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There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follow

There are some good points here, but of course I am going to ignore those to talk instead about the stuff I disagree with! The section about google maps follows a form of criticism that is widespread and particularly annoys me, namely => popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. There is always room for improvement, but all software requires tradeoffs. One of the things that makes a product like google maps so powerful is that it makes a lot of guesses about what you are actually trying to do in order to greatly reduce the complexity and inputs required in order to do these incredibly complicated tasks. So yes, sometimes when you move the map some piece of data will be removed from the screen without your explicit consent, and yeah, in that moment that feels incredibly annoying. But balance that against the 100s or 1000s of times you used google maps and it just worked, perfectly, because it reduced the number of inputs needed to use it to the bare minimum. Google maps doesn't need to fit every use case perfectly, and while its fine to talk through how your hyper specific use case could and should work, remember all the times that it seamlessly routed you around traffic from your office to your house in one touch while you were already hurtling down the highway at 70 mph.

PostPost 7y ago
The example for maps is not a "hyper specific use case": "The process you WANT: pick your start and end. now start searching for places in between. Your start and end are saved. When you find someplace interesting, add it to your list. Keep doing that, keep searching and adding." That's a common use case. The problem with Google maps (and the problem with a lot of modern software) is, as you say, it makes a lot of guesses. The definition of a good user interface is "to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother"* Google Maps is great for finding directions to a very specific place. But after mapping those directions, doing almost anything else destroys that route. If I have to (and I do) open multiple map tabs, or repeatedly enter the same route info after making a search (if I'm on a phone) it is not a good UI. *https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/
- sonofaplum 7y ago
  Why do you think that use case is that common? And why do you think google maps should elevate that particular use case above other competing use cases?
  - feanaro 7y ago
    How would not erasing information when you move the map compromise the current use case, though?
    - sonofaplum 7y ago
      Because especially on mobile, screen space is insanely valuable, and if you want to show new information from the new area the map has been moved to you often need to remove "stale" information.
      - feanaro 7y ago
        Sure, but it could just as easily be a button to clear this information explicitly or it could just be hidden, but not deleted.
    - darren_ 7y ago
      it wouldn't, which is why the complaint in these tweets ("drag the map even a pixel? it erases all your results and closes the infobox you were looking at") is, in fact, not something that happens. give it a go.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Gas station or McDonald's on the route to some far destination. I've done this in the android app and it works but it can be a little awkward.
  - raisedbyninjas 7y ago
    Search for destinations along your route is (finally) a feature in the gmaps mobile app. It isn't in the web-app. Apparently Google agrees that it is a desirable feature. Why does the UI-limited, small screen experience surpass the rich desktop experience?
eitland 7y ago
Edit: yes. Rewrote half of it. The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified". The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route. I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system menu. The "simplified" version removed all that + the timeline feature I think and replaced it with one search box. The timeline came back after a while as did a number of other features they removed but it still isn't as easy or intuitive as the early versions and it still annoys me every time I want to get a route from A to B (as opposed to from where I am now to B). Compare this to Windows 95 that I disliked for a few months until I got used to system wide drag and drop and realized it was in fact better than Windows 3.1.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Performance has also degraded disastrously. My phone is kind of a dinosaur at this point (Galaxy 7), but the lag when scrolling around the map is seconds, and elements delay-load so that misclicks are constant.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Changed to an iPhone XR a few weeks ago. The cheap model of iPhone and it still feels way faster than the my latest androids, including Samsung S7 edge and other flagship phones (and yes, I bought them new). I've stuck with Android until now, but now that I can replace the keyboard on iPhone I gave it a chance and I'm super happy with it.
    - rubber_duck 7y ago
      You are comparing a 3 gen old device to the previous gen iPhone. iPhone 7 I had is noticeably laggy with maps and other heavy apps. Meanwhile my Samsung S10e (equivalent to the XR) has more than sufficient performance and has a better screen for a lower price.
FussyZeus 7y ago
