9 ms·

A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. From an app point of view you can count yourself lucky if

by sime2009 6y ago

A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. From an app point of view you can count yourself lucky if you get even 10% of their attention at any given time. Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it. That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar. They are thinking about how to address that new prospective customer. That person in Excel isn't thinking about cells either. They are thinking about whether Robin in R&D is going to get the figures for Q2 to them in time. Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI.

jwr 6y ago
> A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. I'd put it differently. Realize that your app is not the center of the world. Your users have things to do, and using your app is a small fraction of their life. Even though it might be your baby and you might be spending all of your waking ours thinking about your app, user perspective is different.
- nikki93 6y ago
  Maybe the user is like a person walking down the street and your app is your kid with girl scout cookies boxes it's trying to sell, and you're helping it out. :) And it's not about the money as much as the app growing up, or something.
- tremon 6y ago
  Or, more bluntly: realize that your app is a tool, not a goal. Tools should be predictable, reliable, and easy to use correctly.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    And intuitive! Since apps are like a blackbox to the user, they shouldn’t do things that make the user hesitate or get confused. With feature creep most apps become an unmanageable piece of mess
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  It reminds me of teachers' and professors' attitude towards their classes/courses. From their point of view, it's maybe the only thing they teach or one of 2-3 things and it's the general topic they spend all their time on. From a student's perspective it's one of many courses in various topics. They can't be expected to laser focus on just the class that you teach. But many teachers don't get this concept. They think everything revolves around their course only.
  - mb7733 6y ago
    That's funny, because the inverse problem exists too. Many students think that teaching is all that professors do. They assume that the prof's whole life revolves around teaching their class, when in fact the bulk of the prof's job is research, supervision and administration.
- justinclift 6y ago
  This is what frustrates the heck out of me when platforms decide to redo their entire user experience, just because they feel the need to "change something". Thereby forcing all of their users to learn the new UI immediately, not even with due warning. One or two platforms doing is in a week or so is a pain. But when lots of platforms do this in a short period of it, it can be "throw hands up in the air and do something else". :(
notatoad 6y ago
>A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person. You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.
- oblio 6y ago
  I think the idea is about developer attitudes. I've heard variations of "the user is dumb" too many times to count in the last 15 years.
  - devilduck 6y ago
    A lot of the designers or developers who talk like this tend to fancy themselves as very clever. I have a different opinion of them
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product No. An idiot giving you 100% will never learn your product. A genius giving you 1% will eventually develop a highly optimized way to use your product. If we assume all users are the former, we never design for the latter. That pretty much sums up the last 20 years of de facto UX. And if you disagree, I'd recommend you go find a call center still using mainframe apps, and watch a random sample of 100 users.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    >eventually perhaps, if the user is a continual user. but most users of most products are infrequent, and if your UI relies on being learned over time, it's probably not going to work for most people.
momokoko 6y ago
> Users have tasks to concentrate on. Right, we also need to remember that simple is not better than possible. If your interface is too simple and feature limited that your user can not complete their task, then you have gone too far. We want to reduce friction as much as possible while still allowing a customer to solve their problem.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  And then we should reduce the friction further to allow the user to solve their problem as fast as possible. That means batch-processing and some other complex features. This is because it's very likely that a chunk of your users will not be solving a problem once, but will be solving 200 identical problems a day, 5 days a week, for a year.
- _tulpa 6y ago
  > simple is not better than possible. Dang, that's just the most perfectly succinct phrasing of (an answer to) my pet hate in software/developer attitude/life in general. But it also seems that the 'possible' facet is just nowhere near as financially lucrative as 'simple'.
  - buzzwordninja 6y ago
