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In my comment about the Bloomberg Terminal, I talked about how it, and any good software (also like Vim and Emacs) makes users feel like a wizard. People, espec
by mruts 8y ago
In my comment about the Bloomberg Terminal, I talked about how it, and any good software (also like Vim and Emacs) makes users feel like a wizard. People, especially enterprise banking users, want to feel powerful when using an app. Like it’s an extension of their own mind and body.
If you make something that is valuable but doesn’t give the users a power trip, it will fail. This is just how people work.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoIt's not just about power trips. It's about utility and context. Vim and Emacs give you actual power, not just the feeling of it. Vim's "shortcut grammar" and Emacs' deep interoperability are a huge productivity multiplier for any imaginable task that you can reduce to manipulating text. Information density is about providing context. A good example here would be Google Maps. The app is optimized to be used as a point-to-point navigation tool, but some design decisions - like inconsistent showing of street names - make it pretty much useless as a map. Your UI design may be leading the user down a prescribed path, but if you make it show the minimal amount of information necessary on that path, the UI automatically becomes useless for all other related paths.