17y ago
  I completely agree with you. The technology is now in a position where we can bridge that chasm, and bring the early innovators closer to the early adopters. With all of the talent available, we should be able to narrow that chasm considerably so that all products are friendly to both parties.
chaosprophet 17y ago
I read this post and then went to sokanu.com. For so much talk about UX design, it was a major disappointment. There is absolutely nothing on that landing page which makes me want to give you my email id. As a user, I take the time and effort to actually visit your site without anyone marketing it to me, and I am turned away without even being told what you guys do.
- sthomps 17y ago
  Yes, I realize that. We are in stealth mode currently and in the process of building the alpha platform. I do appreciate you visiting though, and we do understand that it is your time and there is little information about the product.
  - chaosprophet 17y ago
    I don't really get the fuss about stealth mode. AFAIK you don't really achieve anything being in stealth mode. You might get some traffic out of the mystery factor, but other than that I really don't see any reason why startups choose to be in stealth mode. Personally I would be shouting off the roofs about what we are doing. In any case, I believe that if you're asking user's for their email, then you should tell them what you are doing. You don't have to give much details. A short 3 line summary would be enough. In my opinion, "Explore. Connect. Achieve." isn't going to get you a lot of emails. Just my two cents.
    - sthomps 17y ago
      Thanks for the response. I may adjust it to include a short summary in the near future. If it increases the conversion rate of users signing up, then it is a wise decision. I have researched both approaches, both stealth and iterative development with lots of attention. We are trying to create a hybrid of the two. The stealth is only temporary until we are in a position to show the world and then iterate.
    - alain94040 17y ago
      I can think of one reason to be in stealth mode: so the press covers you when you get out of stealth mode. Because that's news. Apart from that, I don't think it matters.
daleharvey 17y ago
very very light on content, yes we should be looking to make wonderfully usable applications for non technical users, I dont think anyone aims to make an unusable site. But how can we do it, what have we been getting wrong so far, what design idioms need to be thrown out and what innovative ui's help users? thats what I want to hear.
- sthomps 17y ago
  Very good point, I will try to put that into another blog post in the near future. I know that there is a book that goes along with this, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" as well.
  - idlewords 17y ago
    Dude, with all due respect, you're 18, your product is in triple-closed alpha, and your writing is entirely aspirational. Less talk, more rock. Go out and do something, and then blog about it once you've learned something interesting. If you want to psych yourself up with self-help stuff, keep a private diary.
    - sthomps 17y ago
      You are entirely correct. None of the content I am writing can hold true meaning until I have made it. All of the writing at this point is purely my opinions on what I observe and the process that I am going through.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Can we put together a list of current products that appeal to this market of "normals" / "mainstream" users and products that a gap exists?
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Another thought: find products that exist in physical form, but can be replaced by something that is much more high-res / efficient with technology. What physical things won't exist in 5-10 years time because technology can replace them. Mainstream users usually adopt products that do this. Examples: * Campuses used to hand out "facebooks" to freshman so they could get to know their fellow students + have a directory. * Spreadsheets used to be large pieces of grid paper used by accountants. * Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin. * We used to mail physical letters. Email has replaced significantly replaced that (of course physical mail still exists, but you don't send physical mail for social interactions anymore). * We think our generation and their families won't be storing photos, memories, and vhs tapes in a shoebox. What's the specific digital equivalent of that is the question we're trying to answer with the new version of Ramamia (to be renamed Genevine). There are probably others.
- spokey 17y ago
  > Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin. This is incidental to your comment, but I think your details are wrong in this example. Multimedia digital encyclopedias replaced physical encyclopedias long before Wikipedia came along, in fact throughout the 80s and early 90s it is a pretty safe bet that encylopedias on CD-ROM and later DVD significantly outsold the dead-tree versions, and by the mid-90s the major brands (at least in the US) already had online versions as well. Encarta (which was initially a rebranded Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia) was just one example, and a later one at that, of many encyclopedias that were transitioning from print to digital. Encarta doesn't represent some kind of paradigm shift in the encyclopedia business, just a large company snatching up a small player in a market they were trying to penetrate. Interestingly enough, Encarta has ceased production, while World Book, Encyclopedia Britannica and others are still in business and presumably profitable (for now). Wikipedia was and continues to be a threat to "traditional" encyclpedias, but not because they didn't anticipate a transition from physical to digital publication.
  - jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
zaidf 17y ago
They should apply that lesson to their blog URL;)
- sthomps 17y ago
  I know, it's too long of a URL, sorry about that.
  - qjz 17y ago
    I'm an Average User and I Don't Care.
    - ams6110 17y ago
      How many people actually care about URLs? At work I help with a drupal site and by default the URLs are going to be something like node/123 or even index.php?n=123 but some people freak about that and insist on "friendly" URLs. I ask "who types in URLs anyway" (other than the site root itself, maybe). People either bookmark them or are linked to them. Is this another "techie" blinder of mine? Am I wrong to think that the "average user" cares at all about what the URL looks like?
      - sthomps 17y ago
        No, you are exactly correct. No average user cares about the URL, let alone types it in. I agree with your point about the nodes/123, or in my case, I see a lot of upset over index.aspx/something. Linking and bookmarking are usually the only ways people find it. The root is usually easy enough, but most people will still use search engines.
lotharbot 17y ago
I don't think "technical" vs "nontechnical" is quite the right dichotomy. Perhaps "familiar with our conventions" vs "not" is a better distinction. Usually when we say someone is tech savvy, what we mean is that they are familiar with our iconography and vocabulary, and know or can guess at the magical keystrokes or settings to make the software work the way they want it to. They may actually be technical users, or they may simply be "normals" with experience. An example: a friend was heading up the alpha test team for Sid Meier's Civilization IV, and invited me to join. I was the only tester without previous Civ experience. At one point I expressed my frustration with not being able to view certain information except when the game popped it up. The other testers and devs were surprised that I didn't know to press F5 through F9 to bring up that information. The devs added buttons for those screens to the GUI in the very next release, with clear icons and helpful mouseover text, and my user experience was much improved. Point being, the thing that gave me trouble wasn't being "non-technical", but inexperienced with the particular conventions being used. The challenge in UI design is to figure out conventions that both experienced and new users will be able to understand, and to replace conventions that new users struggle with. The only useful piece of advice I have is to make sure you have some testers who can compare your product to others like it, and other testers who have never used anything of the sort, so that you can see what conventions people from each camp struggle with.
- sthomps 17y ago
  I like what you say here. The idea of getting both testers that are familiar with services similar and getting some that are completely new offers a complete perspective of the product and its applications. I will make sure to aim for this in our testing group.
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    You may be interested in "the $5 Guerrilla User Test", which was posted on HN last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120820 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120820 and http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-5-guerrilla-user-test/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-5-guerrilla-user-test/ the basic idea is to go into a bar and find someone who's a little bit drunk who'll spend 15 minutes using your software in exchange for a drink. "Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life", and learn from it.