    It depends. Mostly on what kind of users you might have. If the underlying model is very powerful but so complicated that it's very difficult to convey it to anyone, is it of any use? "Financially lucrative" in that case is simply a proxy for "can I get anyone go understand what is even going on?" I've built an online pub quiz, and I'm doing as much hallway usability testing (in the Zoom hallway) as I can. Early on, every single one ended up with me changing things from being more flexible and powerful to being simpler. Either the underlying model, or just what is being presented/allowed in the user interface at any given time. There is just no point in trying to provide lots of options instead of a well thought out middle-of-the-road path of obvious next steps if no-one will be able to get around to doing what they came for. People can't become power users if they aren't users. UX design is so hard, but luckily it's also very interesting :)
outericky 6y ago
> Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI. Therefore, it shouldn't distract from the task at hand.
dspillett 6y ago
> realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. Though from a practical PoV those two states are often hard to distinguish. Very similar hand-holding is required in each case. > Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI. This is very true. We provide accountability/competence/compliance management software for regulated industries (mainly savings and investment banking ATM) and for most of our users touching our software is a secondary task linked to their main roles. Even the day-to-day admins and UAT testers for new releases, are seconded from other areas or worse effectively being asked to use our software on top of their usual roles (an extra task given with no extra time assigned or other tasks paused).
phkahler 6y ago
>> Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it. Yep. It's probably over used as an example, but I always come back to pinch-zoom. People don't care about your UI, the best you can let them do is directly manipulate their data. Anything else is a compromise. That compromise is always going to be there, but we need to minimize it. MS Office has turned into a sort of industrial machine with a control panel. You can do anything to your data if you know what sequence of buttons to push to tell the machine what to do. Actually that peaked several years ago and they have been getting better about more direct access to features. OTOH they also have so much functionality that such UI will never go away completely. On a related tangent, I feel like tools for programmers suffer even more from this. Because we're used to editing text files to get things done, the notion of editing a config file or writing a script to get something to do what you want doesn't seem that unreasonable to software developers. Maybe it should.
- jchw 6y ago
  Programming tools should work this way because we write code; config files are effectively code that doesn't execute (or sometimes does.) A lot of the config files we use (think stuff like: gitignore, eslint/babel configuration, Dockerfiles, package.toml, etc.) we version into source control so that we can track changes over time. I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better; VSCode probably has done the best by providing autocompletion in YAML and JSON files using JSONSchema. Text files aren't perfect, but they're hard to beat. It's not like the hardest part of programming is actually syntax, anyways. You can always improve on this by providing better assisted editing. If there's anything I'd actually want it would be for software to have pluggable configuration so I can instruct it to pull its configuration from a database or something along those lines. edit: and on that note, it’s probably the command line interface that actually would strongly benefit from some consideration. CLI arguments are currently a flat unstructured list... but almost everything at least has key value pairs.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    > I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better Alternative views into those same text files would be nice. You could color-code the type of a snippet (yaml string/float issues) or nested blocks. You could offer a graph view of dependencies (context-dependent -- could be services, function calls, modules, docker base images, etc...). Text files are nice (and I've yet to see anything that would be a good replacement for most uses), but that doesn't mean we can't offer extra tooling/views into that data when it would be more convenient.
tootie 6y ago
You really can't bucket your users on a single mental model. It depends entirely on application and usage patterns. Daily users will become experts pretty quickly and look for fast, simple design. Doubly so if it's a line of business application with a captive audience (like a POS interface). Something like my homeowner insurance is a site I log in to like once a year. I'm not ever going to even remember my password let alone how to do anything without giant, colorful buttons leading me along. This is why UX is a profession. The seminal work on interaction design isn't Don't Make Me Think, it's About Face. About Face makes thee general rule that you should not design for beginners or experts but for the perpetual intermediate.
dkarl 6y ago
