9 ms·

Then you're doing it wrong - the correct principle is, "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation"

by s17n 9y ago

givehimagun 9y ago
I don't know anymore - is that some self fulling prophecy? "the customer should be able to use the product fully once they have experimented, tried, failed, corrected, and learned by mistake the user interface that we have"
- Maakuth 9y ago
  There is no need for that prophecy to fulfill itself, because it is a fact that users don't read documentation. As Joel Spolsky noted, they rarely read even anything: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-people-who-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-lives/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
  - nine_k 9y ago
    ...except numerous forum posts, when googling for "how do I do X with Y".
    - jerf 9y ago
      I think, but can not directly prove, that you're already talking about a very small minority there, single-digit percentage levels. Lots of people just muddle along, or ask the office grapevine, or just give up.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jimjimjim 9y ago
hmm, no i think the first quote is probably closer to reality.
zokier 9y ago
/s? Damn Poe's law strikes again
KGIII 9y ago
Why is that? It used to be that there were help files and you pushed buttons until you figured out what they did. You had pages and pages of comfiguation options. You had manuals that explained things - without needing a browser. You had settings and advanced settings, hidden switches, and tweaks. Now, you get a hamburger icon and there's not even an exit button. Part of the joy of computing was figuring out what all those buttons and options did. VLC is one application that still has a decent settings selection and their advanced options is just about perfect. I don't even know what half those options are for - but I like it. Please give me back my options to break stuff. I am not scared. Breaking stuff helps me learn. I don't even remember the last time I broke things bad enough to need a reformat. That's not for lack of trying, it's for lack of buttons. I'd like to kindly request you put those buttons back. Seriously, discovering features and mashing buttons until you learn is one of the great joys of computing.
- kelnos 9y ago
  The result of computing leaving the hands of heavily-technical users and entering the world of the non-technical is that people are terrified of doing the wrong thing and breaking things. Technical people inherently know that there's very little they can do that's irreversible, and that they'll be able to figure out how to reverse even the craziest of breakage. Non-technical people do not assume breakage is irreversible, and even when they do, they do not assume that they'll be able to unbreak it themselves. Finding someone to help is a nuisance and can be embarrassing.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Maybe if they had to struggle, they'd learn? If we old people could do it, the next generation is smart enough to do it. Hell, they've got Google to help them. It's not like I'm expecting a return of dip switches and multi-binder manuals. Just, maybe, stop designing for the lowest common denominator? People aren't going to learn unless you give them a reason to. People aren't going to learn if they don't have to. Would you rather smarter users, or simplistic software that underperforms and offers only one output option? I favor choice. I do admit that it makes good financial choice to cater to the lowest common denominator, but even many of my beloved Linux apps are getting dumbed down. I haven't even had a kernel panic in years. Hell, I haven't even had to compile my own kernel in this whole decade. (I have, I just didn't need to.) It's not about keeping it out of the hands of the less technical, it's about still keeping it educational for those of us who are. What kind of dystopia is it, when the preferences menu has but three options? Instead of a stylus, maybe you should just give me a crayon! Really, I think VLC has it right. Handbrake is pretty good. Gimp goes a bit overboard, but I can respect that. My VNC server? It's got like eight options, total. Torrent client? Maybe twice that many, spread over four panes. That's like putting four pieces of lettuce on four plates and telling me it's a salad! Mobile apps? Some of them don't even have options! If there are no options, why use an app? Just use the web! Hell, they don't even have a close option, some of them. What if I want to close it and restart it at the default screen? Task manager or reboot, that's what. 'Snot like it has a discernable back button. No options to configure it, either. I think people with mental handicaps should be allowed to use computers, just like everyone else. It doesn't mean you should design with them as your primary target audience. I'm pretty sure it took more work to take the buttons out than it took to leave them in there. I can't even begin to count the number of updates that have removed options. What the hell was that? You worked harder to make the application do less. I don't even understand that mentality. Sorry for the rant but this is a pet peeve. Imma start a Bring Back The Buttons campaign. It extends to other things, too. I noticed a friend's new television. Their remote had 3 buttons on it. It wasn't even broken, it came like that from the factory.
hashmal 9y ago
For mass market products, maybe. What about photoshop? music production software? what if your customers are developers and your product is a software library? In many cases there is an inherent complexity to a product, and it warrants some learning curve. Removing the need for documentation often removes power and depth. Funnily, now that many products are like this, the opposite trend is surfacing, and in some niches you have customers who love reading manuals. It becomes part of the user experience.
- kaens 9y ago
  Ableton (music prod software) takes an approach to learnability that works well -- by default there's a dedicated UI element that shows documentation for whatever you're mousing over. It doesn't remove the need to read docs, especially for people who are new to DAWs, but it does alleviate a lot of the intimidation factor and initial learning curve that can come with needing to find what you need to read in a manual for a complex piece of software.
