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This is probably part of the reason why Apple's UX has been so good (historically, let's not get into a discussion about now) – they aren't pandering to power u

This is probably part of the reason why Apple's UX has been so good (historically, let's not get into a discussion about now) – they aren't pandering to power users mostly, they are designing very coherent experiences for most users. Power user features can reduce that coherence, making it more difficult for everyone else. The flip side to the argument here though is that you get tools without much depth, and for certain markets depth is important. For developer tools, depth is almost certainly the right trade-off compared to simplicity, for example. I think Trello is a great example of a project management tool taking the simplicity over depth approach. This is why my friends and family like it for personal things, and for small business problems, but it's also why I don't like it for work – because I work in a bigger team with more complex requirements and prefer something with more depth. I like Trello much more having come to this conclusion about who it's for.

MiroF 6y ago
They pandering to affluent professional-managerial class people, very much not the same as power users - although there is some overlap.
yboris 6y ago
Sorry for off-topic, but is anyone similarly aggravated by some of the MacOS behaviors? Switching between apps with `command` + `tab` will focus but not maximize a minimized application! When you have Zoom in full screen and switch back to it via keyboard shortcut it will not show the window! Every day I experience pain using MacOS and it baffles me this UX persists for years!
adambatkin 6y ago
Just keep in mind that early in a product's lifecycle, it is those Power Users that are the cheerleaders for your product (driving adoption), and sophisticated enough to offer (potentially) valuable feedback. For example: One could argue that Apple was brought back to life by a relatively small group of Power Users with specific requirements for their workloads (Graphic Design, Video Editing, desire for powerful Unix workstations and laptops, etc...) and Apple met those requirements in a way that no one else was able or willing to. Now that Apple's market share has increased - and more importantly, they have started to focus on computing-for-the-masses - you can clearly see why some Power Users are disappointed in this direction, and are feeling left out. Sure, Apple is wildly successful (in a way that they might not be if they spent more resources making that minority of Power Users happier) but it's obvious why those Power Users feel like Apple is leaving them in the dust (and Apple might not exist anymore today, had it not been for those Power Users).
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Very much this. The only reason I use Apple computers today is because I need access to their walled garden of apps (Safari, IOS) and (now slipping) legacy of workhorse hardware. In the past Macs were great for commercial graphics and other niches. Today Xubuntu makes for a better *nix environment (IMO) and Windows has better gaming graphics and backward compatibility. With WSL maturing there's less reason to have a Mac except to compile for the lucrative garden dwellers.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  It's not necessarily power users, it's Steve Blank's earlyvangelists. I don't think it's obvious those two overlap 100%. You could also argue that Apple was brought back to life by the iMac, which was decidedly not a power user machine. (Not easily expandible, USB-only, no choice of display, limited model specs, etc.)
dekerta 6y ago
My team recently moved from Trello to Jira, and I really miss the simplicity and speed of Trello. Sure, Jira has every tool and feature you could ever think of, but it's so bloated and slow I find myself spending half the time waiting for the UI to catch up to me. I like it when products have lots of features and customization, but it can't come at the expense of usability
- alluro2 6y ago
  Uh, sorry to hear about the migration - it's understandable given the (over-)simplicity of Trello, but Jira seems like a jump to another end of the spectrum. We migrated away from Jira (Cloud) to Quire which has been amazing. The poor UX and performance were just making it a choire to keep the boards updated...There was famously a reply in a thread (on their forum) about performance issues in which team member replied that they don't understand what the complaints are about as most of their response times are "3 seconds or less" :) https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Jira-and-Confluence-Cloud-is-toooooo-slow/qaq-p/744373 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Jira...
  - dekerta 6y ago
    Proud of 3-second response times. Modern web-developers in a nutshell
smichel17 6y ago
I'd argue that coherent experience vs "power user" features is a false dichotomy. They are at odds, but you can design a program to have a coherent user experience as long as you stick to a subset of features, and hide the incoherent features away from the coherent interface. That's rather abstract, so let me give a concrete example: Gnome 3 comes with a settings application that allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts -- on my laptop I changed the maximization shortcuts to Ctrl+arrow_keys instead of Win+arrow_keys, which is easier to press one-handed. Most people probably know this. What most people probably don't know is that you can actually assign multiple key combinations to the same action (say I wanted to add the Ctrl shortcuts instead of replacing the win ones). This option is not present in the settings application gui - you have to edit the corresponding dconf entry and add another entry to the array of shortcuts. This is somewhat cumbersome and the gui still only displays the first shortcut in the array, but it lets "power users" do something niche without harming the coherent experience of "regular users". The real dichotemy, in my opinion, is between quality software and developer time/effort. And I don't mean to belittle developers here (I am one, after all); getting a split design like this right -- such that there are few leaky abstractions -- is HARD. I found out about the feature due to one such leak: there are a few shortcuts on Fedora that have two default shortcuts (changing workspaces with either Ctrl+Alt+page_up/down or Win+page_up/down), and changing the one you can see (Win) doesn't remove the other one (a problem for me, since I wanted to use the other one for something else, and I couldn't through the gui; I had to remove the second default in dconf first). Finally, the air quotes around "power users" are because I think it is a leaky abstraction. It's not one group of people who want to customize everu feature, it's a larger group of people who each want to customize one different feature. I think the winning approach overall is to provide a few low level hooks into your application's functionality, that people can use to code their own tweaks.This allows you to get rid of the options that cover a tiny minority of use cases, without losing the functionality. The android todo app Simpletask gets this part perfect with its lua scripting, although the UI is not as polished as it could be given more developer time.

