9 ms·

Perfect UX Is Impossible (2019)

85 points by eitland 7y ago

eitland 7y ago
Deleted and resubmitted since I had posted a wrong URL.
temptemptemp111 7y ago
How about just not modifying the UX in a directionless way? How about some coherency over a 5+ year period of UX?
whatl3y 7y ago
I agree with basically everything said in the post. I also don’t believe any sane and experienced software professional would disagree with any point made here. I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function for the highest percentage of users possible. If you have multiple personas of users who use your application, the amount of time you spend with the R&D of the UX to satisfy each persona should likely be proportional to the percentage of revenue each persona brings in. I’m a backend developer who is pretty awful at developing good UIs, but damn I appreciate a good one when it comes along and feel like the part of the brain that’s used to build a very solid UI is a special one that not many people have developed.
- colinjoy 7y ago
  “the amount of time you spend [...] should likely be proportional to the percentage of revenue each persona brings in” ... and with that you enter the deep waters of revenue attribution. Whose needs are more important? Those of the exec signing the deal, interested in reporting and auditing features, or those of the poor schmuck using form #B67-A hours a day to enter data? Your customers and your users are not necessarily the same people.
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function for the highest percentage of users possible. And so, it blows my mind how Instagram and WhatsApp have continued to get their UX right despite adding so many features over the years. This is super hard considering more than half the world, not all of whom are technology savvy, use WhatsApp and Instagram on daily basis with flawless understanding. I mean, sure, they might struggle a bit, but it isn't anywhere close to frustrating them unlike other popular software. Not to mention how frictionless, smooth their entire UX is. I guess, design focused on content consumption is easier (Email/IM) than content creation (Microsoft Office)? Or, may be, the value of popular software is such, that people put up with it, anyway, and learn to live with it despite the UX?
  - XCSme 7y ago
    Using a chat application or scrolling through a feed is not hard. Users can easily learn a new UX if the product really provides value. Yes, having better UX is good for many reasons, but people have always learned to go around bad UX in order to achieve their goals. Facebook has a shitty UX, I never find what I'm looking for, spammed with ads, fake news, slow loading times, bugged notifications, yet it's still one of the most popular sites on the planet. Their ad manager is a joke when it comes to UX and bugs, yet people still spend billions on advertising on Facebook.
tjoff 7y ago
>> We just simplified the whole Desktop Environment Experience! > Fine, this will be great for onboarding new users but you just made it a lot harder to use for all existing users. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in UX. People almost always mix up user-friendly with beginner-friendly. Those are very different and the majority of cases they are opposites of each other. A good UX is one that combine the two (well, that is also under the assumption that a broad audience is targeted).
- Torwald 7y ago
  > A good UX is one that combine the two good metaphor is of help. e.g. desktop metaphor for tool to manage files. works good for beginners, doesn't constrain experts.
- kaanuynk 7y ago
  Cannot agree more. For beginners the UX should be informative while for users in general it should be friendly.
- marcusjt 7y ago
  In principle there's no reason why you couldn't cater to each user group quite differently and make one experience morph into another as users gain confidence and/or show interest in more advanced features, but in reality there's rarely the scope to even refine the basics iteratively, so everything ends up heavily compromised. (Speaking as a UX designer, 10+ years experience)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zuhayeer 7y ago
Getting caught up in trying to have the perfect UX is one of the largest causes of developer paralysis that I’ve seen. IMO, push it even if it works for 75% of people, and keep working towards 100% – UX is learned on the way.
- CarVac 7y ago
  Attempting to achieve perfection is a problem, but at a minimum I believe any feature needs a good long time spent considering pain points for a wide variety of users. Achieving perfection is impossible, but you need to at least improve the level of the worst aspects. A lot of the problems in open-source software user interfaces, I contend, come from people finishing a feature on the backend and then throwing together a UI that merely functions. I, on the other hand, spend most of a feature's development time thinking about the UI, putting a lot of consideration towards how it interacts with other aspects of the program and how I can remove unnecessary mouse clicks and reduce visual surprise.
  - fendy3002 7y ago
    Both budget and time are the constraints for UI / UX. A bad UI / UX can be redesigned easily without affecting much, especially data. But bad process can produce bad data, and it's both harder and time consuming to fix process and data.
mattlondon 7y ago
