6 ms·

When the sum of two actual UX improvements becomes a bigger UX problem

68 points by eitland 6y ago

sensecall 6y ago
Reading these comments shows how much misconception there is about UX. It's worrying. Good UX is so much more than dumbing things down and making things simple.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Like what else? I feel like simplifying is the imperative.
  - sensecall 6y ago
    Good UX relies on understanding user needs. Meeting user needs doesn't always require simplification: adding friction and complexity can sometimes help.
eitland 6y ago
Author here: I am often extremely frustrated with certain ux decisions and write about it but this is - in my opinion - a good example of how hard even what looks like simple ux can be.
loopz 6y ago
The treating of users as idiots is one of the big pitfalls of modern UX. The problem is many lusers even demand it, but it's so easy to do it wrong: Like dynamic hiding of content, which raises unexpected surprises instead of providing a consistently learnable interface. Or failing to resist adding an annoying popup.
- hinkley 6y ago
  It is the biggest thing I resent about Bamboo. It’s a development tool written to all of the standards of consumer software and thus is continuously lying to me about the capabilities of the system. If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to ask for? The normal users get sticks and rocks to try to build a CI process (or at least an understanding of it) with.
  - m_mueller 6y ago
    I can heartily recommend Teamcity for anything CI. Comes fully baked (i.e. no plugin hell), has nice handling of inheritence and exposes all the options in a still manageable UI.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      For reasons, the things at work that could be changed but that I personally cannot are amongst the ones that bother me the most. First CI system that I maintained (rather than deputizing to someone else) was TeamCity 1.0, and it has kinda felt downhill since. I sometimes want to take the 4 nicest features from each CI system I've used and make a new, minimalist one but I don't want to have to maintain it. I do occasionally do a mental exercise of "how much of a CI system could I build today with off the shelf parts?". The last cycle of this was just recently when I saw an ad about someone integrating k8s into their CI tool, and I thought, "man how much administration code did that just deprecate?"
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to ask for? Here's a modern software development plot twist: 1. Hide all the interesting power features. 2. Analyze reports from the pretty invasive telemetry you put in your software. 3. Note the telemetry saying nobody is using interesting power features. 4. Remove these features in the next version, like a good data-driven company.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      I remember when I learned about greedy algorithms in college that I tsked and promised myself that I'd try to avoid doing something so obviously dumb. And now A/B testing is sophisticated, despite being a poster child for hill-climbing.
- eitland 6y ago
  Agree, also this is reinforces itself in a vicious cycle: Dumb everything down and you get users who cannot use anything but dumb software. As more companies go this way we lose common ground like the knowledge of right clicks / context menus, ordinary menus, what to expect, search operators etc etc.
- MrPatan 6y ago
  I can't rememeber where I read it but the right frame of mind is to treat the user as if they're very smart, but also very busy, and they don't have time to deal with your software's nonsense.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
This is an issue I had to tackle with in the past... We offer a toggle option for a search item and if you select multiple makes of something you can always add makes, but when you remove enough makes that the toggle no longer applies the user gets a scary 'Your search is no longer valid'. I was surprised by this menu but I ended up hunting down the answer since the management did not want any pages showing zero results... the reason: "makes it look like we have smaller inventory than we do"
barbegal 6y ago
I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX improvement. If an item isn't in stock and you can't see that it is normally stocked then you will probably shift your business elsewhere and not come back. But even that wasn't the root cause of the issue here, the root cause was not making the user aware of the following logical fallacy: "if a single part exists for the vehicle only 1 part is shown" is not the same as "if 1 part is shown there only exists a single part for the vehicle".
- loopz 6y ago
  Root cause is complexity and inconsistency, though could be unintentional as well.
- eitland 6y ago
  > I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX improvement. I see your point but I'd say it can be for certain items. A stupid example: if I was shopping for air fresheners (I'm not;-) I'd rather not see my search results in the webshop polluted by every discontinued version of Wunderbaum they ever had in stock.
  - barbegal 6y ago