Except the guesses need to be good. I make it a point to avoid criticizing applications for not being power usery enough but there's a line you can draw where it becomes clear that the guesses are too frequent and consuming too much computing power, just to be ignored. I've seen this a lot with my mother in particular, who is certainly not a power user but knows enough to get by, struggle to use software that's trying too damn hard to guess what she wants, instead of letting her just tell it what she freaking wants.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  It's like how Microsoft announced they were going to use advanced AI to predict when would be a good time to reboot people's PCs for updates instead of, you know, just fucking letting them pick.
  - FussyZeus 7y ago
    Or the myriad of ways I struggle with my Apple products that are almost universally black boxes in which stuff goes and functionality comes out, without any way to change or debug behaviors. Apple seems to get it right pretty consistently, which is why I keep their stuff. But when it does manage to go wrong, holy shit debugging it is an absolute nightmare.
maliker 7y ago
Google has an alternate interface to maps called "My Maps"[1] with the kind of editing and composition features the author misses. I use it all the time to make maps for road trips with lots of points of interest and complicated routes. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/
- throw7 7y ago
  I tried mymaps some time ago, but there was no way (or i couldn't figure it out) to have gmaps use it for navigation. The two seemed to be quite separate products.
DrScientist 7y ago
Two points: They keep changing the interface faster than I can learn it. The way to enable complex expression of tasks in a user interface is by composition. ie have microtasks that you can then combine in different ways. That's what makes excel great - each cell is a single function but you can combine them to build stuff the developer never knew was possible. Being able to store state ( a location ) and then operate on that state is a pretty basic building block of a composable map UI.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 7y ago
My biggest complaint about google maps is that you cant read them when printed. I've been criticized for even wanting to print them, but the option is there with unreadable results.
normalnorm 7y ago
> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"? Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map before. Now it prioritizes ad revenue at the expense of what users actually want to do. There are no "power users" in this new world.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out. Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would you improve in this particular area?
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    There are definitely cases where I am so zoomed in that only a couple of roads are visible on the entire screen, yet there is no name on a road and I have to drag the view down the road multiple screen widths until I can see the name. (This isn't a trade-off for advertising, it's just a flaw.) Edit: In fact, I just confirmed it now. Opened up Google Maps and started looking at small roads. For the third road I checked, Maps wouldn't show a name no matter how far I zoomed in, and I had to drag the view as described above.
  - simias 7y ago
    It's really not about not having enough room. An example that I found immediately zooming at some random location on Google Maps: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-174804_map.png https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-174804_map.png Note that none of the larger roads leading to the roundabout at the top-left is named, while some (but not all) smaller streets names are here. Instead you have the "D509" label copy/pasted haphazardly but that's not the actual name of the boulevard that would be used on a post address so it's of very limited use (and even leaving those labels in there's plenty of room to add the actual street name). Here's Open Street Map for the same map at a similar zoom level: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-175553_map-osm.png https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-175553_map-osm.png OSM doesn't have all the bells and whistles of GMaps, but as far as the map itself it's vastly superior IMO.
kgoltsov 7y ago
I like his point about not knowing what to look for. On a paper map, you can see all of the points of interest for a specific location. This is great for planning trips. On google maps, you might not see what's around until you zoom in, but you don't know where to zoom in the first place.
drngdds 7y ago
>But balance that against the 100s or 1000s of times you used google maps and it just worked, perfectly, because it reduced the number of inputs needed to use it to the bare minimum. I can't, because the autocomplete/dropdown/prediction for saved locations is disabled if you don't enable Google's device-wide "Web and App Activity" spyware function. This means I have to type my address every time I want directions home, even though I manually saved it. It's hot garbage. Another very common usecase which is impossible: getting directions to a place and then looking at the street view so I'll know what it looks like. I have to remember to check street view before the search or redo the search entirely. Again, hot garbage, and inexcusable for a company spending bazillions of dollars on UX people.
mypalmike 7y ago
Indeed, but even without getting into the details of UX tradeoffs, etc... Google Maps was science fiction in 1983. The whole thread misses the fact that the functionality we have in our pockets today would have absolutely blown our minds in 1983. How can it be called perceptually slower?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Simple. Because it got slower over time. All these threads about software being worse and "perceptually slower" than it used to are about regressions. Google Maps and other mentioned tools aren't pushing the envelope. They aren't bleeding edge. They were science fiction made manifest 10-15 years ago, and since then actually decayed in utility, ergonomics and performance. Meanwhile, all the money invested in all the software and hardware should have given us the opposite outcome.