The side effect of being busy and distracted is that they're extremely thrifty with their attention, and sometimes their split-second subconscious decision not to look closely at something gets locked in and not reevaluated. About 70% of the IT support I do for my family goes like this: Voice from the next room: "Can you help me, dkarl? The computer won't save my document." Me, comfy in my chair: "What does it say?" "It's doing something weird." "Weird how? What does it say?" "I don't know, I was just saving like I always do, and now there's this window and it wants me to do something." "What is it asking you to do?" "It wants me to click something? I don't know, maybe it wants a password or it's not going to do it because of iCloud or something? It's been weird lately." "Okay. What are the words in the window where it wants you to click something?" "It says... oh, it says there's another file with this name already." "Okay, do you want me to come over there and help you find the other file and see what's in it?" "No, I can do it. Thank you!" I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face. This is an astute observation. I also didn't know that other kids read cereal boxes like that... I thought it was just me!
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    There's a fair number of them. If there are any parents here with children like that, try to see if you can get them introduced to local trivia competitions such as Science Bowl–it's an invaluable skill that will put you leagues ahead of anyone else since they will never be able to replicate your child's "years of studying".
agumonkey 6y ago
busy, distracted, obliged and not taught a recipe for rote disaster I'm a dev and I cannot cringe at a user failure to operate a piece of software. Even those with a solid enough mind and education will have issues, french teacher told me she couldn't bear the improper use of verbs and nouns in her daily usage. It's a gigantic mess.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Now tell us what graphical interface developers spend their time thinking about. Are they real world problems like the examples given above. What is more important. Someone once said the best interface is no interface. If I do not have to think about an "interface", if the program is doing its job without requiring interaction, then that is more time I have to focus on what is important. Not all software can be like this but a lot can. As the article indicates, there is an enormous amount of "forced interaction" in today's computers. This is in part because companies that employ interface developers rely on the online advertising business to make money.
rkagerer 6y ago
That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar I think about it every time I'm forced to use it. I think about how much I hate it, how constantly clicking between tabs slows me down, and how much more productive I was without it. For mainly this reason, I still use Word 2003 and have no plans to switch until the fad passes and someone in UI at Microsoft finally stops designing for the lowest common denominator and remembers the point of toolbars wasn't to replace menus, but rather to put commonly used functions one click away.
- Paianni 6y ago
  I would think using Office 2003 on an internet-connected machine would be a bit of a liability these days...
  - rkagerer 6y ago
    Third party tools like 0patch help. Obviously so do practices like sensible firewall settings and not opening attachments you don't trust. I have the latest version of Office installed for when it's needed, I simply prefer doing my serious Word work in '03. I don't think I'd hold up any version of Office as the paradigm of "internet safe" software.
nlawalker 6y ago
I can see how this breeds resentment in some contexts, though. A developer might spend a huge amount of time and effort modeling a workflow or a process into something crisp enough for a machine to process. That might take months of what feels like pulling teeth from people to extract requirements - people who are supposed to be domain experts. By the time he's done, he probably understands everything better than the people whose job it is to use the tool - the tool that now enables them to ignore and forget about parts of their job and complete it with 10% of their attention. "Stupid users - they barely understand their own job and I spent months learning the finest details about it to build them a tool so they can keep doing it without understanding it at all." Not saying it's right, but I can see how it happens.
burtonator 6y ago
I'm taking the "minimum cognition principle" ... the least time required to make a decision the better. It's like riding a bike - if you had to think about it you might get in an accident.
grishka 6y ago
A good UI is the one that the user doesn't notice. That means it has to be intuitive and consistent, and shouldn't ever distract the user. Distractions include sudden popups that aren't the result of an immediately preceding interaction (looking at you, iOS). And those login forms. No one ever wants to see a login form for something they've already logged into from this browser/device. Also, it might seem silly to point out, but use your goddamn product yourself the way your users would. That alone really helps with many UI/UX issues.
luxurycommunism 6y ago
That's an excellent point.
jake_morrison 6y ago
Years ago I was switching my father from DOS to Windows. He was resisting learning about the computer. Not because he was stupid, he has a PhD from Harvard. He was busy trying to consolidate his understanding of 1000 years of English literature and move the field forward. He needed the computer to write with, and was willing to learn how to do that. Everything else was a distraction.
goto11 6y ago
The article talks about respecting users but at the same time describes using Facebook as "mindlessly scrolling through feeds of what can most easily be described as garbage content". There is a big disconnect here. If people are actually smart and able to make their own decisions, maybe there is something more to Facebook than "mindless scrolling"?