  - hashmal 9y ago
    I know Ableton Live very well, and yes it's a very good example of hard stuff done right. But I wouldn't include it in the list of "apps that are so user friendly that you don't need to read the docs". (that's not a complaint)
thaumasiotes 9y ago
You can rephrase that principle as "products should be unable to do anything even moderately complicated". It's not correct for anything.
l0b0 9y ago
The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality until only the bare essentials are left. I'd argue this (the UI change, not identifying what can be removed) is always going to be simpler than making the existing UI understandable. A solution which is often asked for by advanced users is a toggle between simple and advanced UI, but this has fundamental problems (The following is inspired by the VLC preferences UI). First, It will be triggered by accident by users who definitely don't want it (or by advanced users sharing the account). How do you ensure they can get back to the simple UI? By definition they are now in a mode which is harder to navigate for a normal user. Second, how do advanced users without extensive knowledge of the internals of the software (non-developers, essentially) locate the controls they were used to from the simple UI? The advanced UI will look fundamentally different from the simple one, because cramming all the advanced features in between the simple ones would just look weird and hacky. Things might even be named differently in the advanced UI because there are technical terms for them which will be more familiar to advanced users. And how do advanced users know if there is even a 1-to-1 mapping (a simple "Dolby Surround" boolean setting vs an advanced "Force Detection of Dolby Surround" boolean setting and "Stereo audio output mode" which can be set to "Dolby Surround")? Third, given finite resources one of the interfaces is going to have more effort applied to it than the other one. How do you ensure that they both stay usable when most users will only ever use one of them?
- kps 9y ago
  > The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality The easiest way, yes. I am reminded again of the point made by Dave Smith, one of the Xerox Star human factors designers, at the ‘Final Demo’¹: “Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions — it just had fewer commands.” PARC weren't trying to make things easy on themselves. Genericity is hard. Orthogonality is hard. Design is hard. (It's unfortunate that Steve Jobs either didn't understand what he saw, or didn't care, and popularized a Potemkin village imitation.) ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw (The particular session starts around 54:30.)
  - digi_owl 9y ago
TeMPOraL 9y ago
That is an even dumber principle, and it is what leads to proliferation of products that are mostly useless toys that pretend to be tools. No amount of JS will make a person who never used 2D graphics programs a master of Photoshop. Only God Himself can make a pivot table that's usable by a newcomer without "having to read any documentation". The only way to realize the principle you described is to dumb down your product until bare minimum of functionality remains, and then hope your users somehow learned to use that minimum in the past. Others have managed to touch on this topic in the thread, so I'll just say this: you don't expect people to be able to fully use a car without having to learn anything. You subject them to a training course. And this applies to pretty much any actual tool. You have to learn to use it effectively. "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned." You can embrace that and figure out how to efficiently teach your users, or you can forever be doomed to building toys that don't actually help anyone that much.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  He's not saying that everyone should be able to use every program. But someone familiar with 2d graphics program in general should be able to learn how to use Photoshop without reading the manual. Consider a bad example: Blender. Even though I have used 3D graphics and CAD extensively I still always have to look things up in the Blender manual. Why? Because nearly every control is poorly labelled, there are no useful tooltips, and basically no hints in the UI at all. Take a look at this awful screenshot for example: https://www.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Release_notes_279_video_overhaul.png https://www.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Release_n... What does "File Extensions" do? What about "Placeholders"? Why do none of the number inputs even have units? Nobody is saying that users should have an intuitive understanding of what a B-frame is, but I shouldn't have to read the manual to find out whether the B-frame interval is specified in seconds or frames.
  - rootlocus 9y ago
    > there are no useful tooltips, and basically no hints in the UI at all. That's just blatantly false: https://i.imgur.com/MGrA4Ax.png https://i.imgur.com/MGrA4Ax.png Not only are there tooltips, the tooltips also document the python API. > I shouldn't have to read the manual to find out whether the B-frame interval is specified in seconds or frames. You mean Max B-Frames? Yes, you should know what B-Frames are and that's enough to understand what you can configure. If it said "Max Frames" would you ask yourself if it concerned frames or seconds? Blender isn't an App that anyone should be able to use. It's a complex, specific tool with a lot of features. I've seen many hours of 3D software trainig for anything from Maya, 3DS, Zbrush to blender. Industry professionals usualy take a few courses and need time to adjust before switching software. Each tool has different workflows and only after ample training are you able to fully utilise its power. Blender is built to be very efficient while modelling, sculpting or animating with loads of shortcuts and modes to make these processes as fast as possible in the 3D viewport. You're basically complainig that an airplane control panel is ugly and bad when you have no piloting training.