    Yes it is still advantageous to demote out of stock items in the search results. But if the store knows a certain Wunderbaum flavor is really popular but not in stock right now it should probably show up fairly highly in the search results. And there is a difference between being temporarily out of stock and discontinued.
  - eps 6y ago
    Just order them by availability. In stock first, out of stock second.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      and if you don't make that clear, I scroll through a bunch of useless results. I can't remember a single time when I wanted out of stock items shown by default.
BlackFly 6y ago
Isn't this just an illustration of the potential pitfall of the tendency to simplify UX to cover just the 80%? Here, the design seems to be following the idea that an owner of the standard edition of the car doesn't need to be made aware of the existence of a heavy duty version of the car. But a person who owns the heavy duty version and is not aware of it is not guided to this knowledge because the UX hides it from them. It is difficult to say that this is what happened, maybe the author was presented with the choice of standard edition or heavy duty edition and genuinely selected the wrong one. Unclear from the description, but yeah, if I have to type in the car model and there is some sub-type, that sub-type should probably be required. It sounds (to me) like this is a case where someone decided to hide the essential complexity of the choice and made the choice accidentally simpler than it actually is.
- Closi 6y ago
  I think it's slightly different. Usually they would show parts for the standard & heavy duty editions - but they only show parts in stock, so they only displayed one of the options. In reality, the same outcome would have happened if the store decided to only stock the part for the standard.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Correct, you caught the small but important difference.
smitty1e 6y ago
More than once in my career I've wished for a read-only connection to the data store and a copy of the schema. Let me figure out my own UX, thank'ee. Which sounds cool until said schema takes up a wall in an 8-point font.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  The only place where I've seen this in practice is crt.sh. The postgres DB is publicly accessible, and you can just run queries against it instead of using the website. https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8 https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc
amelius 6y ago
> As someone who doesn't have much training or experience from the field this felt great. Oh boy, someone without experience is messing with the brakes of their car. What could go wrong? UX problems might turn out to be not the most important ones here.
- kroltan 6y ago
  Have you went to a repair shop? A lot of places are not much better than someone figuring it out on the spot or watching a YouTube tutorial. And besides, the demonstrated UX is terrible even for the knowledgeable field specialist because it hides the heavy-duty version parts completely if they are momentarily unavailable.
- eitland 6y ago
  Relax, I'm also a farmer (kind of) and I also had help the first time I did it, so even if I haven't done it too many times before I'm not totally inexperienced, I just wasn't aware that 1.) my car was the heavy duty edition 2.) none of the part selectors on any webshop that I am aware of was able to differentiate between heavy duty or not based on plate number. Plus it isn't too hard, with my background the only hard part is knowing where to apply the elbow grease and where to be careful ;-) Plus I have a brother who's an actual licensed car technician and I make sure to always be very easy to ask if he has computer problems, or - more likely lately - is stuck with some bigger equations. PS: Seems like you are getting downvoted, it wasn't me but based on the tone and the assumptions you make it wasn't completely unexpected around here.
- theelous3 6y ago
  Car brakes are very simple (all brakes really). Anyone can change out a part so long as they understand the basics of assembling things. Pretty much any part on a car the wears or is part of a system that wears can be swapped out by an amateur.
ensiferum 6y ago
Since when do you order parts based on plate number? If you're using OEM parts rather use the VIN (or the make/model/year/variant) to look up the manufacturer part numbers for the parts you need. This is the only semi-fool proof way.
- flemhans 6y ago
  Such systems are in place in Denmark and Norway (and possibly Germany, others) where the license plate can be publicly looked up to get the VIN and other details. For instance: https://www.nummerplade.net/nummerplade/ax12345.html https://www.nummerplade.net/nummerplade/ax12345.html
- ssharp 6y ago
  There are systems to look up VIN, which gets you make/model/year/trim, by something other than the VIN. In the U.S., the state you live in can find the VIN by plate number. They make expose this information via third parties. Additionally, you can even do things like look up all cars by something like driver's license # or maybe even just name/address. Auto insurers have been using those systems for years to simplify the quoting process. Enter your driver's license # and magically all your cars show up to choose from.
  - ssharp 6y ago
