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Products For People Who Make Products For People

281 points by michaelfairley 16y ago

jarin 16y ago
If there were Zed Shaw fanboys I would be one.
jnoller 16y ago
You know Zed - this was a really good read. There's not much I can personally disagree with here, especially your final point (which I won't give away so people will read it). Very well written; and some great advice. I much prefer this to ranty-zed :)
- gte910h 16y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, "Well reasoned with 75% less hyperbolic rant". Good stuff Zed, keep it up.
gte910h 16y ago
I think his "longbeards" actually do quite well on iOS where it says "Do X just SO" and you get a pretty decent design if you just follow the 1-2-3s
- jnoller 16y ago
  I don't know - they probably do, god knows it allows me to make something that doesn't look like a series of cat turds, but formulaic designs don't last long term. You need something which really differentiates you from the pack.
  - count 16y ago
    I think it could be argued that formulaic design/experience HELPS long term, if you have some functionality that the user needs. If your app looks/acts/feels like the rest of the OS or environment, the user will (in theory) learn it faster and use it more fluently. A 'revolutionary' design may be awesome, and may increase the productivity or ease of use of your specific application, while causing some serious friction between your app and it's environment in the users mind.
raganwald 16y ago
I hear a lot of "programmers don't do good Ui" as well as "marketers dictate bad UI" in my travels. I used to try to work out some sort of theory about which statement is true, and why. But then I experienced a revelation, Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap. Therefore, if handed ten UIs designed by programmers, nine will be crap. If handed ten UIs designed by marketers, nine will be crap. Perhaps there is a characteristic way in which the nine programmer crap UIs are crap, but the observation that most programmer UIs are crap is not insightful and doesn't magically justify the idea of turning UI design over to product management.
- jnoller 16y ago
  That's a really good point - but I think a really big issue is that a lot of programmers (and I don't know why) seem to think that a good User Interface (API, Visual, Docs, etc) is just not needed. That; and the attitudes range from "who cares" to downright hostile "if you can't understand it, you're stupid". I say this as a programmer (who spends a lot of time on the "user" facing components), not as a business person. That attitude has to change - I don't care that the business people think hackers are Eloi fit for the slaughter while they are the Morlocks - the intelligent ones. Good business people don't have that attitude, good business and product people do care about scalability, supportability and quality. Those that don't will fail. On the other hand, the constant refrain I hear from people in my own community and profession about making something usable and intuitive just makes me upset. I can't change the broken business people - I can try to make my corner of the world better.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    Interesting that you compare "a lot of programmers" to "good business people." It is no surprise that the programmers fare poorly in comparison. What do you have to say about Good Programmers? Or A Lot of Business People? May I attempt to find common ground between our points of view by suggesting that 90% of programmers have this attitude? And that by the same token, 90% of business people are busy demanding flash web site intros and banners that SCREAM without doing the A/B testing or other quantified analysis to know whether they are generating higher conversions? But your last statement is absolutely spot on: making what we do better is what matters most. Upmod gladly given.
rimantas 16y ago
Looks like Zed got some different Cooper's book than I did. Or misread it completely. "Inmates are running the asylum“ was one of the most useful books I ever read, it completely changed my attitude. It's not "don't let programmers to do interfaces", it is "build interfaces for intended users and intended usage". If Zed thinks that Cooper's book is idiotic then he is just unable to get what it's all about (like many other nerds — and that explains why open-source is good for servers and sucks in UI department). I hope he sticks to building awesome web servers nobody needs.
- jaimzob 16y ago
  Not sure why you're being down voted but I got exactly the same impression. I'm usually a big Zed fan, and Mongrel2 looks great, but I think he's totally misread Cooper's book here.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    > Not sure why you're being down voted Two reasons: > then he is just unable to get what it's all about (like many other nerds Extremely flamebaity, abusive 'nerds,' and No True Scotsman-ish. > I hope he sticks to building awesome web servers nobody needs. Insulting.
    - rimantas 16y ago
      Hey, I called Mongrel2 awesome, how is that insulting? ;) The first mongrel (I used and liked it), it solved the very real problem at the time. Mongrel2 may be 10x as awesome but now there is no unsolved problem for it to be as successful. Ok, I admit, it may be insulting, but calling that book idiotic is even more so.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  I don't know what book you read but the title alone, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" is offensive since it implies I'm the inmate. But take this quote just from the product description at Amazon: "The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. Business executives have let the inmates run the asylum!" Don't get much clearer than that, but let's talk about the damage the book caused. For a book that purports to try to improve things for humans it sure caused a ton of damage to humans. It was lacking in almost any real substance and was effectively a thinly disguised rant about coders. It was used to fire programmers, boost fake ass business guys, and created the plague of crappily implemented products that may look slick, but fail in horrible ways. In my own personal experience with the book I have had numerous executives and biz people toss it on my desk and say they read it and they agree. I've had friends fired or demoted because of this book. It also spawned whole generations of "UX consultants" who fleeced people using the phrasing and words in the book. I personally had to deal with consultant after consultant who would come in, looked at the best we could do, and then insult us. And any time a programmer tried to show who was really in charge and to blame, out came this damn book to prove us wrong. I could go on, but no matter what little snippets of text you remember, the impact of the book the way I remember it is one of negativity toward a group of people who were not to blame: programmers.