jwr 6y ago

> A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. I'd put it differently. Realize that your app is not the center of the world. Your users have things to do, and using your app is a small fraction of their life. Even though it might be your baby and you might be spending all of your waking ours thinking about your app, user perspective is different.

nikki93 6y ago
Maybe the user is like a person walking down the street and your app is your kid with girl scout cookies boxes it's trying to sell, and you're helping it out. :) And it's not about the money as much as the app growing up, or something.
tremon 6y ago
Or, more bluntly: realize that your app is a tool, not a goal. Tools should be predictable, reliable, and easy to use correctly.
- grugagag 6y ago
  And intuitive! Since apps are like a blackbox to the user, they shouldn’t do things that make the user hesitate or get confused. With feature creep most apps become an unmanageable piece of mess
bonoboTP 6y ago
It reminds me of teachers' and professors' attitude towards their classes/courses. From their point of view, it's maybe the only thing they teach or one of 2-3 things and it's the general topic they spend all their time on. From a student's perspective it's one of many courses in various topics. They can't be expected to laser focus on just the class that you teach. But many teachers don't get this concept. They think everything revolves around their course only.
- mb7733 6y ago
  That's funny, because the inverse problem exists too. Many students think that teaching is all that professors do. They assume that the prof's whole life revolves around teaching their class, when in fact the bulk of the prof's job is research, supervision and administration.
justinclift 6y ago
This is what frustrates the heck out of me when platforms decide to redo their entire user experience, just because they feel the need to "change something". Thereby forcing all of their users to learn the new UI immediately, not even with due warning. One or two platforms doing is in a week or so is a pain. But when lots of platforms do this in a short period of it, it can be "throw hands up in the air and do something else". :(

notatoad 6y ago

>A better model for thinking of users is to realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted but this is functionally the same thing. whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product. "Users are stupid" isn't necessarily a judgemental thing meant to demean your users, just a reality that you have to accomodate the people who are going use your product in a way that's indistinguishable from a stupid person. You can't assume that anybody will remember anything they did in a previous step, or that anybody will correctly interpret the label on a button no matter how clearly you think it is worded, or when presented with multiple options will be able to correctly choose the one they want.

oblio 6y ago
I think the idea is about developer attitudes. I've heard variations of "the user is dumb" too many times to count in the last 15 years.
- devilduck 6y ago
  A lot of the designers or developers who talk like this tend to fancy themselves as very clever. I have a different opinion of them
ethbr0 6y ago
> whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product No. An idiot giving you 100% will never learn your product. A genius giving you 1% will eventually develop a highly optimized way to use your product. If we assume all users are the former, we never design for the latter. That pretty much sums up the last 20 years of de facto UX. And if you disagree, I'd recommend you go find a call center still using mainframe apps, and watch a random sample of 100 users.
- notatoad 6y ago
  >eventually perhaps, if the user is a continual user. but most users of most products are infrequent, and if your UI relies on being learned over time, it's probably not going to work for most people.

momokoko 6y ago

> Users have tasks to concentrate on. Right, we also need to remember that simple is not better than possible. If your interface is too simple and feature limited that your user can not complete their task, then you have gone too far. We want to reduce friction as much as possible while still allowing a customer to solve their problem.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
And then we should reduce the friction further to allow the user to solve their problem as fast as possible. That means batch-processing and some other complex features. This is because it's very likely that a chunk of your users will not be solving a problem once, but will be solving 200 identical problems a day, 5 days a week, for a year.
_tulpa 6y ago
> simple is not better than possible. Dang, that's just the most perfectly succinct phrasing of (an answer to) my pet hate in software/developer attitude/life in general. But it also seems that the 'possible' facet is just nowhere near as financially lucrative as 'simple'.
- buzzwordninja 6y ago
  It depends. Mostly on what kind of users you might have. If the underlying model is very powerful but so complicated that it's very difficult to convey it to anyone, is it of any use? "Financially lucrative" in that case is simply a proxy for "can I get anyone go understand what is even going on?" I've built an online pub quiz, and I'm doing as much hallway usability testing (in the Zoom hallway) as I can. Early on, every single one ended up with me changing things from being more flexible and powerful to being simpler. Either the underlying model, or just what is being presented/allowed in the user interface at any given time. There is just no point in trying to provide lots of options instead of a well thought out middle-of-the-road path of obvious next steps if no-one will be able to get around to doing what they came for. People can't become power users if they aren't users. UX design is so hard, but luckily it's also very interesting :)

outericky 6y ago

> Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI. Therefore, it shouldn't distract from the task at hand.