  - abnry 7y ago
    I get your point, and it has its merit, but at some point you'd expect things to slow down, right?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      My experience makes me expect it, on the theory that popular software sucks and companies building it tend to have broken incentive structures. It shouldn't be like this in theory. Computers only ever get faster (occasional fixes for CPU bugs notwithstanding). So making software slow down requires active work. So does removing or breaking useful features.
  - mypalmike 7y ago
    While utility and ergonomics can be debated, I'd be surprised if performance of Google Maps in particular has regressed. Google keeps track of latency metrics for every one of its thousands (millions?) of services. If the services involved in Google Maps began to regress in latency, it would have been noticed and addressed. You can be sure that many performance improvements have been implemented, and if you had access to the 2005 and 2019 versions, you would be amazed at how capable and fast today's is compared to then.
bmurphy1976 7y ago
I have a problem rather frequently with Google maps. I zoom in to a small 3x3 mile area and search for something like Chinese restaurants. What usually happens is Google either zooms out to the entire city (a 100x100 mile area) or it zooms away completely back to my home city. That's fucking annoying. Then I manually place everything back to where I actually wanted it and had it in the first place, and lo and behold it's showing me every kind of restaurant instead of Chinese restaurants. I have to click the search this area button which of course conveniently wasn't on the original screen to get the results I wanted in the first place. Then I click on a restaurant to look at the pictures and read the reviews and when I'm done I naturally click the back button and it's all gone. I'm back to some other screen, maybe an empty map or one of the screens I was on previously that I didn't want, but it's almost never the list of Chinese restaurants in the small geographic area I was researching in the first place. And that's just one example of one problem I regularly have with Google Maps. It's a horrible horrible user experience if you aren't using it in the way they think you should be using it. I don't think this is a power user use case. Everybody wants to look up Chinese restaurants at a family or friend's house at some point in their life. Why is this so fucking hard?
nindalf 7y ago
The Office 2007 redesign was panned for similar reasons. Power users couldn’t understand why the biggest, most prominently placed buttons were for copy and paste, when everyone knew that you could use ctrl+c and ctrl+v instead. Turns out, only the power users knew that and the vast majority of users clicked 4 times for edit-copy, edit-paste. Now they only had to click twice. This was a quality of life improvement for the vast majority of users, even if it wasn’t for the minority who used it the most.
xenocyon 7y ago
It's not just about 'power users', and you can see this easily by looking at car dashboard controls for standard consumer cars over the last couple of decades. Old controls had the property that you could in most cases feel and adjust them without looking, and they responded instantly. Today one is often forced to interact with a touchscreen which has to be looked at it while driving, responds poorly and erratically to touch, and often buries basic options in deep menus. A simple thing like lowering stereo volume, previously instantaneous, can now have a significant latency. None of the above is about power users. And none of this is innate to today's hardware. It's a matter of prioritization. And consumers, though initially swayed by shiny objects, do eventually respond to good design and good engineering. Indeed Google itself found its early success partly through clean and thoughtful design, at a time when other search engine websites were massively cluttered and banner ads were the bane of the Web.
tomc1985 7y ago
You had me until you started minimizing power users, like pretty much every software developer today. I don't see the guesswork as a good thing; Google Maps hasn't "just worked" for me anywhere near 100% of the time in years. "One step forward, two steps back" would almost perfectly describe GMap's "smartness"
TeMPOraL 7y ago
There are many excellent points made in response to your comment, but I'd like to point out one thing: > popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y' Being a power user isn't a function of geekness, or a mark of belonging to some niche. Being a power user is a function of frequency and depth of use. My wife is a power user of a particular e-commerce seller backend, a certain CAD software, and Excel, all due to her job. She is not technical, but when you spend 8 hours a day each day in front of some piece of software, you eventually do become a power user. Teenagers of today are power users of Snapchat, because they use it all the time. Software being "power user friendly" isn't about accommodating existing power users; it's about allowing power users of that software to appear. It's about allowing the room for growth, allowing to do more with less effort. Software that doesn't becomes a toy, inviting only shallow, casual interaction. It's not all it could be. And it's the worst when software that was power user friendly becomes less so over time - it takes back the value it once gave to people.