andjones 16y ago
Excellent read. I found myself relating this to the division between hacker types and the MBA types. I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people. As a hacker, I enjoy having large blocks of time to create what I think is good and not coding some autocratic vision of a product. As I've grown older though, I have come to appreciate and value the interaction between MBA types and myself. In one particular project an MBA type brought me valuable information about what we were doing well, how we compared against competitors, and what he thought our customers wanted. He then told me to run with it and stepped out of the way. I thought that was pretty neat. Another thought - A quote from the article: "A sudden rise in Long Beards simply copying Product People Products but doing it cheaper using their cost reducing backend skills." reminded of the Paul Graham essay "Copy What You Like" http://paulgraham.com/copy.html http://paulgraham.com/copy.html ... and copying something you like is probably a good way to bridge the gap between back end "long beard" and product designer.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people." One of the founding principles of Y Combinator is to make the Hackers the product people.
deleted 16y ago
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neilk 16y ago
There is really no mystery about UI. Yes, it requires skill and a deep knowledge of how humans process information, and even a touch of design genius. But the real problem is that most shops can't measure usability in a fine-grained way. And yet everyone does have some idea that it's really important. Consequently they are bamboozled by anyone who purports to have such expertise. For the most part, so-called usability experts are really just graphic design snobs. They have a certain aesthetic they like, which is arguably "cleaner" and has more white space. So the page might be better organized but that's nowhere near what true usability is. Real usability work is about trying to understand how the user is thinking. What their mental model is. What their goals are. In what context they are trying to achieve a task. Not just how their eye is scanning for information. Anyway my point is, when it comes to real usability work, programmers are just as (un)qualified as graphic designers, marketers, or any other kind of "product" person. Arguably the designer is supposed to have a larger toolbox when it comes to possible graphic treatments, but the programmer also has a toolbox of quantitative methods, experimentation, and a deep understanding of how the system could work.
- jeffclark 16y ago
  UI designer = "white space" UX designer = "mental space"
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    It's easy to redefine the meaning of a term if it's rendered as an acronym. User Interface Designer = "white space" User Experience Designer = "mental space" Now how arbitrary is that? What is it about "Experience" that implies thinking and "Interface" that implies a lack thereof? What about all the designers unfortunate enough to come before the term "UX" was invented? I suppose Jef Raskin was only ever about white space. Let me suggest an improvement Mediocre Designer = "white space" Good Designer = "white space and mental space"
    - binomial 16y ago
      Well, there's also the fact that some "UX" guys don't have any great ability in graphic design, but are great when designing the use and flow of an interface. It's not necessary that an ability in the latter implies similar ability in the former.
krakensden 16y ago
On a side note, Heroku's web site is really, really pretty.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Check out their documentation for the new Addon program: http://addons.heroku.com/provider/ http://addons.heroku.com/provider/ Click some of the links at the bottom. It's so gorgeous.
danielnicollet 16y ago
I have been a "product person" for 15 years and I believe that product people like Michael describes are bad product people. A good product manager knows the UI and the guts behind it. I am not an engineer by training but I wouldn't be a good product manager in this field if I didn't know how to build a web server either. For the "Jeep Cherokee made from iron ore": I give up. ;-)
- TWAndrews 16y ago
  Agreed. The best product people are those who can understand the back end--even if they couldn't code it themselves, they have a respect and basic understanding for what's going on.
- nkurz 16y ago
  I want to believe, but I'm dubious. I'm almost certain when he says he can "make a web server", he means that he can sit down with a text editor, a compiler, and a standard C library, and produce a program that will serve HTTP requests. There's some gray area beyond this, but he definitely does not mean that he can download, configure, and run a premade piece of software. Is this what you mean too? Is there really a population of self-described "product people" who have this knowledge? Or did you interpret his statement differently? I certainly agree that such people exist, but I would be surprised that their luxurious gray beards don't blow their cover. Which is to say, do they really work as product managers?
greenlblue 16y ago
Good to be reminded once in a while that code is written for people and not machines.
- billswift 16y ago
  English is written for people and not machines. Code needs to be written for both. It's too bad that coders often forget that someone is going to need to be able to read it later.
metamemetics 16y ago
Here's what I do to plan my code based on user experience. I use Free Mind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and write in the middle of the home node "Things A User Can Do" I end up with things like "arrive at site", "create objectX", "view & edit objectY" as the next level nodes and keep going down levels from there. Since a mind map is a tree structure, it really helps to visually map out decisions a user will make. Following a branch is the user making a decision of what to spend their limited attention on. If you are improperly the distributing number of decisions a user must juggle at a particular node or repeating a lot of functionality in different areas, you will instantly visually see it. Then when you start translating to code, if it's M-V-C architecture like most webapps, the first order nodes are the names of your controller functions. What methodologies do other people use?