23 points by sthomps 17y ago

It's true that users don't care if you're using RoR or have load balanced servers or or replicated databases or anything like that. However, users do care about what those things provide. Load balanced servers means their requests are likely to be met without large slowdowns. Replicated databases means your application will have better uptime. RoR could mean that you're able to add features more easily. We care about this technology because it allows us to provide a better end result. We talk about it internally because we want to share our successes and failures so that we can educate and learn from our peers and create better end results for the average user. I don't care why my house stays up, but I'm glad that there are people (line engineers and architects) who do so that I have a wonderful, stable home. We're the architects of the web.

sthomps 17y ago
I agree. I am also grateful for engineers that keep websites running properly and quickly. I can't stand it when a website is slow or doesn't work. I have an equal appreciation for those engineers as well as the ones that allow us to have a roof that stays up or a bridge that doesn't collapse. Engineers to engineers of course need to care about the technology. However, in terms of design, so many products seem to forget about the core user of their product and their needs.
jdietrich 17y ago
I think the real point of the article is that almost all of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but how often do we talk about users? Keep a tally yourself and I think you'll see my point - I counted more HN articles in the past week about Haskell than about users. I would expect that the majority of us here at HN can easily build stable, reasonably scalable applications quite easily. I would expect that far fewer of us really understand the needs, desires and abilities of the average user. To me, it seems ridiculous that we continue to worry about marginal, incremental improvements in the technology when it is readily apparent that "technically better" solutions are easily beaten in the market by solutions that resonate better with users. To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry about whether or not a house will stay up, because they have mature processes and frameworks in place to guarantee the soundness of the design. The real work of architects, the part that separates the likes of Foster and Gehry from everyone else, is of aesthetics and usability. What makes an architect great is not their ability to build cheaper or stronger or bigger buildings, but their ability to build beautiful and elegant ones. We have a great deal to learn from them.
- sthomps 17y ago
  Thank you for that wonderful response. The analogy about the architects is spot on. The technology debate is always raging about which platform and language to use. The people present in the tech world can easily forget about the users with all of the technology present. The last statement in your second paragraph is especially wise, and the ability to resonate with users is the absolute key.
- rue 17y ago
  > I think the real point of the article is that almost all > of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We > spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django > and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but > how often do we talk about users? Frankly, I do not see any shortage of talk about "users" or "delivering" or any other of hundreds of similar terms. I think this line of reasoning overlooks some pretty crucial factors: - Arguing about X vs. Y beyond a certain point often has nothing to do with "productivity" or some other undefinable metric. It is entertainment. Not ha-ha entertainment, but something to pass the time - trading quips, debating and so on. - New paradigms, languages, frameworks and applications - as well as hardware and architecture - certainly affect users. Some directly, some by providing developers the ability to concentrate on the essence rather than the unnecessary boilerplate obstacles. It often seems that the people writing the "stop language wars" posts and the like are the ones most emotionally invested in the topic. > To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry > about whether or not a house will stay up, because they > have mature processes and frameworks in place to > guarantee the soundness of the design. Yeah, and those processes did not just spring up from nothing. There have been centuries, millennia, of development - and you can be sure there were more than a few "pyramid vs. cube" and "vaulted vs. flat" debates in there.
- aswanson 17y ago
  I've thought about this on a parallel track. It seems to me that each iteration of a technology makes it easier to create and deploy, until it reaches a point where the only thing that matters are aesthetic capabilities.

jdietrich 17y ago

Yes, yes, a million times yes. This is the great challenge and the great opportunity of our era. A yawning chasm has opened up between 'techies' and everyone else, but we have the tools and the technologies to bridge that gap. For most of us in this industry, the challenge is no longer the technology itself - it is to humanise technology and make it accessible and useful for the mass of the people. I strongly believe that we are in a new industrial revolution.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
sthomps 17y ago
I completely agree with you. The technology is now in a position where we can bridge that chasm, and bring the early innovators closer to the early adopters. With all of the talent available, we should be able to narrow that chasm considerably so that all products are friendly to both parties.

chaosprophet 17y ago

I read this post and then went to sokanu.com. For so much talk about UX design, it was a major disappointment. There is absolutely nothing on that landing page which makes me want to give you my email id. As a user, I take the time and effort to actually visit your site without anyone marketing it to me, and I am turned away without even being told what you guys do.

sthomps 17y ago
Yes, I realize that. We are in stealth mode currently and in the process of building the alpha platform. I do appreciate you visiting though, and we do understand that it is your time and there is little information about the product.
- chaosprophet 17y ago
  I don't really get the fuss about stealth mode. AFAIK you don't really achieve anything being in stealth mode. You might get some traffic out of the mystery factor, but other than that I really don't see any reason why startups choose to be in stealth mode. Personally I would be shouting off the roofs about what we are doing. In any case, I believe that if you're asking user's for their email, then you should tell them what you are doing. You don't have to give much details. A short 3 line summary would be enough. In my opinion, "Explore. Connect. Achieve." isn't going to get you a lot of emails. Just my two cents.
  - sthomps 17y ago
    Thanks for the response. I may adjust it to include a short summary in the near future. If it increases the conversion rate of users signing up, then it is a wise decision. I have researched both approaches, both stealth and iterative development with lots of attention. We are trying to create a hybrid of the two. The stealth is only temporary until we are in a position to show the world and then iterate.
  - alain94040 17y ago
    I can think of one reason to be in stealth mode: so the press covers you when you get out of stealth mode. Because that's news. Apart from that, I don't think it matters.

daleharvey 17y ago

very very light on content, yes we should be looking to make wonderfully usable applications for non technical users, I dont think anyone aims to make an unusable site. But how can we do it, what have we been getting wrong so far, what design idioms need to be thrown out and what innovative ui's help users? thats what I want to hear.

sthomps 17y ago
Very good point, I will try to put that into another blog post in the near future. I know that there is a book that goes along with this, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" as well.
- idlewords 17y ago
  Dude, with all due respect, you're 18, your product is in triple-closed alpha, and your writing is entirely aspirational. Less talk, more rock. Go out and do something, and then blog about it once you've learned something interesting. If you want to psych yourself up with self-help stuff, keep a private diary.
  - sthomps 17y ago
    You are entirely correct. None of the content I am writing can hold true meaning until I have made it. All of the writing at this point is purely my opinions on what I observe and the process that I am going through.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Can we put together a list of current products that appeal to this market of "normals" / "mainstream" users and products that a gap exists?