dspillett 6y ago

> realise that they are not stupid, just busy and distracted. Though from a practical PoV those two states are often hard to distinguish. Very similar hand-holding is required in each case. > Users have tasks to concentrate on. They don't have the attention left over to deal with your app's crappy UI. This is very true. We provide accountability/competence/compliance management software for regulated industries (mainly savings and investment banking ATM) and for most of our users touching our software is a secondary task linked to their main roles. Even the day-to-day admins and UAT testers for new releases, are seconded from other areas or worse effectively being asked to use our software on top of their usual roles (an extra task given with no extra time assigned or other tasks paused).

phkahler 6y ago

>> Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it. Yep. It's probably over used as an example, but I always come back to pinch-zoom. People don't care about your UI, the best you can let them do is directly manipulate their data. Anything else is a compromise. That compromise is always going to be there, but we need to minimize it. MS Office has turned into a sort of industrial machine with a control panel. You can do anything to your data if you know what sequence of buttons to push to tell the machine what to do. Actually that peaked several years ago and they have been getting better about more direct access to features. OTOH they also have so much functionality that such UI will never go away completely. On a related tangent, I feel like tools for programmers suffer even more from this. Because we're used to editing text files to get things done, the notion of editing a config file or writing a script to get something to do what you want doesn't seem that unreasonable to software developers. Maybe it should.

jchw 6y ago
Programming tools should work this way because we write code; config files are effectively code that doesn't execute (or sometimes does.) A lot of the config files we use (think stuff like: gitignore, eslint/babel configuration, Dockerfiles, package.toml, etc.) we version into source control so that we can track changes over time. I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better; VSCode probably has done the best by providing autocompletion in YAML and JSON files using JSONSchema. Text files aren't perfect, but they're hard to beat. It's not like the hardest part of programming is actually syntax, anyways. You can always improve on this by providing better assisted editing. If there's anything I'd actually want it would be for software to have pluggable configuration so I can instruct it to pull its configuration from a database or something along those lines. edit: and on that note, it’s probably the command line interface that actually would strongly benefit from some consideration. CLI arguments are currently a flat unstructured list... but almost everything at least has key value pairs.
- hansvm 6y ago
  > I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better Alternative views into those same text files would be nice. You could color-code the type of a snippet (yaml string/float issues) or nested blocks. You could offer a graph view of dependencies (context-dependent -- could be services, function calls, modules, docker base images, etc...). Text files are nice (and I've yet to see anything that would be a good replacement for most uses), but that doesn't mean we can't offer extra tooling/views into that data when it would be more convenient.

tootie 6y ago

You really can't bucket your users on a single mental model. It depends entirely on application and usage patterns. Daily users will become experts pretty quickly and look for fast, simple design. Doubly so if it's a line of business application with a captive audience (like a POS interface). Something like my homeowner insurance is a site I log in to like once a year. I'm not ever going to even remember my password let alone how to do anything without giant, colorful buttons leading me along. This is why UX is a profession. The seminal work on interaction design isn't Don't Make Me Think, it's About Face. About Face makes thee general rule that you should not design for beginners or experts but for the perpetual intermediate.

dkarl 6y ago

The side effect of being busy and distracted is that they're extremely thrifty with their attention, and sometimes their split-second subconscious decision not to look closely at something gets locked in and not reevaluated. About 70% of the IT support I do for my family goes like this: Voice from the next room: "Can you help me, dkarl? The computer won't save my document." Me, comfy in my chair: "What does it say?" "It's doing something weird." "Weird how? What does it say?" "I don't know, I was just saving like I always do, and now there's this window and it wants me to do something." "What is it asking you to do?" "It wants me to click something? I don't know, maybe it wants a password or it's not going to do it because of iCloud or something? It's been weird lately." "Okay. What are the words in the window where it wants you to click something?" "It says... oh, it says there's another file with this name already." "Okay, do you want me to come over there and help you find the other file and see what's in it?" "No, I can do it. Thank you!" I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face.