jpr 16y ago
Great stuff. I think I'm developing a severe case of nerd crush on Zed. The part about linguistic experience was especially good. I have thought for some time now that all configuration files, command-line options etc. should have simple and clearly defined syntax. Some already do. My dislike of weird, inconsistent and complex syntax (and semantics) is so severe that I've semi-intentionally not learnt shell-scripting, Perl or Ruby. Sadly, there are very few systems that I feel I get a good linguistic experience(TM)(R) out of. I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals. I really wish good textual UIs (there aren't many that I know, but I'm using one for writing this comment: GNU/Emacs) became the norm, instead of the randomness of the contemporary GUIs or the bass-arckwardness of shell-like languages. I think UIs should aim to become Turing-complete, completely self-documenting and reflective. The distinction between a function, a program and an user interface is in my opinion mostly arbitrary and harmful, creating an unnecessary wall of misunderstandings between the author of a program and its users.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals." The dilemma is that human language is staggeringly ambiguous. This works because human beings have an extremely sophisticated model of other human beings in their head and a really good pattern matching facility, which makes us really good at selecting the intended interpretation without even noticing the ambiguities. Presented with the languages we use to instruct computers, designed to be perfectly unambiguous, normal humans quickly get upset that the computer doesn't understand them if they veer the slightest bit from the tightrope of a language they're given to use. In other words, if you have a computer that faithfully and consistently passes the Turing Test, you may have something. Otherwise, pointing and grunting might be less frustrating for normal people. Another aside: pointing or at least gesturing is much better than even the perfect language interface for editing a photo or playing a video game. So it depends on the application.
  - 16y ago
Bdennyw 16y ago
You know there are entire disciplines dedicated to the study of usability and user experience. Zed seems shocked that someone would claim that programmers (who generally have no training or interest usability) aren't good at making usable products. It's about as controversial as saying that construction workers don't make good architects.
mnemonicsloth 16y ago
Colophon: The Long Beards, (Latin Langobardi, later "Lombards") were a tribe of Germanic "barbarians" who settled in Northern Italy in the late 500s AD. They were primarily responsible for thwarting the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's campaign to reconquer Italy and re-establish the Western Empire. http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/alboin.jpg http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/alboin.jpg Today Lombardy is the most populous of Italy's 20 regions and Milan, the capital, is Italy's leading financial center.
- zeemonkee 16y ago
  That's interesting; I didn't know the origin of "Lombard". Justinian's attempt to conquer Italy was one of the bloodiest periods of European history.
GFischer 16y ago
"let's say you can pull this off and you have permission to really make the UI sexy. Alright, where's your designer? In every mega-corp and government agency I've worked for there has never been a staff designer of any kind." Amen to that. I'm working on a project to boost a new product line for my megacorp that competes against the established leader. So I asked to really boost the UI. And it was approved, provided of course, I made it myself :( . All my pleas for a designer were unheard or shrugged off. With some help from the Internet, I've come up with a design that doesn't suck, but it's still a far cry from what a designer would have done in a tenth of the time (in effect, they hired me as a crappy designer and spent far too much of my time aka their money, but they don't see it that way)
ojbyrne 16y ago
In my opinion usability requires a lot of grunt work. You have to craft error messages for any and all user input. You have to degrade gracefully if the user's interface (no JS, IE6, small screen on a phone, etc) doesn't meet the ideals for which you've designed the interface. Usable is much more work than functional. Most programmers are aware of that, and are willing to put the time and effort in to making what's required. But often the product people, besides deciding what things should look like overall, are also in control of the budget and schedule, and they expect all those kinds of things to just magically appear.
c00p3r 16y ago
Yet another blog post for the sake of a blog post. Every educated software engineer know, that by respecting and following a fundamental programming methodologies, such as data-abstraction, modularity, encapsulation of details, and other basic techniques for managing the complexity of large systems, you will get maintainability and programmer-friendliness for free. The problem is - most of in-house back-end developers and their public teachers doesn't have a even a basic engineering education. People who have managed to understand the ideas on which the SICP book is based upon, let alone MIT graduates, never write such long but empty posts.
jimbokun 16y ago
Another word for programmers who "make products for people who make products" are systems programmers. I'm sure Apple values systems programmers. And Google. And Oracle (at least they certainly should). Microsoft could not possibly build their products without systems programmers. Amazon could not have created its cloud products without systems programmers. In Apple's case, their products would be impossible without the capabilities that the systems people build. Without an operating system that they could strip down and fit on a phone, while keeping much of its core functionality, no iPhone. Likewise if they didn't have the technology underlying Safari under their control. Much of the eye candy that wowed people in Mac OS X came as a thin layer on top of the technology built by systems programmers. Like the graphics APIs underlying Expose. And the fast, system wide indexing behind Spotlight. So, if you want to be appreciated as someone who "makes products for people who make products," work for a software company that makes products requiring innovation in systems software.