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

Another thought: find products that exist in physical form, but can be replaced by something that is much more high-res / efficient with technology. What physical things won't exist in 5-10 years time because technology can replace them. Mainstream users usually adopt products that do this. Examples: * Campuses used to hand out "facebooks" to freshman so they could get to know their fellow students + have a directory. * Spreadsheets used to be large pieces of grid paper used by accountants. * Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin. * We used to mail physical letters. Email has replaced significantly replaced that (of course physical mail still exists, but you don't send physical mail for social interactions anymore). * We think our generation and their families won't be storing photos, memories, and vhs tapes in a shoebox. What's the specific digital equivalent of that is the question we're trying to answer with the new version of Ramamia (to be renamed Genevine). There are probably others.

spokey 17y ago
> Encyclopedias did really well until Wikipedia came along. Encarta was the first sign of trouble, but Wikipedia was the nail in the coffin. This is incidental to your comment, but I think your details are wrong in this example. Multimedia digital encyclopedias replaced physical encyclopedias long before Wikipedia came along, in fact throughout the 80s and early 90s it is a pretty safe bet that encylopedias on CD-ROM and later DVD significantly outsold the dead-tree versions, and by the mid-90s the major brands (at least in the US) already had online versions as well. Encarta (which was initially a rebranded Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia) was just one example, and a later one at that, of many encyclopedias that were transitioning from print to digital. Encarta doesn't represent some kind of paradigm shift in the encyclopedia business, just a large company snatching up a small player in a market they were trying to penetrate. Interestingly enough, Encarta has ceased production, while World Book, Encyclopedia Britannica and others are still in business and presumably profitable (for now). Wikipedia was and continues to be a threat to "traditional" encyclpedias, but not because they didn't anticipate a transition from physical to digital publication.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

zaidf 17y ago

They should apply that lesson to their blog URL;)

sthomps 17y ago
I know, it's too long of a URL, sorry about that.
- qjz 17y ago
  I'm an Average User and I Don't Care.
  - ams6110 17y ago
    How many people actually care about URLs? At work I help with a drupal site and by default the URLs are going to be something like node/123 or even index.php?n=123 but some people freak about that and insist on "friendly" URLs. I ask "who types in URLs anyway" (other than the site root itself, maybe). People either bookmark them or are linked to them. Is this another "techie" blinder of mine? Am I wrong to think that the "average user" cares at all about what the URL looks like?
    - sthomps 17y ago
      No, you are exactly correct. No average user cares about the URL, let alone types it in. I agree with your point about the nodes/123, or in my case, I see a lot of upset over index.aspx/something. Linking and bookmarking are usually the only ways people find it. The root is usually easy enough, but most people will still use search engines.

lotharbot 17y ago

I don't think "technical" vs "nontechnical" is quite the right dichotomy. Perhaps "familiar with our conventions" vs "not" is a better distinction. Usually when we say someone is tech savvy, what we mean is that they are familiar with our iconography and vocabulary, and know or can guess at the magical keystrokes or settings to make the software work the way they want it to. They may actually be technical users, or they may simply be "normals" with experience. An example: a friend was heading up the alpha test team for Sid Meier's Civilization IV, and invited me to join. I was the only tester without previous Civ experience. At one point I expressed my frustration with not being able to view certain information except when the game popped it up. The other testers and devs were surprised that I didn't know to press F5 through F9 to bring up that information. The devs added buttons for those screens to the GUI in the very next release, with clear icons and helpful mouseover text, and my user experience was much improved. Point being, the thing that gave me trouble wasn't being "non-technical", but inexperienced with the particular conventions being used. The challenge in UI design is to figure out conventions that both experienced and new users will be able to understand, and to replace conventions that new users struggle with. The only useful piece of advice I have is to make sure you have some testers who can compare your product to others like it, and other testers who have never used anything of the sort, so that you can see what conventions people from each camp struggle with.

sthomps 17y ago
I like what you say here. The idea of getting both testers that are familiar with services similar and getting some that are completely new offers a complete perspective of the product and its applications. I will make sure to aim for this in our testing group.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  You may be interested in "the $5 Guerrilla User Test", which was posted on HN last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120820 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120820 and http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-5-guerrilla-user-test/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-5-guerrilla-user-test/ the basic idea is to go into a bar and find someone who's a little bit drunk who'll spend 15 minutes using your software in exchange for a drink. "Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life", and learn from it.