> you didn't put in any kind way to configure it. I have often found that in many projects I have worked on that there are always UX compromises that are made for good reasons (typically to make the primary use cases as usable/simple/easy as possible etc, often at the expense of "power users"). Things that can be configured often never get done purely due to time/resource constraints, rather than due to any maliciousness or lack of foresight. You can bet your bottom dollar that the engineers building the system will have brought up the fact that something can/should be a user preference/have a power-user shortcut/etc etc during early stages of design & development (since the engineers tend to fall into the "power user" category due to their familiarity with the software they're making) However, I have found that once the primary use case gets marked as done, it is never updated to allow power users to shortcut/configure bits and pieces "because agile" (i.e. you are off to the next feature and there is never a time to go back and look at tech-/UX-debt). For what it is worth, I don't think this is a bad thing. Often the "power users" with some niche workflows are typically a) a very, very small percentage of your users, and b) a very, very vocal percentage of your users. Most of the users will just get on with their life when using your software, but it is the "power users" who will make sure that you're aware of how much your team's work sucks. When the "power users" are a significant proportion of your users, only then is it worth formally recognising their needs as part of the formal design, otherwise it generally seems to be a lot of work to support the niche needs of literally a handful of users at the opportunity cost of adding features for the other 99.99995% of your users.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > Most of the users will just get on with their life when using your software, but it is the "power users" who will make sure that you're aware of how much your team's work sucks. It is enough that one make a viral blogpost detailing why he thinks your software sucks, for a lot of people to instantly put your software in the "won't touch" category though.
  - FalconSensei 7y ago
    possibly 'a lot of people' meaning other power users though. How much blog posts about software do you think regular folks read?
doublekill 7y ago
Move away from one-size-fits all, but have the UX adapt to user behavior. Personalized UX is pretty close to perfect.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  at the same time, way more complex to automate tests/qa, and to debug
ronyfadel 7y ago
Close to “Perfect UX” is when technology is acting on your behalf, and you don’t even know it’s there. A good example of this is the Nest thermostat. After a few weeks you just forget it exists, and it does its thing in the background.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Like any proper thermostat. Except when it loses Internet connection or Nest/Google decides it's bored with the platform and bricks your thermostat remotely :). I think depending on third-party subscriptions should be considered an UX antipattern.
  - ronyfadel 7y ago
    Other thermostats don’t learn your preferences. If anything, Nest gets in the way the first few weeks, then goes to the background. I’m talking about product UX, how a Nest thermostat usually works, independently of Google getting bored ;)
XCSme 7y ago
I partially agree with the article, but the examples given are very simple and don't prove anything. Saying that it's impossible to have good UX because A is good for some users and bad for others while B is the opposite doesn't prove that there is no option C which satisfies both types of users.
- valuearb 7y ago
  It’s a straw man article. No one is saying any UX is perfect, and their analysis is so superficial to be meaningless.
gfodor 7y ago
Agree with this article - also, another unspoken truth about UX: it is a multiplier, not a constant factor. If your app provides a ton of value, people will suffer through truly awful UX. And the tightest flow can’t save an app nobody wants.
michaelbrave 7y ago
Because there will always be more than one target audience with different needs and preferred ways of doing things it can't be done. You can do the most common for your targeted audience which can be a good solution, but never will everyone think it's perfect. Its similar to the idea that someones utopia is someone else's dystopia.
kaanuynk 7y ago
I mostly agree with the article. A good UX includes a simple and informative onboarding experience for the new users while improving the friction points of the existing users.
atoav 7y ago
Many people forget to ask the (essential) question: "Good UX – for whom?" For example a tool that might be exceptional to use for a professional might be very very bad to use for a consumer and vice versa. Software (in theory) could give multiple target demographics with good consistent etc UX at once by beeing configurable. However there is a clear trend to making everything intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad), often at the expense of people who have to use the software the whole day. In the worst case the whole target demographic of a software is powerusers but the UX still trades off usability for a flat learning curve. Imagine a point of sale system. Retail workers have to use that stuff the whole day. This means it nearly never makes sense to sacrifice power user efficiency just to be able to tell some manager who will never have to work with the damn thing: "Look how easy this is to understand".
- deltron3030 7y ago