cool-RR 16y ago
I agree with many of the things said in the article. I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them. I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core parts of their OSS projects, without realizing that if they concentrated a bit more on the things that Zed mentioned, their project would become so much easier and fun to work with, and they'd have a bigger healthier community around it. <Sociopathic rant> Sometimes when I see one of these projects, (let's call it, as an example, project FooBar and say that it converts between image formats,) I fantasize about forking the project, fixing up all the documentation to be good, make a good UI, give installers, make a nice logo, etc. Then rename it, sell it as a commercial project and become a millionaire, without crediting the authors of FooBar. Then I will drive in my fancy car to visit the core developers, and I will show them a wad of $100 notes and tell them: "You see this? This could have been yours. This could have been yours if only you documented your freaking code. You worked so hard on this code, and if you would have only taken care of the things around it, like documentation and binaries and design and UX, you could have made a lot of money. But you didn't. You suck." Then maybe for their next project they'll write freaking documetation. </Sociopathic rant>
- forensic 16y ago
  Sounds like an xkcd comic involving the guy with the hat.
- nopassrecover 16y ago
  Except the implicit intellectual theft. What you are describing is pretty close to the music industry's original purpose - bridging the gap between creators and buyers - and see how often that gets criticised (perhaps rightfully now) as vampiric.
Poiesis 16y ago
Steve Jobs on design: "It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works" This applies just as much to infrastructure as it does to anything customer-facing. To a non-programmer, for example, sendmail, nginx, and mongrel2 may all look like user-hostile crap. To a developer or administrator, it's easier to discern the differences in the design of this part, which is itself a major part of the usability of a webserver.
ryan-allen 16y ago
It's very refreshing to see someone write about their ideas and at the same time, demonstrate them with a real product. It's more than most people do when they proclaim things like what he has in his essay. Zed is someone worth listening to.
fun2have 16y ago
Well Copper designed the first prototype of Visual Basic. I think that explains lots. When you combine Zed's argument that "Nope, because the tools they've given you are again controlled by some corporation with a certain design ideal. If it's Microsoft then the things you have to work with are Microsoft looking and feeling. " How many unusable software products came about because of Visual Basic? I can rant and rant about Copper.
zeemonkee 16y ago
Couldn't agree more about how a poorly designed backend can increase costs, however pretty and well-designed the frontend is. We have a situation at work just like this: the inherited backend code is dreadful, full of WTFs due to poor implementation, lack of knowledge and lack of planning and design. It's eating away our profit margins. New features and customization take far longer than they should, and time estimates are impossible. Bugs, from simple UI stuff to server issues, are numerous and end up adding to customer support costs, not to mention reputation. Do the management understand this ? Nope, they just consider these costs to be the normal cost of doing business in this sector. We have pleaded time and again to rewrite and refactor the code, but never given the time or leeway because the sales team want the latest shiny feature to sell to the client. The irony is that we have a healthy and growing user base and top-rank clients. An outside competitor (of which the developers are aware, but about which the management are oblivious) are about to eat our lunch because they can simply execute better and faster.
yycom 16y ago
It's one thing for a random comment, but to see it on an actual, real live blog post by the likes of Zed is irritating. "couldn't care less", please. How can you be hackers if you can't get some basic logic right?
adrianhoward 16y ago
Just one point on Cooper and the Inmates book... it was written 11 years ago. Cooper being a vaguely smart guy has learned stuff since then and has quite a different view on the way development and ux folk fit together now. Folks interested in a look into his more current thinking might want to take a look at his keynote for Agile 2008 http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile_2008.html http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile..., and his keynote at Interaction 08 http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php. And from his involvement in things like the http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-ux-retreat-at-cooper http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-... things are moving on from there too. There's a large chunk of the UX community that's moving away from the developers-as-enemy attitude. And vice versa for the developer community I hope :-)
jpwagner 16y ago
Frontend - Backend = Profit Awesome
cparedes 16y ago
I would kill for nicely designed API's for the things I work with. Then maybe I can stop writing stupid shell script wrappers.
shoover 16y ago
The comments here are very UI-centric, but what I found interesting was first the reminder to invest in fad-resistant skills (and don't forget, he drew a distinction between UI and hardcore design skills!). And second the stuff about parsers in the section about making usable infrastructure software. Every time I peek at the mongrel2 source, there's one or two more Ragel files in there, some of them generating token streams to be consumed by a Lemon parser. I figured there was a good reason for that (although I shot a quizzical glance at the one that just parses "--a --b b" CLI args into key/value pairs). What I didn't realize was how much that's an integral tenet of his software design philosophy.