PostPost 7y ago

The example for maps is not a "hyper specific use case": "The process you WANT: pick your start and end. now start searching for places in between. Your start and end are saved. When you find someplace interesting, add it to your list. Keep doing that, keep searching and adding." That's a common use case. The problem with Google maps (and the problem with a lot of modern software) is, as you say, it makes a lot of guesses. The definition of a good user interface is "to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother"* Google Maps is great for finding directions to a very specific place. But after mapping those directions, doing almost anything else destroys that route. If I have to (and I do) open multiple map tabs, or repeatedly enter the same route info after making a search (if I'm on a phone) it is not a good UI. *https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/

sonofaplum 7y ago
Why do you think that use case is that common? And why do you think google maps should elevate that particular use case above other competing use cases?
- feanaro 7y ago
  How would not erasing information when you move the map compromise the current use case, though?
  - sonofaplum 7y ago
    Because especially on mobile, screen space is insanely valuable, and if you want to show new information from the new area the map has been moved to you often need to remove "stale" information.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      Sure, but it could just as easily be a button to clear this information explicitly or it could just be hidden, but not deleted.
  - darren_ 7y ago
    it wouldn't, which is why the complaint in these tweets ("drag the map even a pixel? it erases all your results and closes the infobox you were looking at") is, in fact, not something that happens. give it a go.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Gas station or McDonald's on the route to some far destination. I've done this in the android app and it works but it can be a little awkward.
- raisedbyninjas 7y ago
  Search for destinations along your route is (finally) a feature in the gmaps mobile app. It isn't in the web-app. Apparently Google agrees that it is a desirable feature. Why does the UI-limited, small screen experience surpass the rich desktop experience?

eitland 7y ago

Edit: yes. Rewrote half of it. The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified". The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route. I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system menu. The "simplified" version removed all that + the timeline feature I think and replaced it with one search box. The timeline came back after a while as did a number of other features they removed but it still isn't as easy or intuitive as the early versions and it still annoys me every time I want to get a route from A to B (as opposed to from where I am now to B). Compare this to Windows 95 that I disliked for a few months until I got used to system wide drag and drop and realized it was in fact better than Windows 3.1.

thrower123 7y ago
Performance has also degraded disastrously. My phone is kind of a dinosaur at this point (Galaxy 7), but the lag when scrolling around the map is seconds, and elements delay-load so that misclicks are constant.
- eitland 7y ago
  Changed to an iPhone XR a few weeks ago. The cheap model of iPhone and it still feels way faster than the my latest androids, including Samsung S7 edge and other flagship phones (and yes, I bought them new). I've stuck with Android until now, but now that I can replace the keyboard on iPhone I gave it a chance and I'm super happy with it.
  - rubber_duck 7y ago
    You are comparing a 3 gen old device to the previous gen iPhone. iPhone 7 I had is noticeably laggy with maps and other heavy apps. Meanwhile my Samsung S10e (equivalent to the XR) has more than sufficient performance and has a better screen for a lower price.

FussyZeus 7y ago

Except the guesses need to be good. I make it a point to avoid criticizing applications for not being power usery enough but there's a line you can draw where it becomes clear that the guesses are too frequent and consuming too much computing power, just to be ignored. I've seen this a lot with my mother in particular, who is certainly not a power user but knows enough to get by, struggle to use software that's trying too damn hard to guess what she wants, instead of letting her just tell it what she freaking wants.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
It's like how Microsoft announced they were going to use advanced AI to predict when would be a good time to reboot people's PCs for updates instead of, you know, just fucking letting them pick.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Or the myriad of ways I struggle with my Apple products that are almost universally black boxes in which stuff goes and functionality comes out, without any way to change or debug behaviors. Apple seems to get it right pretty consistently, which is why I keep their stuff. But when it does manage to go wrong, holy shit debugging it is an absolute nightmare.

maliker 7y ago

Google has an alternate interface to maps called "My Maps"[1] with the kind of editing and composition features the author misses. I use it all the time to make maps for road trips with lots of points of interest and complicated routes. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/

throw7 7y ago
I tried mymaps some time ago, but there was no way (or i couldn't figure it out) to have gmaps use it for navigation. The two seemed to be quite separate products.