    A funny aside to this on how poorly integrated these things can be: My state has a random proof of insurance system where licensed drivers with registered vehicles will be randomly selected and be forced to provide proof of insurance for their registered vehicle. I got one of these a few years ago for a car that I had sold at least several months prior to the date they wanted me to show insurance proof for. Boy was that an unexpectedly difficult situation to navigate. It turns out the state uses a private company to run this program and the state just dumps them information a few times a year. Of course the private company runs under the guise of a state agency even though it isn't. Talking with the private company led nowhere since my logic of "you literally have access to the State DMV. Call them up and find out when that VIN was titled to someone else" didn't land. I ultimately needed to deal with the State DMV directly, all while under the countdown clock of my license being automatically suspended for failure to provide proof.
bregma 6y ago
You should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. This is an example of where they tried to make it simpler. It turns out making things simple is hard.
ssharp 6y ago
Making things simple in an elegant way is difficult. It's one of the hardest challenges in UX. You can take a knife to things and make a lot of well-intentioned mistakes. There are also domain-specific challenges you need to consider and every domain is going to have a completely different set of user needs, challenges, etc. This is where understanding your customer and understanding the variety of ways they shop is critical. In this case, it's an auto parts shop. I've bought auto parts enough to know my shopping behaviors and needs: 1) I know exactly what part I want and what to see what options are available for that part 2) I know roughly what I'm looking for but am not sure the exact part 3) I'm always going to buy for a specific car. Parts for other cars are irrelevant to me With these considerations, this site clearly made a few mistakes: 1) It didn't get the right car make, which is a critical flaw 2) By hiding out of stock items, they eliminated the ability to discover the product you actually need if you're only loosely aware of what you need (my #2 point above) 3) Only showing one relevant part is quite bad for auto parts. Brake pads come in different materials and I may want to choose. Rotor quality can vary a lot. Maybe I want painted instead of unpainted calipers. All this boils down to a case of not considering the actual customer. Good UX is aligning experiences with needs and behaviors and what's good UX in one application might be terrible in another. It seems like that is what happened here.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> I saw a notice saying that unlike many auto parts webshops they would try to only show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed. If I saw that I'd close the tab and go to a different vendor that has a proper search interface. I get anxiety just reading that. Perhaps it's the result of experience, but I don't trust devices that hide what they're doing. This applies to everything from digital FM radios (I assume they don't work until I can tune in to few stations I know at correct frequencies), to "helpful" Windows troubleshooters (my mental model of those is that they sleep for a random number of seconds and report they're done, because I've never seen one fix anything, or even change anything in the system). I won't trust your inventory search until I can see a dedicated search results page, where I can see and tweak the filters to double-check that your search system isn't making some mistaken assumptions. Because, all too often, it is, and I have to manually correct this to get what I need. This story is just another evidence that you shouldn't trust technology that tries to keep you in the dark. (And then comes the business-related cynicism of mine: "show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed" is an open door to market segmentation; take the user to the most expensive matching part directly, and let the cheaper ones be bought by those who know how to query for them directly.)
- phkahler 6y ago
  Yep. Anyone that claims to have the one true answer, or the one part you need is full of crap. Google isnt even that good, there's no way an auto parts store gets it that right.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Exactly. And here's the thing: I would love to use a system that could tell me which part is best for me - as long as it showed me the work. I.e. what exact criteria led to the system determining this given part is one I'm looking for. This is the way to build trust in the relationship with the user.
    - eitland 6y ago
      This was my mistake, as an IT person I though the license plate -> model lookup was precise enough to account for differences like this one. In hindsight it seems kind of related to Gell Mann Amnesia: I know things are bad on my side of the fence but expect it to be OK in the more traditional disciplines like mechanical engineering etc.
AdrianB1 6y ago
I fail to see what are the UX improvements; none of the 2 count as an improvement, but a dumb-down features.