Then you're doing it wrong - the correct principle is, "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation"

by s17n 9y ago

Then you're doing it wrong - the correct principle is, "the customer should be able to use the product fully without having to read any documentation"

givehimagun 9y ago

I don't know anymore - is that some self fulling prophecy? "the customer should be able to use the product fully once they have experimented, tried, failed, corrected, and learned by mistake the user interface that we have"

Maakuth 9y ago
There is no need for that prophecy to fulfill itself, because it is a fact that users don't read documentation. As Joel Spolsky noted, they rarely read even anything: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-people-who-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-lives/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
- nine_k 9y ago
  ...except numerous forum posts, when googling for "how do I do X with Y".
  - jerf 9y ago
    I think, but can not directly prove, that you're already talking about a very small minority there, single-digit percentage levels. Lots of people just muddle along, or ask the office grapevine, or just give up.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jimjimjim 9y ago

hmm, no i think the first quote is probably closer to reality.

zokier 9y ago

/s? Damn Poe's law strikes again

KGIII 9y ago

Why is that? It used to be that there were help files and you pushed buttons until you figured out what they did. You had pages and pages of comfiguation options. You had manuals that explained things - without needing a browser. You had settings and advanced settings, hidden switches, and tweaks. Now, you get a hamburger icon and there's not even an exit button. Part of the joy of computing was figuring out what all those buttons and options did. VLC is one application that still has a decent settings selection and their advanced options is just about perfect. I don't even know what half those options are for - but I like it. Please give me back my options to break stuff. I am not scared. Breaking stuff helps me learn. I don't even remember the last time I broke things bad enough to need a reformat. That's not for lack of trying, it's for lack of buttons. I'd like to kindly request you put those buttons back. Seriously, discovering features and mashing buttons until you learn is one of the great joys of computing.

kelnos 9y ago
The result of computing leaving the hands of heavily-technical users and entering the world of the non-technical is that people are terrified of doing the wrong thing and breaking things. Technical people inherently know that there's very little they can do that's irreversible, and that they'll be able to figure out how to reverse even the craziest of breakage. Non-technical people do not assume breakage is irreversible, and even when they do, they do not assume that they'll be able to unbreak it themselves. Finding someone to help is a nuisance and can be embarrassing.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Maybe if they had to struggle, they'd learn? If we old people could do it, the next generation is smart enough to do it. Hell, they've got Google to help them. It's not like I'm expecting a return of dip switches and multi-binder manuals. Just, maybe, stop designing for the lowest common denominator? People aren't going to learn unless you give them a reason to. People aren't going to learn if they don't have to. Would you rather smarter users, or simplistic software that underperforms and offers only one output option? I favor choice. I do admit that it makes good financial choice to cater to the lowest common denominator, but even many of my beloved Linux apps are getting dumbed down. I haven't even had a kernel panic in years. Hell, I haven't even had to compile my own kernel in this whole decade. (I have, I just didn't need to.) It's not about keeping it out of the hands of the less technical, it's about still keeping it educational for those of us who are. What kind of dystopia is it, when the preferences menu has but three options? Instead of a stylus, maybe you should just give me a crayon! Really, I think VLC has it right. Handbrake is pretty good. Gimp goes a bit overboard, but I can respect that. My VNC server? It's got like eight options, total. Torrent client? Maybe twice that many, spread over four panes. That's like putting four pieces of lettuce on four plates and telling me it's a salad! Mobile apps? Some of them don't even have options! If there are no options, why use an app? Just use the web! Hell, they don't even have a close option, some of them. What if I want to close it and restart it at the default screen? Task manager or reboot, that's what. 'Snot like it has a discernable back button. No options to configure it, either. I think people with mental handicaps should be allowed to use computers, just like everyone else. It doesn't mean you should design with them as your primary target audience. I'm pretty sure it took more work to take the buttons out than it took to leave them in there. I can't even begin to count the number of updates that have removed options. What the hell was that? You worked harder to make the application do less. I don't even understand that mentality. Sorry for the rant but this is a pet peeve. Imma start a Bring Back The Buttons campaign. It extends to other things, too. I noticed a friend's new television. Their remote had 3 buttons on it. It wasn't even broken, it came like that from the factory.

hashmal 9y ago

For mass market products, maybe. What about photoshop? music production software? what if your customers are developers and your product is a software library? In many cases there is an inherent complexity to a product, and it warrants some learning curve. Removing the need for documentation often removes power and depth. Funnily, now that many products are like this, the opposite trend is surfacing, and in some niches you have customers who love reading manuals. It becomes part of the user experience.