MiroF 6y ago

They pandering to affluent professional-managerial class people, very much not the same as power users - although there is some overlap.

yboris 6y ago

Sorry for off-topic, but is anyone similarly aggravated by some of the MacOS behaviors? Switching between apps with `command` + `tab` will focus but not maximize a minimized application! When you have Zoom in full screen and switch back to it via keyboard shortcut it will not show the window! Every day I experience pain using MacOS and it baffles me this UX persists for years!

adambatkin 6y ago

Just keep in mind that early in a product's lifecycle, it is those Power Users that are the cheerleaders for your product (driving adoption), and sophisticated enough to offer (potentially) valuable feedback. For example: One could argue that Apple was brought back to life by a relatively small group of Power Users with specific requirements for their workloads (Graphic Design, Video Editing, desire for powerful Unix workstations and laptops, etc...) and Apple met those requirements in a way that no one else was able or willing to. Now that Apple's market share has increased - and more importantly, they have started to focus on computing-for-the-masses - you can clearly see why some Power Users are disappointed in this direction, and are feeling left out. Sure, Apple is wildly successful (in a way that they might not be if they spent more resources making that minority of Power Users happier) but it's obvious why those Power Users feel like Apple is leaving them in the dust (and Apple might not exist anymore today, had it not been for those Power Users).

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Very much this. The only reason I use Apple computers today is because I need access to their walled garden of apps (Safari, IOS) and (now slipping) legacy of workhorse hardware. In the past Macs were great for commercial graphics and other niches. Today Xubuntu makes for a better *nix environment (IMO) and Windows has better gaming graphics and backward compatibility. With WSL maturing there's less reason to have a Mac except to compile for the lucrative garden dwellers.
edmundsauto 6y ago
It's not necessarily power users, it's Steve Blank's earlyvangelists. I don't think it's obvious those two overlap 100%. You could also argue that Apple was brought back to life by the iMac, which was decidedly not a power user machine. (Not easily expandible, USB-only, no choice of display, limited model specs, etc.)

dekerta 6y ago

My team recently moved from Trello to Jira, and I really miss the simplicity and speed of Trello. Sure, Jira has every tool and feature you could ever think of, but it's so bloated and slow I find myself spending half the time waiting for the UI to catch up to me. I like it when products have lots of features and customization, but it can't come at the expense of usability

alluro2 6y ago
Uh, sorry to hear about the migration - it's understandable given the (over-)simplicity of Trello, but Jira seems like a jump to another end of the spectrum. We migrated away from Jira (Cloud) to Quire which has been amazing. The poor UX and performance were just making it a choire to keep the boards updated...There was famously a reply in a thread (on their forum) about performance issues in which team member replied that they don't understand what the complaints are about as most of their response times are "3 seconds or less" :) https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Jira-and-Confluence-Cloud-is-toooooo-slow/qaq-p/744373 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Jira...
- dekerta 6y ago
  Proud of 3-second response times. Modern web-developers in a nutshell

smichel17 6y ago

I'd argue that coherent experience vs "power user" features is a false dichotomy. They are at odds, but you can design a program to have a coherent user experience as long as you stick to a subset of features, and hide the incoherent features away from the coherent interface. That's rather abstract, so let me give a concrete example: Gnome 3 comes with a settings application that allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts -- on my laptop I changed the maximization shortcuts to Ctrl+arrow_keys instead of Win+arrow_keys, which is easier to press one-handed. Most people probably know this. What most people probably don't know is that you can actually assign multiple key combinations to the same action (say I wanted to add the Ctrl shortcuts instead of replacing the win ones). This option is not present in the settings application gui - you have to edit the corresponding dconf entry and add another entry to the array of shortcuts. This is somewhat cumbersome and the gui still only displays the first shortcut in the array, but it lets "power users" do something niche without harming the coherent experience of "regular users". The real dichotemy, in my opinion, is between quality software and developer time/effort. And I don't mean to belittle developers here (I am one, after all); getting a split design like this right -- such that there are few leaky abstractions -- is HARD. I found out about the feature due to one such leak: there are a few shortcuts on Fedora that have two default shortcuts (changing workspaces with either Ctrl+Alt+page_up/down or Win+page_up/down), and changing the one you can see (Win) doesn't remove the other one (a problem for me, since I wanted to use the other one for something else, and I couldn't through the gui; I had to remove the second default in dconf first). Finally, the air quotes around "power users" are because I think it is a leaky abstraction. It's not one group of people who want to customize everu feature, it's a larger group of people who each want to customize one different feature. I think the winning approach overall is to provide a few low level hooks into your application's functionality, that people can use to code their own tweaks.This allows you to get rid of the options that cover a tiny minority of use cases, without losing the functionality. The android todo app Simpletask gets this part perfect with its lua scripting, although the UI is not as polished as it could be given more developer time.