68 points by eitland 6y ago

Reading these comments shows how much misconception there is about UX. It's worrying. Good UX is so much more than dumbing things down and making things simple.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Like what else? I feel like simplifying is the imperative.
- sensecall 6y ago
  Good UX relies on understanding user needs. Meeting user needs doesn't always require simplification: adding friction and complexity can sometimes help.

eitland 6y ago

Author here: I am often extremely frustrated with certain ux decisions and write about it but this is - in my opinion - a good example of how hard even what looks like simple ux can be.

loopz 6y ago

The treating of users as idiots is one of the big pitfalls of modern UX. The problem is many lusers even demand it, but it's so easy to do it wrong: Like dynamic hiding of content, which raises unexpected surprises instead of providing a consistently learnable interface. Or failing to resist adding an annoying popup.

hinkley 6y ago
It is the biggest thing I resent about Bamboo. It’s a development tool written to all of the standards of consumer software and thus is continuously lying to me about the capabilities of the system. If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to ask for? The normal users get sticks and rocks to try to build a CI process (or at least an understanding of it) with.
- m_mueller 6y ago
  I can heartily recommend Teamcity for anything CI. Comes fully baked (i.e. no plugin hell), has nice handling of inheritence and exposes all the options in a still manageable UI.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    For reasons, the things at work that could be changed but that I personally cannot are amongst the ones that bother me the most. First CI system that I maintained (rather than deputizing to someone else) was TeamCity 1.0, and it has kinda felt downhill since. I sometimes want to take the 4 nicest features from each CI system I've used and make a new, minimalist one but I don't want to have to maintain it. I do occasionally do a mental exercise of "how much of a CI system could I build today with off the shelf parts?". The last cycle of this was just recently when I saw an ad about someone integrating k8s into their CI tool, and I thought, "man how much administration code did that just deprecate?"
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > If you hide all the features how do I even know they are there or what to ask for? Here's a modern software development plot twist: 1. Hide all the interesting power features. 2. Analyze reports from the pretty invasive telemetry you put in your software. 3. Note the telemetry saying nobody is using interesting power features. 4. Remove these features in the next version, like a good data-driven company.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I remember when I learned about greedy algorithms in college that I tsked and promised myself that I'd try to avoid doing something so obviously dumb. And now A/B testing is sophisticated, despite being a poster child for hill-climbing.
eitland 6y ago
Agree, also this is reinforces itself in a vicious cycle: Dumb everything down and you get users who cannot use anything but dumb software. As more companies go this way we lose common ground like the knowledge of right clicks / context menus, ordinary menus, what to expect, search operators etc etc.
MrPatan 6y ago
I can't rememeber where I read it but the right frame of mind is to treat the user as if they're very smart, but also very busy, and they don't have time to deal with your software's nonsense.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

This is an issue I had to tackle with in the past... We offer a toggle option for a search item and if you select multiple makes of something you can always add makes, but when you remove enough makes that the toggle no longer applies the user gets a scary 'Your search is no longer valid'. I was surprised by this menu but I ended up hunting down the answer since the management did not want any pages showing zero results... the reason: "makes it look like we have smaller inventory than we do"

barbegal 6y ago

I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX improvement. If an item isn't in stock and you can't see that it is normally stocked then you will probably shift your business elsewhere and not come back. But even that wasn't the root cause of the issue here, the root cause was not making the user aware of the following logical fallacy: "if a single part exists for the vehicle only 1 part is shown" is not the same as "if 1 part is shown there only exists a single part for the vehicle".

loopz 6y ago
Root cause is complexity and inconsistency, though could be unintentional as well.
eitland 6y ago
> I think the fact that out of stock items aren't shown isn't a UX improvement. I see your point but I'd say it can be for certain items. A stupid example: if I was shopping for air fresheners (I'm not;-) I'd rather not see my search results in the webshop polluted by every discontinued version of Wunderbaum they ever had in stock.
- barbegal 6y ago
  Yes it is still advantageous to demote out of stock items in the search results. But if the store knows a certain Wunderbaum flavor is really popular but not in stock right now it should probably show up fairly highly in the search results. And there is a difference between being temporarily out of stock and discontinued.
- eps 6y ago
  Just order them by availability. In stock first, out of stock second.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    and if you don't make that clear, I scroll through a bunch of useless results. I can't remember a single time when I wanted out of stock items shown by default.