kaens 9y ago
Ableton (music prod software) takes an approach to learnability that works well -- by default there's a dedicated UI element that shows documentation for whatever you're mousing over. It doesn't remove the need to read docs, especially for people who are new to DAWs, but it does alleviate a lot of the intimidation factor and initial learning curve that can come with needing to find what you need to read in a manual for a complex piece of software.
- hashmal 9y ago
  I know Ableton Live very well, and yes it's a very good example of hard stuff done right. But I wouldn't include it in the list of "apps that are so user friendly that you don't need to read the docs". (that's not a complaint)

thaumasiotes 9y ago

You can rephrase that principle as "products should be unable to do anything even moderately complicated". It's not correct for anything.

l0b0 9y ago

The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality until only the bare essentials are left. I'd argue this (the UI change, not identifying what can be removed) is always going to be simpler than making the existing UI understandable. A solution which is often asked for by advanced users is a toggle between simple and advanced UI, but this has fundamental problems (The following is inspired by the VLC preferences UI). First, It will be triggered by accident by users who definitely don't want it (or by advanced users sharing the account). How do you ensure they can get back to the simple UI? By definition they are now in a mode which is harder to navigate for a normal user. Second, how do advanced users without extensive knowledge of the internals of the software (non-developers, essentially) locate the controls they were used to from the simple UI? The advanced UI will look fundamentally different from the simple one, because cramming all the advanced features in between the simple ones would just look weird and hacky. Things might even be named differently in the advanced UI because there are technical terms for them which will be more familiar to advanced users. And how do advanced users know if there is even a 1-to-1 mapping (a simple "Dolby Surround" boolean setting vs an advanced "Force Detection of Dolby Surround" boolean setting and "Stereo audio output mode" which can be set to "Dolby Surround")? Third, given finite resources one of the interfaces is going to have more effort applied to it than the other one. How do you ensure that they both stay usable when most users will only ever use one of them?

kps 9y ago
> The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality The easiest way, yes. I am reminded again of the point made by Dave Smith, one of the Xerox Star human factors designers, at the ‘Final Demo’¹: “Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions — it just had fewer commands.” PARC weren't trying to make things easy on themselves. Genericity is hard. Orthogonality is hard. Design is hard. (It's unfortunate that Steve Jobs either didn't understand what he saw, or didn't care, and popularized a Potemkin village imitation.) ¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw (The particular session starts around 54:30.)
- digi_owl 9y ago

TeMPOraL 9y ago

That is an even dumber principle, and it is what leads to proliferation of products that are mostly useless toys that pretend to be tools. No amount of JS will make a person who never used 2D graphics programs a master of Photoshop. Only God Himself can make a pivot table that's usable by a newcomer without "having to read any documentation". The only way to realize the principle you described is to dumb down your product until bare minimum of functionality remains, and then hope your users somehow learned to use that minimum in the past. Others have managed to touch on this topic in the thread, so I'll just say this: you don't expect people to be able to fully use a car without having to learn anything. You subject them to a training course. And this applies to pretty much any actual tool. You have to learn to use it effectively. "The only intuitive interface is the nipple, everything else is learned." You can embrace that and figure out how to efficiently teach your users, or you can forever be doomed to building toys that don't actually help anyone that much.

IshKebab 9y ago
He's not saying that everyone should be able to use every program. But someone familiar with 2d graphics program in general should be able to learn how to use Photoshop without reading the manual. Consider a bad example: Blender. Even though I have used 3D graphics and CAD extensively I still always have to look things up in the Blender manual. Why? Because nearly every control is poorly labelled, there are no useful tooltips, and basically no hints in the UI at all. Take a look at this awful screenshot for example: https://www.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Release_notes_279_video_overhaul.png https://www.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Release_n... What does "File Extensions" do? What about "Placeholders"? Why do none of the number inputs even have units? Nobody is saying that users should have an intuitive understanding of what a B-frame is, but I shouldn't have to read the manual to find out whether the B-frame interval is specified in seconds or frames.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > there are no useful tooltips, and basically no hints in the UI at all. That's just blatantly false: https://i.imgur.com/MGrA4Ax.png https://i.imgur.com/MGrA4Ax.png Not only are there tooltips, the tooltips also document the python API. > I shouldn't have to read the manual to find out whether the B-frame interval is specified in seconds or frames. You mean Max B-Frames? Yes, you should know what B-Frames are and that's enough to understand what you can configure. If it said "Max Frames" would you ask yourself if it concerned frames or seconds? Blender isn't an App that anyone should be able to use. It's a complex, specific tool with a lot of features. I've seen many hours of 3D software trainig for anything from Maya, 3DS, Zbrush to blender. Industry professionals usualy take a few courses and need time to adjust before switching software. Each tool has different workflows and only after ample training are you able to fully utilise its power. Blender is built to be very efficient while modelling, sculpting or animating with loads of shortcuts and modes to make these processes as fast as possible in the 3D viewport. You're basically complainig that an airplane control panel is ugly and bad when you have no piloting training.