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The smarter ones usually iterate based on user input.

• a1369209993 6y ago
  To be fair, the smarter designers do too, but you don't hear about them because good design doesn't shove itself in your proverbial or literal face.
• notatoad 6y ago
  and some of the designs that you don't personally like were undoubtedly the result of iterating based on user input - what actually tests well with users is very often not what the sort of people who post on hacker news would assume is the best design.
  • IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Yeah, just to add: and some designs come out of relentless targeting the impact of the bottom line at the expense of aesthetic or "pleasurable to use", some designs come out of snake-oil sales-people, etc etc. Different populations, different needs/wants/desires/cultural expectations. This is what focused advertising is all about. You can create one interface and say "everyone must use and learn to love this one," and that can work well. You can also gain immediate appeal by creating "one interface for each population of potential users" and relentlessly target your designs for each of those populations. I don't think we've fully recognized it in software engineering circles, but I think a lot of what are producing today is really about creating different experiences for different populations when the core capabilities have been there, available for free or on extremely cheap computing platforms, for anyone to use, for decades. I imagine that's fundamentally what the job of most software engineers is today: find the design that best matches the needs of the customer, and build a workflow for their needs.