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I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little c

I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the user for what we are making likely barely graduated high school. software should be developed in terms of the user, not the developer. Not every one knows every windows/linux command and debugging to fix problems.

egfx 6y ago
Yeah, this will be part of what holds back A.I. in the future. A.I. software is being built in the mirror of how the developer thinks. It's being made to think and act robotic with error correction instead of being made of mistakes, misunderstandings and abstractions like a real person.
mydongle 6y ago
While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
  - wolrah 6y ago
    > Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome. A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save. > Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift. > Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images. Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)
    - deeblering4 6y ago
      > How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same. We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF. Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.
- S_A_P 6y ago
  Just depends on whether or not there is a genuine usability and discoverability improvement or not. Most new UI is trending towards way worse. Particularly in mobile.
- toast0 6y ago
  When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P
brenden2 6y ago
This is a good point, and it's something I have often come across with various experts. Some take it to an extreme and assume everyone else is dumb and they're the only one who knows what's good for them. I'm not sure what the correct term for this type of thinking is, but I've always disliked it and tried to help people actually empathize with the other side. And yet, people still like to go around saying "people are stupid" etc. If I were to guess, I think the internet has somewhat helped make this worse, because it separates some of the human connection from your everyday interactions. If you can't read someone's emotions on their face, and you're just reading their words on a support ticket, it's very easy to dismiss them as dumb or foolish when in fact it's you who does not understand the problem from their perspective. I guess part of the problem might be that what's obvious to someone who's already encountered that problem may be non-obvious to someone who's entirely new to a particular domain (or product or whatever).
carapace 6y ago
I only ever got to participate in live user testing once. We shelled out for the room with the one-way mirror and everything. Watching normal people use our thing was most excruciating and educational. We were literally hopping up and down on our side of the glass, hooting and shouting. It was brutal.
- HighSaysBob 6y ago
  At my job we try and do this weekly or every other week with real users testing our apps. You can’t ever guess what they want without seeing them use it and asking questions.
FalconSensei 6y ago
Many developers didn't realize yet that the average person actually don't care about technology. They want to press a button to send an audio message, search and watch cat videos, read some news, with less friction as possible. They are not even remotely interested in how it works.

egfx 6y ago

Yeah, this will be part of what holds back A.I. in the future. A.I. software is being built in the mirror of how the developer thinks. It's being made to think and act robotic with error correction instead of being made of mistakes, misunderstandings and abstractions like a real person.

mydongle 6y ago

While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Well, that doesn't apply here because gifs still have better UX than video for many use cases. Nobody wants to use video as it's implemented right now for reaction gifs. Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
- wolrah 6y ago
  > Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Uh... Right click, "Save video as..." in Chrome. Has been that way as long as I can recall. I'm 95% sure Firefox works the same way. No idea about IE or OG Edge because who really cares, presumably Edgium behaves like Chrome. A lot of sites override the right click menu in one way or another, but that's not the browser's fault. A standard video embed is easy to save. > Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another. I think that might run in to some practical limitations, both in terms of simple clipboard data limits and the fact that while an image is loaded entirely in to RAM to play a video may not be. If the user does a right-click>copy five seconds in while the video is still loading but has already started playing, what should the browser do? How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    If the right click menu itself is the problem, that kind of is the browser's fault. Especially when firefox has an override for that, pressing shift. > Copy/paste with video in a browser is not as straightforward as images. Copy is already broken and weird for images, since it doesn't get you the original file. But if you fixed that, I would expect pasting to give me a 'transferring...' window as long as the browser is still open and it can't be fed from cache. That wouldn't be particularly hard to implement. (And being unable to feed from cache wouldn't be unique to video at all. Image downloads already ignore the cache all the time.)
  - deeblering4 6y ago
    > How should it handle extreme situations like someone clicking "Copy" on their Plex Web Player embed of a 100GB 4K UHD movie? You can’t yet. Thats the point. GIFs are not 100GB 4K movies, yet the current state of the art treats the two the same. We need a standard method to distinguish an (optionally) looping, soundless “GIF” video from a traditional video, and mimic the behavior of an image in the case of a GIF. Also GIF videos needs to behave like GIF images consistently across all modern browsers and mobile devices.
S_A_P 6y ago
Just depends on whether or not there is a genuine usability and discoverability improvement or not. Most new UI is trending towards way worse. Particularly in mobile.
toast0 6y ago
When you run the user studies to tell me what's good, I'll believe you. Until then, I'm using the last published user studies which were Microsoft's work leading up to Windows 95. :P

brenden2 6y ago

This is a good point, and it's something I have often come across with various experts. Some take it to an extreme and assume everyone else is dumb and they're the only one who knows what's good for them. I'm not sure what the correct term for this type of thinking is, but I've always disliked it and tried to help people actually empathize with the other side. And yet, people still like to go around saying "people are stupid" etc. If I were to guess, I think the internet has somewhat helped make this worse, because it separates some of the human connection from your everyday interactions. If you can't read someone's emotions on their face, and you're just reading their words on a support ticket, it's very easy to dismiss them as dumb or foolish when in fact it's you who does not understand the problem from their perspective. I guess part of the problem might be that what's obvious to someone who's already encountered that problem may be non-obvious to someone who's entirely new to a particular domain (or product or whatever).

carapace 6y ago

I only ever got to participate in live user testing once. We shelled out for the room with the one-way mirror and everything. Watching normal people use our thing was most excruciating and educational. We were literally hopping up and down on our side of the glass, hooting and shouting. It was brutal.

HighSaysBob 6y ago
At my job we try and do this weekly or every other week with real users testing our apps. You can’t ever guess what they want without seeing them use it and asking questions.

FalconSensei 6y ago

Many developers didn't realize yet that the average person actually don't care about technology. They want to press a button to send an audio message, search and watch cat videos, read some news, with less friction as possible. They are not even remotely interested in how it works.