4 ms·
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 dynami
by 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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoFor 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 agoI 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 agoAgree, 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 agoI 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.