  The key question is if the tasks and users value a differentiated output from using the software or not. If not, then the best UX is as streamlined and invisible as possible. Professional or power user doesn't mean much here, because they could value both things, streamlining and an abundance of options, it's domain dependent.
- chongli 7y ago
  intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad) And yet my dad is constantly confused and frustrated by all these gestures he keeps invoking by accident. In truth, iOS is loaded with power user features that constantly surprise beginners. The same is true for macOS with all of its trackpad gestures and complicated windowing features. The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS. It had a consistent user interface backed by extensive research into human-computer interaction. It used powerful spatial metaphors that worked with the brain’s spatial memory [1], not against it like today’s “smart” systems that try to guess what the user wants. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    >The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS This is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing, inserting their own preference in place of Classic Mac OS. For your typical user, I'd wager it will often be the OS to which they were first exposed. (though certainly not always) Personally, I rather liked Windows 3.11. It did everything I needed at the time, and it was simple enough that I could hold pretty much the entire abstraction of it's configurations, settings, features, etc in my own mental space. Windows 95 was... okay. I managed to skip ME and Vista. In contrast, Classic Mac OS seemed like a "pretty" OS that crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues that often required disabling "extensions" and re-enabling them in groups to find the offending one. Until then, you'd experience the supremely unhelpful "type 10 bomb" hard crash. Windows BSOD was annoying, but I hated those bombs.
tjchear 7y ago
I read some of the other posts by OP and they mentioned that the ribbon interface was a mess. I remember I quite enjoyed it, and I'm also aware that some people didn't like it, but I never knew why they didn't like it. Anyone here care to enlighten me, from a UX standpoint?
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  For me, the ribbon interface makes it difficult to find things, unless they happen to be on the default ribbon. The classical menu is a tree structure. The first level is horizontal in the menu bar, every other level is vertical and opens when you click the previous level. You can easily go inspect the entire structure if you are looking for something that you use rarely and don't remember where it is. Also, the items are ordered by topic ("file-related things here, editing-related things here"), with ribbons it feels like "most frequently used buttons here, everything else randomly hidden somewhere else". It does not help that some ribbons are secret and only appear when you do a specific action, e.g. select an item of given type. I'd rather have a disabled menu item that I can't click, but at least I see that it exists. Shortly, with classical menu I feel in control: everything is here, neatly organized by topic, I choose what I want. With ribbons it feels like the system discourages me from doing anything that is not in the default ribbon, by making it more difficult to find. I have no idea how large part of this is simply a force of habit. But from my experience, new users who never saw a non-ribbon menu still have a problem finding things. Except now I have that problem, too. (In larger context, it feels like a typical Microsoft arbitrary change for change's sake. Just like the control panel is dramatically different in each version of Windows. It's like the more important something is, the more they love to experiment with it, where "experiment" means forcing it on all users.)
  - tjchear 7y ago
    I see. I can only say that I was never advanced enough of a user that this became a problem; much of what I needed was already in the ribbon, and I could find them by just scanning the whole thing, as opposed to drilling down menus.
- gertlex 7y ago
leecarraher 7y ago
At least that's Microsoft's motto
acjohnson55 7y ago
I don't think the title is helpful, but I agree with the gist of the article. We have a long way to go to achieve human-computer interfaces for naive users that are better than human-human-computer systems, where the human in the middle is a trained expert user working with a poweruser interface. This is basically what sales and customer support are for digital services and SaaS. I think we'll eventually get there, but it's a long road, with loads of open problems. This is why I'm optimistic about the career prospects of product engineers for the foreseeable future.
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Define "perfect." If we want an app that will work for all possible users, then, yes, it is impossible. If, however, we want a UX that is optimized for only a certain set of users, then it may actually be entirely possible; especially if we can depend on user training. Tufte is big on interfaces like that. Some of his ideas are weird as hell, at first blush; but, as soon as we start to grok it, it's great. I remember the Japanese train schedules and maps in the Tokyo stations. They looked like complete monstrosities, at first. However, after I'd been there a couple of days, I learned to use them to very quickly find my stations and cost.
G0ther 7y ago
Steve jobs: hold my beer