nerdponx 6y ago
I think one of the reasons I find computers relatively easy is that I compulsively read whatever you put in front of me. I always read cereal boxes when I was a kid, even the non-kid cereal boxes that were all about colon health and fiber. But even I get this blindness sometimes, especially when I'm writing code and running builds and tests and trying to work quickly and efficiently. I'll get hung up on something for ten minutes where the answer is literally spelled out for me in front of my face. This is an astute observation. I also didn't know that other kids read cereal boxes like that... I thought it was just me!
- saagarjha 6y ago
  There's a fair number of them. If there are any parents here with children like that, try to see if you can get them introduced to local trivia competitions such as Science Bowl–it's an invaluable skill that will put you leagues ahead of anyone else since they will never be able to replicate your child's "years of studying".

agumonkey 6y ago

busy, distracted, obliged and not taught a recipe for rote disaster I'm a dev and I cannot cringe at a user failure to operate a piece of software. Even those with a solid enough mind and education will have issues, french teacher told me she couldn't bear the improper use of verbs and nouns in her daily usage. It's a gigantic mess.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Now tell us what graphical interface developers spend their time thinking about. Are they real world problems like the examples given above. What is more important. Someone once said the best interface is no interface. If I do not have to think about an "interface", if the program is doing its job without requiring interaction, then that is more time I have to focus on what is important. Not all software can be like this but a lot can. As the article indicates, there is an enormous amount of "forced interaction" in today's computers. This is in part because companies that employ interface developers rely on the online advertising business to make money.

rkagerer 6y ago

That person in MSWord isn't thinking about the ribbon bar I think about it every time I'm forced to use it. I think about how much I hate it, how constantly clicking between tabs slows me down, and how much more productive I was without it. For mainly this reason, I still use Word 2003 and have no plans to switch until the fad passes and someone in UI at Microsoft finally stops designing for the lowest common denominator and remembers the point of toolbars wasn't to replace menus, but rather to put commonly used functions one click away.

Paianni 6y ago
I would think using Office 2003 on an internet-connected machine would be a bit of a liability these days...
- rkagerer 6y ago
  Third party tools like 0patch help. Obviously so do practices like sensible firewall settings and not opening attachments you don't trust. I have the latest version of Office installed for when it's needed, I simply prefer doing my serious Word work in '03. I don't think I'd hold up any version of Office as the paradigm of "internet safe" software.

nlawalker 6y ago

I can see how this breeds resentment in some contexts, though. A developer might spend a huge amount of time and effort modeling a workflow or a process into something crisp enough for a machine to process. That might take months of what feels like pulling teeth from people to extract requirements - people who are supposed to be domain experts. By the time he's done, he probably understands everything better than the people whose job it is to use the tool - the tool that now enables them to ignore and forget about parts of their job and complete it with 10% of their attention. "Stupid users - they barely understand their own job and I spent months learning the finest details about it to build them a tool so they can keep doing it without understanding it at all." Not saying it's right, but I can see how it happens.

burtonator 6y ago

I'm taking the "minimum cognition principle" ... the least time required to make a decision the better. It's like riding a bike - if you had to think about it you might get in an accident.

grishka 6y ago

A good UI is the one that the user doesn't notice. That means it has to be intuitive and consistent, and shouldn't ever distract the user. Distractions include sudden popups that aren't the result of an immediately preceding interaction (looking at you, iOS). And those login forms. No one ever wants to see a login form for something they've already logged into from this browser/device. Also, it might seem silly to point out, but use your goddamn product yourself the way your users would. That alone really helps with many UI/UX issues.

luxurycommunism 6y ago

That's an excellent point.

jake_morrison 6y ago

Years ago I was switching my father from DOS to Windows. He was resisting learning about the computer. Not because he was stupid, he has a PhD from Harvard. He was busy trying to consolidate his understanding of 1000 years of English literature and move the field forward. He needed the computer to write with, and was willing to learn how to do that. Everything else was a distraction.

goto11 6y ago

The article talks about respecting users but at the same time describes using Facebook as "mindlessly scrolling through feeds of what can most easily be described as garbage content". There is a big disconnect here. If people are actually smart and able to make their own decisions, maybe there is something more to Facebook than "mindless scrolling"?