BlackFly 6y ago

Isn't this just an illustration of the potential pitfall of the tendency to simplify UX to cover just the 80%? Here, the design seems to be following the idea that an owner of the standard edition of the car doesn't need to be made aware of the existence of a heavy duty version of the car. But a person who owns the heavy duty version and is not aware of it is not guided to this knowledge because the UX hides it from them. It is difficult to say that this is what happened, maybe the author was presented with the choice of standard edition or heavy duty edition and genuinely selected the wrong one. Unclear from the description, but yeah, if I have to type in the car model and there is some sub-type, that sub-type should probably be required. It sounds (to me) like this is a case where someone decided to hide the essential complexity of the choice and made the choice accidentally simpler than it actually is.

Closi 6y ago
I think it's slightly different. Usually they would show parts for the standard & heavy duty editions - but they only show parts in stock, so they only displayed one of the options. In reality, the same outcome would have happened if the store decided to only stock the part for the standard.
- eitland 6y ago
  Correct, you caught the small but important difference.

smitty1e 6y ago

More than once in my career I've wished for a read-only connection to the data store and a copy of the schema. Let me figure out my own UX, thank'ee. Which sounds cool until said schema takes up a wall in an 8-point font.

captn3m0 6y ago
The only place where I've seen this in practice is crt.sh. The postgres DB is publicly accessible, and you can just run queries against it instead of using the website. https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8 https://github.com/PaulSec/crt.sh/issues/8 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/crtsh/oEDOzwr2Fuc

amelius 6y ago

> As someone who doesn't have much training or experience from the field this felt great. Oh boy, someone without experience is messing with the brakes of their car. What could go wrong? UX problems might turn out to be not the most important ones here.

kroltan 6y ago
Have you went to a repair shop? A lot of places are not much better than someone figuring it out on the spot or watching a YouTube tutorial. And besides, the demonstrated UX is terrible even for the knowledgeable field specialist because it hides the heavy-duty version parts completely if they are momentarily unavailable.
eitland 6y ago
Relax, I'm also a farmer (kind of) and I also had help the first time I did it, so even if I haven't done it too many times before I'm not totally inexperienced, I just wasn't aware that 1.) my car was the heavy duty edition 2.) none of the part selectors on any webshop that I am aware of was able to differentiate between heavy duty or not based on plate number. Plus it isn't too hard, with my background the only hard part is knowing where to apply the elbow grease and where to be careful ;-) Plus I have a brother who's an actual licensed car technician and I make sure to always be very easy to ask if he has computer problems, or - more likely lately - is stuck with some bigger equations. PS: Seems like you are getting downvoted, it wasn't me but based on the tone and the assumptions you make it wasn't completely unexpected around here.
theelous3 6y ago
Car brakes are very simple (all brakes really). Anyone can change out a part so long as they understand the basics of assembling things. Pretty much any part on a car the wears or is part of a system that wears can be swapped out by an amateur.

ensiferum 6y ago

Since when do you order parts based on plate number? If you're using OEM parts rather use the VIN (or the make/model/year/variant) to look up the manufacturer part numbers for the parts you need. This is the only semi-fool proof way.