85 points by eitland 7y ago

eitland 7y ago

Deleted and resubmitted since I had posted a wrong URL.

temptemptemp111 7y ago

How about just not modifying the UX in a directionless way? How about some coherency over a 5+ year period of UX?

whatl3y 7y ago

I agree with basically everything said in the post. I also don’t believe any sane and experienced software professional would disagree with any point made here. I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function for the highest percentage of users possible. If you have multiple personas of users who use your application, the amount of time you spend with the R&D of the UX to satisfy each persona should likely be proportional to the percentage of revenue each persona brings in. I’m a backend developer who is pretty awful at developing good UIs, but damn I appreciate a good one when it comes along and feel like the part of the brain that’s used to build a very solid UI is a special one that not many people have developed.

colinjoy 7y ago
“the amount of time you spend [...] should likely be proportional to the percentage of revenue each persona brings in” ... and with that you enter the deep waters of revenue attribution. Whose needs are more important? Those of the exec signing the deal, interested in reporting and auditing features, or those of the poor schmuck using form #B67-A hours a day to enter data? Your customers and your users are not necessarily the same people.
ignoramous 7y ago
> I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function for the highest percentage of users possible. And so, it blows my mind how Instagram and WhatsApp have continued to get their UX right despite adding so many features over the years. This is super hard considering more than half the world, not all of whom are technology savvy, use WhatsApp and Instagram on daily basis with flawless understanding. I mean, sure, they might struggle a bit, but it isn't anywhere close to frustrating them unlike other popular software. Not to mention how frictionless, smooth their entire UX is. I guess, design focused on content consumption is easier (Email/IM) than content creation (Microsoft Office)? Or, may be, the value of popular software is such, that people put up with it, anyway, and learn to live with it despite the UX?
- XCSme 7y ago
  Using a chat application or scrolling through a feed is not hard. Users can easily learn a new UX if the product really provides value. Yes, having better UX is good for many reasons, but people have always learned to go around bad UX in order to achieve their goals. Facebook has a shitty UX, I never find what I'm looking for, spammed with ads, fake news, slow loading times, bugged notifications, yet it's still one of the most popular sites on the planet. Their ad manager is a joke when it comes to UX and bugs, yet people still spend billions on advertising on Facebook.

tjoff 7y ago

>> We just simplified the whole Desktop Environment Experience! > Fine, this will be great for onboarding new users but you just made it a lot harder to use for all existing users. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in UX. People almost always mix up user-friendly with beginner-friendly. Those are very different and the majority of cases they are opposites of each other. A good UX is one that combine the two (well, that is also under the assumption that a broad audience is targeted).

Torwald 7y ago
> A good UX is one that combine the two good metaphor is of help. e.g. desktop metaphor for tool to manage files. works good for beginners, doesn't constrain experts.
kaanuynk 7y ago
Cannot agree more. For beginners the UX should be informative while for users in general it should be friendly.
marcusjt 7y ago
In principle there's no reason why you couldn't cater to each user group quite differently and make one experience morph into another as users gain confidence and/or show interest in more advanced features, but in reality there's rarely the scope to even refine the basics iteratively, so everything ends up heavily compromised. (Speaking as a UX designer, 10+ years experience)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zuhayeer 7y ago

Getting caught up in trying to have the perfect UX is one of the largest causes of developer paralysis that I’ve seen. IMO, push it even if it works for 75% of people, and keep working towards 100% – UX is learned on the way.

CarVac 7y ago
Attempting to achieve perfection is a problem, but at a minimum I believe any feature needs a good long time spent considering pain points for a wide variety of users. Achieving perfection is impossible, but you need to at least improve the level of the worst aspects. A lot of the problems in open-source software user interfaces, I contend, come from people finishing a feature on the backend and then throwing together a UI that merely functions. I, on the other hand, spend most of a feature's development time thinking about the UI, putting a lot of consideration towards how it interacts with other aspects of the program and how I can remove unnecessary mouse clicks and reduce visual surprise.
- fendy3002 7y ago
  Both budget and time are the constraints for UI / UX. A bad UI / UX can be redesigned easily without affecting much, especially data. But bad process can produce bad data, and it's both harder and time consuming to fix process and data.