281 points by michaelfairley 16y ago

jarin 16y ago

If there were Zed Shaw fanboys I would be one.

You know Zed - this was a really good read. There's not much I can personally disagree with here, especially your final point (which I won't give away so people will read it). Very well written; and some great advice. I much prefer this to ranty-zed :)

gte910h 16y ago
I was thinking the same thing, "Well reasoned with 75% less hyperbolic rant". Good stuff Zed, keep it up.

gte910h 16y ago

I think his "longbeards" actually do quite well on iOS where it says "Do X just SO" and you get a pretty decent design if you just follow the 1-2-3s

jnoller 16y ago
I don't know - they probably do, god knows it allows me to make something that doesn't look like a series of cat turds, but formulaic designs don't last long term. You need something which really differentiates you from the pack.
- count 16y ago
  I think it could be argued that formulaic design/experience HELPS long term, if you have some functionality that the user needs. If your app looks/acts/feels like the rest of the OS or environment, the user will (in theory) learn it faster and use it more fluently. A 'revolutionary' design may be awesome, and may increase the productivity or ease of use of your specific application, while causing some serious friction between your app and it's environment in the users mind.

raganwald 16y ago

I hear a lot of "programmers don't do good Ui" as well as "marketers dictate bad UI" in my travels. I used to try to work out some sort of theory about which statement is true, and why. But then I experienced a revelation, Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap. Therefore, if handed ten UIs designed by programmers, nine will be crap. If handed ten UIs designed by marketers, nine will be crap. Perhaps there is a characteristic way in which the nine programmer crap UIs are crap, but the observation that most programmer UIs are crap is not insightful and doesn't magically justify the idea of turning UI design over to product management.

jnoller 16y ago
That's a really good point - but I think a really big issue is that a lot of programmers (and I don't know why) seem to think that a good User Interface (API, Visual, Docs, etc) is just not needed. That; and the attitudes range from "who cares" to downright hostile "if you can't understand it, you're stupid". I say this as a programmer (who spends a lot of time on the "user" facing components), not as a business person. That attitude has to change - I don't care that the business people think hackers are Eloi fit for the slaughter while they are the Morlocks - the intelligent ones. Good business people don't have that attitude, good business and product people do care about scalability, supportability and quality. Those that don't will fail. On the other hand, the constant refrain I hear from people in my own community and profession about making something usable and intuitive just makes me upset. I can't change the broken business people - I can try to make my corner of the world better.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Interesting that you compare "a lot of programmers" to "good business people." It is no surprise that the programmers fare poorly in comparison. What do you have to say about Good Programmers? Or A Lot of Business People? May I attempt to find common ground between our points of view by suggesting that 90% of programmers have this attitude? And that by the same token, 90% of business people are busy demanding flash web site intros and banners that SCREAM without doing the A/B testing or other quantified analysis to know whether they are generating higher conversions? But your last statement is absolutely spot on: making what we do better is what matters most. Upmod gladly given.

rimantas 16y ago

Looks like Zed got some different Cooper's book than I did. Or misread it completely. "Inmates are running the asylum“ was one of the most useful books I ever read, it completely changed my attitude. It's not "don't let programmers to do interfaces", it is "build interfaces for intended users and intended usage". If Zed thinks that Cooper's book is idiotic then he is just unable to get what it's all about (like many other nerds — and that explains why open-source is good for servers and sucks in UI department). I hope he sticks to building awesome web servers nobody needs.

jaimzob 16y ago
Not sure why you're being down voted but I got exactly the same impression. I'm usually a big Zed fan, and Mongrel2 looks great, but I think he's totally misread Cooper's book here.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  > Not sure why you're being down voted Two reasons: > then he is just unable to get what it's all about (like many other nerds Extremely flamebaity, abusive 'nerds,' and No True Scotsman-ish. > I hope he sticks to building awesome web servers nobody needs. Insulting.
  - rimantas 16y ago
    Hey, I called Mongrel2 awesome, how is that insulting? ;) The first mongrel (I used and liked it), it solved the very real problem at the time. Mongrel2 may be 10x as awesome but now there is no unsolved problem for it to be as successful. Ok, I admit, it may be insulting, but calling that book idiotic is even more so.
zedshaw 16y ago
I don't know what book you read but the title alone, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" is offensive since it implies I'm the inmate. But take this quote just from the product description at Amazon: "The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. Business executives have let the inmates run the asylum!" Don't get much clearer than that, but let's talk about the damage the book caused. For a book that purports to try to improve things for humans it sure caused a ton of damage to humans. It was lacking in almost any real substance and was effectively a thinly disguised rant about coders. It was used to fire programmers, boost fake ass business guys, and created the plague of crappily implemented products that may look slick, but fail in horrible ways. In my own personal experience with the book I have had numerous executives and biz people toss it on my desk and say they read it and they agree. I've had friends fired or demoted because of this book. It also spawned whole generations of "UX consultants" who fleeced people using the phrasing and words in the book. I personally had to deal with consultant after consultant who would come in, looked at the best we could do, and then insult us. And any time a programmer tried to show who was really in charge and to blame, out came this damn book to prove us wrong. I could go on, but no matter what little snippets of text you remember, the impact of the book the way I remember it is one of negativity toward a group of people who were not to blame: programmers.