DrScientist 7y ago

Two points: They keep changing the interface faster than I can learn it. The way to enable complex expression of tasks in a user interface is by composition. ie have microtasks that you can then combine in different ways. That's what makes excel great - each cell is a single function but you can combine them to build stuff the developer never knew was possible. Being able to store state ( a location ) and then operate on that state is a pretty basic building block of a composable map UI.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 7y ago

My biggest complaint about google maps is that you cant read them when printed. I've been criticized for even wanting to print them, but the option is there with unreadable results.

normalnorm 7y ago

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y', therefore x is hopelessly borked, poorly designed, and borderline useless. So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"? Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map before. Now it prioritizes ad revenue at the expense of what users actually want to do. There are no "power users" in this new world.

ineedasername 7y ago
Getting directions is simple. Even the author doesn't take issue with that specific functionality. And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out. Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would you improve in this particular area?
- jessriedel 7y ago
  There are definitely cases where I am so zoomed in that only a couple of roads are visible on the entire screen, yet there is no name on a road and I have to drag the view down the road multiple screen widths until I can see the name. (This isn't a trade-off for advertising, it's just a flaw.) Edit: In fact, I just confirmed it now. Opened up Google Maps and started looking at small roads. For the third road I checked, Maps wouldn't show a name no matter how far I zoomed in, and I had to drag the view as described above.
- simias 7y ago
  It's really not about not having enough room. An example that I found immediately zooming at some random location on Google Maps: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-174804_map.png https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-174804_map.png Note that none of the larger roads leading to the roundabout at the top-left is named, while some (but not all) smaller streets names are here. Instead you have the "D509" label copy/pasted haphazardly but that's not the actual name of the boulevard that would be used on a post address so it's of very limited use (and even leaving those labels in there's plenty of room to add the actual street name). Here's Open Street Map for the same map at a similar zoom level: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-175553_map-osm.png https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-175553_map-osm.png OSM doesn't have all the bells and whistles of GMaps, but as far as the map itself it's vastly superior IMO.

kgoltsov 7y ago

I like his point about not knowing what to look for. On a paper map, you can see all of the points of interest for a specific location. This is great for planning trips. On google maps, you might not see what's around until you zoom in, but you don't know where to zoom in the first place.

drngdds 7y ago

>But balance that against the 100s or 1000s of times you used google maps and it just worked, perfectly, because it reduced the number of inputs needed to use it to the bare minimum. I can't, because the autocomplete/dropdown/prediction for saved locations is disabled if you don't enable Google's device-wide "Web and App Activity" spyware function. This means I have to type my address every time I want directions home, even though I manually saved it. It's hot garbage. Another very common usecase which is impossible: getting directions to a place and then looking at the street view so I'll know what it looks like. I have to remember to check street view before the search or redo the search entirely. Again, hot garbage, and inexcusable for a company spending bazillions of dollars on UX people.