mattlondon 7y ago

> you didn't put in any kind way to configure it. I have often found that in many projects I have worked on that there are always UX compromises that are made for good reasons (typically to make the primary use cases as usable/simple/easy as possible etc, often at the expense of "power users"). Things that can be configured often never get done purely due to time/resource constraints, rather than due to any maliciousness or lack of foresight. You can bet your bottom dollar that the engineers building the system will have brought up the fact that something can/should be a user preference/have a power-user shortcut/etc etc during early stages of design & development (since the engineers tend to fall into the "power user" category due to their familiarity with the software they're making) However, I have found that once the primary use case gets marked as done, it is never updated to allow power users to shortcut/configure bits and pieces "because agile" (i.e. you are off to the next feature and there is never a time to go back and look at tech-/UX-debt). For what it is worth, I don't think this is a bad thing. Often the "power users" with some niche workflows are typically a) a very, very small percentage of your users, and b) a very, very vocal percentage of your users. Most of the users will just get on with their life when using your software, but it is the "power users" who will make sure that you're aware of how much your team's work sucks. When the "power users" are a significant proportion of your users, only then is it worth formally recognising their needs as part of the formal design, otherwise it generally seems to be a lot of work to support the niche needs of literally a handful of users at the opportunity cost of adding features for the other 99.99995% of your users.

jcelerier 7y ago
> Most of the users will just get on with their life when using your software, but it is the "power users" who will make sure that you're aware of how much your team's work sucks. It is enough that one make a viral blogpost detailing why he thinks your software sucks, for a lot of people to instantly put your software in the "won't touch" category though.
- FalconSensei 7y ago
  possibly 'a lot of people' meaning other power users though. How much blog posts about software do you think regular folks read?

doublekill 7y ago

Move away from one-size-fits all, but have the UX adapt to user behavior. Personalized UX is pretty close to perfect.

FalconSensei 7y ago
at the same time, way more complex to automate tests/qa, and to debug

ronyfadel 7y ago

Close to “Perfect UX” is when technology is acting on your behalf, and you don’t even know it’s there. A good example of this is the Nest thermostat. After a few weeks you just forget it exists, and it does its thing in the background.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Like any proper thermostat. Except when it loses Internet connection or Nest/Google decides it's bored with the platform and bricks your thermostat remotely :). I think depending on third-party subscriptions should be considered an UX antipattern.
- ronyfadel 7y ago
  Other thermostats don’t learn your preferences. If anything, Nest gets in the way the first few weeks, then goes to the background. I’m talking about product UX, how a Nest thermostat usually works, independently of Google getting bored ;)

XCSme 7y ago

I partially agree with the article, but the examples given are very simple and don't prove anything. Saying that it's impossible to have good UX because A is good for some users and bad for others while B is the opposite doesn't prove that there is no option C which satisfies both types of users.

valuearb 7y ago
It’s a straw man article. No one is saying any UX is perfect, and their analysis is so superficial to be meaningless.

gfodor 7y ago

Agree with this article - also, another unspoken truth about UX: it is a multiplier, not a constant factor. If your app provides a ton of value, people will suffer through truly awful UX. And the tightest flow can’t save an app nobody wants.

michaelbrave 7y ago

Because there will always be more than one target audience with different needs and preferred ways of doing things it can't be done. You can do the most common for your targeted audience which can be a good solution, but never will everyone think it's perfect. Its similar to the idea that someones utopia is someone else's dystopia.

kaanuynk 7y ago

I mostly agree with the article. A good UX includes a simple and informative onboarding experience for the new users while improving the friction points of the existing users.

atoav 7y ago

Many people forget to ask the (essential) question: "Good UX – for whom?" For example a tool that might be exceptional to use for a professional might be very very bad to use for a consumer and vice versa. Software (in theory) could give multiple target demographics with good consistent etc UX at once by beeing configurable. However there is a clear trend to making everything intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad), often at the expense of people who have to use the software the whole day. In the worst case the whole target demographic of a software is powerusers but the UX still trades off usability for a flat learning curve. Imagine a point of sale system. Retail workers have to use that stuff the whole day. This means it nearly never makes sense to sacrifice power user efficiency just to be able to tell some manager who will never have to work with the damn thing: "Look how easy this is to understand".