andjones 16y ago

Excellent read. I found myself relating this to the division between hacker types and the MBA types. I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people. As a hacker, I enjoy having large blocks of time to create what I think is good and not coding some autocratic vision of a product. As I've grown older though, I have come to appreciate and value the interaction between MBA types and myself. In one particular project an MBA type brought me valuable information about what we were doing well, how we compared against competitors, and what he thought our customers wanted. He then told me to run with it and stepped out of the way. I thought that was pretty neat. Another thought - A quote from the article: "A sudden rise in Long Beards simply copying Product People Products but doing it cheaper using their cost reducing backend skills." reminded of the Paul Graham essay "Copy What You Like" http://paulgraham.com/copy.html http://paulgraham.com/copy.html ... and copying something you like is probably a good way to bridge the gap between back end "long beard" and product designer.

jimbokun 16y ago
"I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people." One of the founding principles of Y Combinator is to make the Hackers the product people.

deleted 16y ago

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neilk 16y ago

There is really no mystery about UI. Yes, it requires skill and a deep knowledge of how humans process information, and even a touch of design genius. But the real problem is that most shops can't measure usability in a fine-grained way. And yet everyone does have some idea that it's really important. Consequently they are bamboozled by anyone who purports to have such expertise. For the most part, so-called usability experts are really just graphic design snobs. They have a certain aesthetic they like, which is arguably "cleaner" and has more white space. So the page might be better organized but that's nowhere near what true usability is. Real usability work is about trying to understand how the user is thinking. What their mental model is. What their goals are. In what context they are trying to achieve a task. Not just how their eye is scanning for information. Anyway my point is, when it comes to real usability work, programmers are just as (un)qualified as graphic designers, marketers, or any other kind of "product" person. Arguably the designer is supposed to have a larger toolbox when it comes to possible graphic treatments, but the programmer also has a toolbox of quantitative methods, experimentation, and a deep understanding of how the system could work.

jeffclark 16y ago
UI designer = "white space" UX designer = "mental space"
- alextgordon 16y ago
  It's easy to redefine the meaning of a term if it's rendered as an acronym. User Interface Designer = "white space" User Experience Designer = "mental space" Now how arbitrary is that? What is it about "Experience" that implies thinking and "Interface" that implies a lack thereof? What about all the designers unfortunate enough to come before the term "UX" was invented? I suppose Jef Raskin was only ever about white space. Let me suggest an improvement Mediocre Designer = "white space" Good Designer = "white space and mental space"
  - binomial 16y ago
    Well, there's also the fact that some "UX" guys don't have any great ability in graphic design, but are great when designing the use and flow of an interface. It's not necessary that an ability in the latter implies similar ability in the former.

krakensden 16y ago

On a side note, Heroku's web site is really, really pretty.

steveklabnik 16y ago
Check out their documentation for the new Addon program: http://addons.heroku.com/provider/ http://addons.heroku.com/provider/ Click some of the links at the bottom. It's so gorgeous.

danielnicollet 16y ago

I have been a "product person" for 15 years and I believe that product people like Michael describes are bad product people. A good product manager knows the UI and the guts behind it. I am not an engineer by training but I wouldn't be a good product manager in this field if I didn't know how to build a web server either. For the "Jeep Cherokee made from iron ore": I give up. ;-)

TWAndrews 16y ago
Agreed. The best product people are those who can understand the back end--even if they couldn't code it themselves, they have a respect and basic understanding for what's going on.
nkurz 16y ago
I want to believe, but I'm dubious. I'm almost certain when he says he can "make a web server", he means that he can sit down with a text editor, a compiler, and a standard C library, and produce a program that will serve HTTP requests. There's some gray area beyond this, but he definitely does not mean that he can download, configure, and run a premade piece of software. Is this what you mean too? Is there really a population of self-described "product people" who have this knowledge? Or did you interpret his statement differently? I certainly agree that such people exist, but I would be surprised that their luxurious gray beards don't blow their cover. Which is to say, do they really work as product managers?

greenlblue 16y ago

Good to be reminded once in a while that code is written for people and not machines.

billswift 16y ago
English is written for people and not machines. Code needs to be written for both. It's too bad that coders often forget that someone is going to need to be able to read it later.

metamemetics 16y ago

Here's what I do to plan my code based on user experience. I use Free Mind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and write in the middle of the home node "Things A User Can Do" I end up with things like "arrive at site", "create objectX", "view & edit objectY" as the next level nodes and keep going down levels from there. Since a mind map is a tree structure, it really helps to visually map out decisions a user will make. Following a branch is the user making a decision of what to spend their limited attention on. If you are improperly the distributing number of decisions a user must juggle at a particular node or repeating a lot of functionality in different areas, you will instantly visually see it. Then when you start translating to code, if it's M-V-C architecture like most webapps, the first order nodes are the names of your controller functions. What methodologies do other people use?

