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I recommend balancing this perspective with the fact that most users are using your UI to get a small fragment of their job done. Expecting them to spend time

by bhawks 6y ago

I recommend balancing this perspective with the fact that most users are using your UI to get a small fragment of their job done. Expecting them to spend time to learn and configure your UI is not cost free. Therefore it needs some convincing value to justify the investment. If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem.

tomc1985 6y ago
> If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem. It's valid, but extremely selfish. I think one should strive to minimize the amount of negative externalities one creates for their users, especially by removing something that people use. I'm not against removing things -- it's just that the current development zeitgeist seems to believe in killing things as soon as they hit a growth peak, and not when that something is nearly dead. To this end I really admire(d) Microsoft for just how much they cho(o)se to keep in their big ol enterprise platforms like Windows or Office. Hell the Mac OS versions of Office have the same menu layouts that I learned when I was in elementary school. There are so many things they could/should kill -- please God let Wordart be on that list -- but don't, because they know people have muscle memory, and because they know a platform with lots of diverse capabilities is part of how their customer base thrives. The Office ribbon may be a fantastic UI design, but people hate it because it broke muscle memory and shattered expectations. Some of the groupings make no sense, and people constantly have trouble finding things, is at least partially attributable to just how long is takes for intuition and expectations to die.
donmcronald 6y ago
Yes. Definitely. A lot of my complaints come from hidden UI components and a lack of discoverability. For example, I think it’s Chrome where the action to clear download items is hidden behind a ... menu even though “Clear All” is the only option. Why not put that right there instead of the ...? I think it’s ok to have some expectation for the user to learn the UI. As a user though, it often feels like the designers want to impede my ability to learn the UI. I used to be able to click around and discover everything. Now I need to sort through 50 articles of blog spam to find out what gestures or hidden menus to use. Even the docs suck (or don’t exist).

by bhawks 6y ago

tomc1985 6y ago

> If that can't be done for most users simplification (by way of removal) is a valid way of caring for your user ecosystem. It's valid, but extremely selfish. I think one should strive to minimize the amount of negative externalities one creates for their users, especially by removing something that people use. I'm not against removing things -- it's just that the current development zeitgeist seems to believe in killing things as soon as they hit a growth peak, and not when that something is nearly dead. To this end I really admire(d) Microsoft for just how much they cho(o)se to keep in their big ol enterprise platforms like Windows or Office. Hell the Mac OS versions of Office have the same menu layouts that I learned when I was in elementary school. There are so many things they could/should kill -- please God let Wordart be on that list -- but don't, because they know people have muscle memory, and because they know a platform with lots of diverse capabilities is part of how their customer base thrives. The Office ribbon may be a fantastic UI design, but people hate it because it broke muscle memory and shattered expectations. Some of the groupings make no sense, and people constantly have trouble finding things, is at least partially attributable to just how long is takes for intuition and expectations to die.

donmcronald 6y ago

Yes. Definitely. A lot of my complaints come from hidden UI components and a lack of discoverability. For example, I think it’s Chrome where the action to clear download items is hidden behind a ... menu even though “Clear All” is the only option. Why not put that right there instead of the ...? I think it’s ok to have some expectation for the user to learn the UI. As a user though, it often feels like the designers want to impede my ability to learn the UI. I used to be able to click around and discover everything. Now I need to sort through 50 articles of blog spam to find out what gestures or hidden menus to use. Even the docs suck (or don’t exist).