mypalmike 7y ago

Indeed, but even without getting into the details of UX tradeoffs, etc... Google Maps was science fiction in 1983. The whole thread misses the fact that the functionality we have in our pockets today would have absolutely blown our minds in 1983. How can it be called perceptually slower?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Simple. Because it got slower over time. All these threads about software being worse and "perceptually slower" than it used to are about regressions. Google Maps and other mentioned tools aren't pushing the envelope. They aren't bleeding edge. They were science fiction made manifest 10-15 years ago, and since then actually decayed in utility, ergonomics and performance. Meanwhile, all the money invested in all the software and hardware should have given us the opposite outcome.
- abnry 7y ago
  I get your point, and it has its merit, but at some point you'd expect things to slow down, right?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    My experience makes me expect it, on the theory that popular software sucks and companies building it tend to have broken incentive structures. It shouldn't be like this in theory. Computers only ever get faster (occasional fixes for CPU bugs notwithstanding). So making software slow down requires active work. So does removing or breaking useful features.
- mypalmike 7y ago
  While utility and ergonomics can be debated, I'd be surprised if performance of Google Maps in particular has regressed. Google keeps track of latency metrics for every one of its thousands (millions?) of services. If the services involved in Google Maps began to regress in latency, it would have been noticed and addressed. You can be sure that many performance improvements have been implemented, and if you had access to the 2005 and 2019 versions, you would be amazed at how capable and fast today's is compared to then.

bmurphy1976 7y ago

I have a problem rather frequently with Google maps. I zoom in to a small 3x3 mile area and search for something like Chinese restaurants. What usually happens is Google either zooms out to the entire city (a 100x100 mile area) or it zooms away completely back to my home city. That's fucking annoying. Then I manually place everything back to where I actually wanted it and had it in the first place, and lo and behold it's showing me every kind of restaurant instead of Chinese restaurants. I have to click the search this area button which of course conveniently wasn't on the original screen to get the results I wanted in the first place. Then I click on a restaurant to look at the pictures and read the reviews and when I'm done I naturally click the back button and it's all gone. I'm back to some other screen, maybe an empty map or one of the screens I was on previously that I didn't want, but it's almost never the list of Chinese restaurants in the small geographic area I was researching in the first place. And that's just one example of one problem I regularly have with Google Maps. It's a horrible horrible user experience if you aren't using it in the way they think you should be using it. I don't think this is a power user use case. Everybody wants to look up Chinese restaurants at a family or friend's house at some point in their life. Why is this so fucking hard?

nindalf 7y ago

The Office 2007 redesign was panned for similar reasons. Power users couldn’t understand why the biggest, most prominently placed buttons were for copy and paste, when everyone knew that you could use ctrl+c and ctrl+v instead. Turns out, only the power users knew that and the vast majority of users clicked 4 times for edit-copy, edit-paste. Now they only had to click twice. This was a quality of life improvement for the vast majority of users, even if it wasn’t for the minority who used it the most.

xenocyon 7y ago

It's not just about 'power users', and you can see this easily by looking at car dashboard controls for standard consumer cars over the last couple of decades. Old controls had the property that you could in most cases feel and adjust them without looking, and they responded instantly. Today one is often forced to interact with a touchscreen which has to be looked at it while driving, responds poorly and erratically to touch, and often buries basic options in deep menus. A simple thing like lowering stereo volume, previously instantaneous, can now have a significant latency. None of the above is about power users. And none of this is innate to today's hardware. It's a matter of prioritization. And consumers, though initially swayed by shiny objects, do eventually respond to good design and good engineering. Indeed Google itself found its early success partly through clean and thoughtful design, at a time when other search engine websites were massively cluttered and banner ads were the bane of the Web.

tomc1985 7y ago

You had me until you started minimizing power users, like pretty much every software developer today. I don't see the guesswork as a good thing; Google Maps hasn't "just worked" for me anywhere near 100% of the time in years. "One step forward, two steps back" would almost perfectly describe GMap's "smartness"

TeMPOraL 7y ago

There are many excellent points made in response to your comment, but I'd like to point out one thing: > popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y' Being a power user isn't a function of geekness, or a mark of belonging to some niche. Being a power user is a function of frequency and depth of use. My wife is a power user of a particular e-commerce seller backend, a certain CAD software, and Excel, all due to her job. She is not technical, but when you spend 8 hours a day each day in front of some piece of software, you eventually do become a power user. Teenagers of today are power users of Snapchat, because they use it all the time. Software being "power user friendly" isn't about accommodating existing power users; it's about allowing power users of that software to appear. It's about allowing the room for growth, allowing to do more with less effort. Software that doesn't becomes a toy, inviting only shallow, casual interaction. It's not all it could be. And it's the worst when software that was power user friendly becomes less so over time - it takes back the value it once gave to people.