jpr 16y ago

Great stuff. I think I'm developing a severe case of nerd crush on Zed. The part about linguistic experience was especially good. I have thought for some time now that all configuration files, command-line options etc. should have simple and clearly defined syntax. Some already do. My dislike of weird, inconsistent and complex syntax (and semantics) is so severe that I've semi-intentionally not learnt shell-scripting, Perl or Ruby. Sadly, there are very few systems that I feel I get a good linguistic experience(TM)(R) out of. I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals. I really wish good textual UIs (there aren't many that I know, but I'm using one for writing this comment: GNU/Emacs) became the norm, instead of the randomness of the contemporary GUIs or the bass-arckwardness of shell-like languages. I think UIs should aim to become Turing-complete, completely self-documenting and reflective. The distinction between a function, a program and an user interface is in my opinion mostly arbitrary and harmful, creating an unnecessary wall of misunderstandings between the author of a program and its users.

jimbokun 16y ago
"I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals." The dilemma is that human language is staggeringly ambiguous. This works because human beings have an extremely sophisticated model of other human beings in their head and a really good pattern matching facility, which makes us really good at selecting the intended interpretation without even noticing the ambiguities. Presented with the languages we use to instruct computers, designed to be perfectly unambiguous, normal humans quickly get upset that the computer doesn't understand them if they veer the slightest bit from the tightrope of a language they're given to use. In other words, if you have a computer that faithfully and consistently passes the Turing Test, you may have something. Otherwise, pointing and grunting might be less frustrating for normal people. Another aside: pointing or at least gesturing is much better than even the perfect language interface for editing a photo or playing a video game. So it depends on the application.
- 16y ago

Bdennyw 16y ago

You know there are entire disciplines dedicated to the study of usability and user experience. Zed seems shocked that someone would claim that programmers (who generally have no training or interest usability) aren't good at making usable products. It's about as controversial as saying that construction workers don't make good architects.

mnemonicsloth 16y ago

Colophon: The Long Beards, (Latin Langobardi, later "Lombards") were a tribe of Germanic "barbarians" who settled in Northern Italy in the late 500s AD. They were primarily responsible for thwarting the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's campaign to reconquer Italy and re-establish the Western Empire. http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/alboin.jpg http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/alboin.jpg Today Lombardy is the most populous of Italy's 20 regions and Milan, the capital, is Italy's leading financial center.

zeemonkee 16y ago
That's interesting; I didn't know the origin of "Lombard". Justinian's attempt to conquer Italy was one of the bloodiest periods of European history.

GFischer 16y ago

"let's say you can pull this off and you have permission to really make the UI sexy. Alright, where's your designer? In every mega-corp and government agency I've worked for there has never been a staff designer of any kind." Amen to that. I'm working on a project to boost a new product line for my megacorp that competes against the established leader. So I asked to really boost the UI. And it was approved, provided of course, I made it myself :( . All my pleas for a designer were unheard or shrugged off. With some help from the Internet, I've come up with a design that doesn't suck, but it's still a far cry from what a designer would have done in a tenth of the time (in effect, they hired me as a crappy designer and spent far too much of my time aka their money, but they don't see it that way)

ojbyrne 16y ago

In my opinion usability requires a lot of grunt work. You have to craft error messages for any and all user input. You have to degrade gracefully if the user's interface (no JS, IE6, small screen on a phone, etc) doesn't meet the ideals for which you've designed the interface. Usable is much more work than functional. Most programmers are aware of that, and are willing to put the time and effort in to making what's required. But often the product people, besides deciding what things should look like overall, are also in control of the budget and schedule, and they expect all those kinds of things to just magically appear.

c00p3r 16y ago

Yet another blog post for the sake of a blog post. Every educated software engineer know, that by respecting and following a fundamental programming methodologies, such as data-abstraction, modularity, encapsulation of details, and other basic techniques for managing the complexity of large systems, you will get maintainability and programmer-friendliness for free. The problem is - most of in-house back-end developers and their public teachers doesn't have a even a basic engineering education. People who have managed to understand the ideas on which the SICP book is based upon, let alone MIT graduates, never write such long but empty posts.

jimbokun 16y ago

Another word for programmers who "make products for people who make products" are systems programmers. I'm sure Apple values systems programmers. And Google. And Oracle (at least they certainly should). Microsoft could not possibly build their products without systems programmers. Amazon could not have created its cloud products without systems programmers. In Apple's case, their products would be impossible without the capabilities that the systems people build. Without an operating system that they could strip down and fit on a phone, while keeping much of its core functionality, no iPhone. Likewise if they didn't have the technology underlying Safari under their control. Much of the eye candy that wowed people in Mac OS X came as a thin layer on top of the technology built by systems programmers. Like the graphics APIs underlying Expose. And the fast, system wide indexing behind Spotlight. So, if you want to be appreciated as someone who "makes products for people who make products," work for a software company that makes products requiring innovation in systems software.