deltron3030 7y ago
The key question is if the tasks and users value a differentiated output from using the software or not. If not, then the best UX is as streamlined and invisible as possible. Professional or power user doesn't mean much here, because they could value both things, streamlining and an abundance of options, it's domain dependent.
chongli 7y ago
intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad) And yet my dad is constantly confused and frustrated by all these gestures he keeps invoking by accident. In truth, iOS is loaded with power user features that constantly surprise beginners. The same is true for macOS with all of its trackpad gestures and complicated windowing features. The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS. It had a consistent user interface backed by extensive research into human-computer interaction. It used powerful spatial metaphors that worked with the brain’s spatial memory [1], not against it like today’s “smart” systems that try to guess what the user wants. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
- ineedasername 7y ago
  >The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS This is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing, inserting their own preference in place of Classic Mac OS. For your typical user, I'd wager it will often be the OS to which they were first exposed. (though certainly not always) Personally, I rather liked Windows 3.11. It did everything I needed at the time, and it was simple enough that I could hold pretty much the entire abstraction of it's configurations, settings, features, etc in my own mental space. Windows 95 was... okay. I managed to skip ME and Vista. In contrast, Classic Mac OS seemed like a "pretty" OS that crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues that often required disabling "extensions" and re-enabling them in groups to find the offending one. Until then, you'd experience the supremely unhelpful "type 10 bomb" hard crash. Windows BSOD was annoying, but I hated those bombs.

tjchear 7y ago

I read some of the other posts by OP and they mentioned that the ribbon interface was a mess. I remember I quite enjoyed it, and I'm also aware that some people didn't like it, but I never knew why they didn't like it. Anyone here care to enlighten me, from a UX standpoint?

Viliam1234 7y ago
For me, the ribbon interface makes it difficult to find things, unless they happen to be on the default ribbon. The classical menu is a tree structure. The first level is horizontal in the menu bar, every other level is vertical and opens when you click the previous level. You can easily go inspect the entire structure if you are looking for something that you use rarely and don't remember where it is. Also, the items are ordered by topic ("file-related things here, editing-related things here"), with ribbons it feels like "most frequently used buttons here, everything else randomly hidden somewhere else". It does not help that some ribbons are secret and only appear when you do a specific action, e.g. select an item of given type. I'd rather have a disabled menu item that I can't click, but at least I see that it exists. Shortly, with classical menu I feel in control: everything is here, neatly organized by topic, I choose what I want. With ribbons it feels like the system discourages me from doing anything that is not in the default ribbon, by making it more difficult to find. I have no idea how large part of this is simply a force of habit. But from my experience, new users who never saw a non-ribbon menu still have a problem finding things. Except now I have that problem, too. (In larger context, it feels like a typical Microsoft arbitrary change for change's sake. Just like the control panel is dramatically different in each version of Windows. It's like the more important something is, the more they love to experiment with it, where "experiment" means forcing it on all users.)
- tjchear 7y ago
  I see. I can only say that I was never advanced enough of a user that this became a problem; much of what I needed was already in the ribbon, and I could find them by just scanning the whole thing, as opposed to drilling down menus.
gertlex 7y ago

leecarraher 7y ago

At least that's Microsoft's motto

acjohnson55 7y ago

I don't think the title is helpful, but I agree with the gist of the article. We have a long way to go to achieve human-computer interfaces for naive users that are better than human-human-computer systems, where the human in the middle is a trained expert user working with a poweruser interface. This is basically what sales and customer support are for digital services and SaaS. I think we'll eventually get there, but it's a long road, with loads of open problems. This is why I'm optimistic about the career prospects of product engineers for the foreseeable future.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Define "perfect." If we want an app that will work for all possible users, then, yes, it is impossible. If, however, we want a UX that is optimized for only a certain set of users, then it may actually be entirely possible; especially if we can depend on user training. Tufte is big on interfaces like that. Some of his ideas are weird as hell, at first blush; but, as soon as we start to grok it, it's great. I remember the Japanese train schedules and maps in the Tokyo stations. They looked like complete monstrosities, at first. However, after I'd been there a couple of days, I learned to use them to very quickly find my stations and cost.

G0ther 7y ago

Steve jobs: hold my beer