flemhans 6y ago
Such systems are in place in Denmark and Norway (and possibly Germany, others) where the license plate can be publicly looked up to get the VIN and other details. For instance: https://www.nummerplade.net/nummerplade/ax12345.html https://www.nummerplade.net/nummerplade/ax12345.html
ssharp 6y ago
There are systems to look up VIN, which gets you make/model/year/trim, by something other than the VIN. In the U.S., the state you live in can find the VIN by plate number. They make expose this information via third parties. Additionally, you can even do things like look up all cars by something like driver's license # or maybe even just name/address. Auto insurers have been using those systems for years to simplify the quoting process. Enter your driver's license # and magically all your cars show up to choose from.
- ssharp 6y ago
  A funny aside to this on how poorly integrated these things can be: My state has a random proof of insurance system where licensed drivers with registered vehicles will be randomly selected and be forced to provide proof of insurance for their registered vehicle. I got one of these a few years ago for a car that I had sold at least several months prior to the date they wanted me to show insurance proof for. Boy was that an unexpectedly difficult situation to navigate. It turns out the state uses a private company to run this program and the state just dumps them information a few times a year. Of course the private company runs under the guise of a state agency even though it isn't. Talking with the private company led nowhere since my logic of "you literally have access to the State DMV. Call them up and find out when that VIN was titled to someone else" didn't land. I ultimately needed to deal with the State DMV directly, all while under the countdown clock of my license being automatically suspended for failure to provide proof.

bregma 6y ago

You should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. This is an example of where they tried to make it simpler. It turns out making things simple is hard.

ssharp 6y ago

Making things simple in an elegant way is difficult. It's one of the hardest challenges in UX. You can take a knife to things and make a lot of well-intentioned mistakes. There are also domain-specific challenges you need to consider and every domain is going to have a completely different set of user needs, challenges, etc. This is where understanding your customer and understanding the variety of ways they shop is critical. In this case, it's an auto parts shop. I've bought auto parts enough to know my shopping behaviors and needs: 1) I know exactly what part I want and what to see what options are available for that part 2) I know roughly what I'm looking for but am not sure the exact part 3) I'm always going to buy for a specific car. Parts for other cars are irrelevant to me With these considerations, this site clearly made a few mistakes: 1) It didn't get the right car make, which is a critical flaw 2) By hiding out of stock items, they eliminated the ability to discover the product you actually need if you're only loosely aware of what you need (my #2 point above) 3) Only showing one relevant part is quite bad for auto parts. Brake pads come in different materials and I may want to choose. Rotor quality can vary a lot. Maybe I want painted instead of unpainted calipers. All this boils down to a case of not considering the actual customer. Good UX is aligning experiences with needs and behaviors and what's good UX in one application might be terrible in another. It seems like that is what happened here.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> I saw a notice saying that unlike many auto parts webshops they would try to only show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed. If I saw that I'd close the tab and go to a different vendor that has a proper search interface. I get anxiety just reading that. Perhaps it's the result of experience, but I don't trust devices that hide what they're doing. This applies to everything from digital FM radios (I assume they don't work until I can tune in to few stations I know at correct frequencies), to "helpful" Windows troubleshooters (my mental model of those is that they sleep for a random number of seconds and report they're done, because I've never seen one fix anything, or even change anything in the system). I won't trust your inventory search until I can see a dedicated search results page, where I can see and tweak the filters to double-check that your search system isn't making some mistaken assumptions. Because, all too often, it is, and I have to manually correct this to get what I need. This story is just another evidence that you shouldn't trust technology that tries to keep you in the dark. (And then comes the business-related cynicism of mine: "show me the one relevant part if they knew which part I needed" is an open door to market segmentation; take the user to the most expensive matching part directly, and let the cheaper ones be bought by those who know how to query for them directly.)

phkahler 6y ago
Yep. Anyone that claims to have the one true answer, or the one part you need is full of crap. Google isnt even that good, there's no way an auto parts store gets it that right.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Exactly. And here's the thing: I would love to use a system that could tell me which part is best for me - as long as it showed me the work. I.e. what exact criteria led to the system determining this given part is one I'm looking for. This is the way to build trust in the relationship with the user.
  - eitland 6y ago
    This was my mistake, as an IT person I though the license plate -> model lookup was precise enough to account for differences like this one. In hindsight it seems kind of related to Gell Mann Amnesia: I know things are bad on my side of the fence but expect it to be OK in the more traditional disciplines like mechanical engineering etc.

AdrianB1 6y ago

I fail to see what are the UX improvements; none of the 2 count as an improvement, but a dumb-down features.