cool-RR 16y ago

I agree with many of the things said in the article. I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them. I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core parts of their OSS projects, without realizing that if they concentrated a bit more on the things that Zed mentioned, their project would become so much easier and fun to work with, and they'd have a bigger healthier community around it. <Sociopathic rant> Sometimes when I see one of these projects, (let's call it, as an example, project FooBar and say that it converts between image formats,) I fantasize about forking the project, fixing up all the documentation to be good, make a good UI, give installers, make a nice logo, etc. Then rename it, sell it as a commercial project and become a millionaire, without crediting the authors of FooBar. Then I will drive in my fancy car to visit the core developers, and I will show them a wad of $100 notes and tell them: "You see this? This could have been yours. This could have been yours if only you documented your freaking code. You worked so hard on this code, and if you would have only taken care of the things around it, like documentation and binaries and design and UX, you could have made a lot of money. But you didn't. You suck." Then maybe for their next project they'll write freaking documetation. </Sociopathic rant>

forensic 16y ago
Sounds like an xkcd comic involving the guy with the hat.
nopassrecover 16y ago
Except the implicit intellectual theft. What you are describing is pretty close to the music industry's original purpose - bridging the gap between creators and buyers - and see how often that gets criticised (perhaps rightfully now) as vampiric.

Poiesis 16y ago

Steve Jobs on design: "It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works" This applies just as much to infrastructure as it does to anything customer-facing. To a non-programmer, for example, sendmail, nginx, and mongrel2 may all look like user-hostile crap. To a developer or administrator, it's easier to discern the differences in the design of this part, which is itself a major part of the usability of a webserver.

ryan-allen 16y ago

It's very refreshing to see someone write about their ideas and at the same time, demonstrate them with a real product. It's more than most people do when they proclaim things like what he has in his essay. Zed is someone worth listening to.

fun2have 16y ago

Well Copper designed the first prototype of Visual Basic. I think that explains lots. When you combine Zed's argument that "Nope, because the tools they've given you are again controlled by some corporation with a certain design ideal. If it's Microsoft then the things you have to work with are Microsoft looking and feeling. " How many unusable software products came about because of Visual Basic? I can rant and rant about Copper.

zeemonkee 16y ago

Couldn't agree more about how a poorly designed backend can increase costs, however pretty and well-designed the frontend is. We have a situation at work just like this: the inherited backend code is dreadful, full of WTFs due to poor implementation, lack of knowledge and lack of planning and design. It's eating away our profit margins. New features and customization take far longer than they should, and time estimates are impossible. Bugs, from simple UI stuff to server issues, are numerous and end up adding to customer support costs, not to mention reputation. Do the management understand this ? Nope, they just consider these costs to be the normal cost of doing business in this sector. We have pleaded time and again to rewrite and refactor the code, but never given the time or leeway because the sales team want the latest shiny feature to sell to the client. The irony is that we have a healthy and growing user base and top-rank clients. An outside competitor (of which the developers are aware, but about which the management are oblivious) are about to eat our lunch because they can simply execute better and faster.

yycom 16y ago

It's one thing for a random comment, but to see it on an actual, real live blog post by the likes of Zed is irritating. "couldn't care less", please. How can you be hackers if you can't get some basic logic right?

adrianhoward 16y ago

Just one point on Cooper and the Inmates book... it was written 11 years ago. Cooper being a vaguely smart guy has learned stuff since then and has quite a different view on the way development and ux folk fit together now. Folks interested in a look into his more current thinking might want to take a look at his keynote for Agile 2008 http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile_2008.html http://www.cooper.com/journal/2008/08/alans_keynote_at_agile..., and his keynote at Interaction 08 http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php http://interaction08.ixda.org/Alan_Cooper.php. And from his involvement in things like the http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-ux-retreat-at-cooper http://www.andersramsay.com/2010/02/04/notes-from-the-agile-... things are moving on from there too. There's a large chunk of the UX community that's moving away from the developers-as-enemy attitude. And vice versa for the developer community I hope :-)

jpwagner 16y ago

Frontend - Backend = Profit Awesome

cparedes 16y ago

I would kill for nicely designed API's for the things I work with. Then maybe I can stop writing stupid shell script wrappers.

shoover 16y ago

The comments here are very UI-centric, but what I found interesting was first the reminder to invest in fad-resistant skills (and don't forget, he drew a distinction between UI and hardcore design skills!). And second the stuff about parsers in the section about making usable infrastructure software. Every time I peek at the mongrel2 source, there's one or two more Ragel files in there, some of them generating token streams to be consumed by a Lemon parser. I figured there was a good reason for that (although I shot a quizzical glance at the one that just parses "--a --b b" CLI args into key/value pairs). What I didn't realize was how much that's an integral tenet of his software design philosophy.