4 ms·

Some devs do lack empathy for users, but that's a trope with lots of professions. I think it's more... 1. UX is a skill you need to train separately from the r

by pfraze 6y ago

Some devs do lack empathy for users, but that's a trope with lots of professions. I think it's more... 1. UX is a skill you need to train separately from the rest of your engineering skillset and not everybody does. I strongly recommend "Refactoring UI" to get some fast training. 2. Not everybody does user testing where you sit down with new users and watch them use it. Until you've done that multiple times, you won't develop a good intuition for how people approach new software. I recommend this to everyone, just do it. It's an essential training tool as well as an essential product-development process. 3. Every project is driven by competing feature ideas, often in an exploratory way. Everyone has feature requests, and engineers often think in terms of exposing knobs to adjust because they want to expose the underlying power of the system. The problem is, humans have a very limited budget of concepts they can take in from a UI, and the information architecture of a UI is holistic. "Just one more feature" can throw the entire thing out of balance. This factor alone makes it easy to make bad UIs.

atoav 6y ago
I'd add: 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the problem. A minimalistic UI isn't automatically more or less powerful than a complex one if it combines well with other tools. To make every part combine well with the other parts to get out more than the sum of the parts is worth it, but find the right degree of minimalism vs complexity. 5. Make sure you waste the cognitive energy of people by having them figure out the same things over and over again. Rhe work of programmers multiplies: if you make one tiny thing a little bit nicer, it might make a hundred moments on a thousand days for a thousand people nicer. Same goes for making things that suck. So things should be obvious — if they are not (e.g. because the underlying problems are hardcore) make sure your software reduces the cognitive energy needed to solve that hard problem. Never claim that a hard problem is simple unless you really managed to simplify it.
- hacknat 6y ago
  I'll add: 6. Not every software project even has a UI 7. Some software projects have a very specialized set of users or barely interact with users and solve very technical problems or data problems (the software I work on now runs 24/7 in perpetuity, and as long as it works, they interact with it only once).
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  > 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the problem. A minimalistic UI isn't automatically more or less powerful than a complex one if it combines well with other tools. To make every part combine well with the other parts to get out more than the sum of the parts is worth it, but find the right degree of minimalism vs complexity. It doesn't have to be sleak but minimalist ! = sleak. A UX designer makes things minimalist while a UI designer makes them sleak. A minimalist UI is a strong sign that care was put into abstracting away unnecessary and complex features that most users do not need - which is the job of a UX designer.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    I think this only works for certain classes of applications. Applications that professional users use do typically need lots of features, no matter how you present that. The idea of "most users don't need this" is misguided because while most of the functionality won't be necessary for most users, users don't necessarily agree on which features they will need, every one of them requiring a different subset of the features. Just take something like a sheet music composer (something like Sibelius, Finale or Dorico). There's no way in hell you can just strip out a significant chunk of the features because doing that would totally break the product for many, many users (incidentally, the YouTube channel tantacrul has some interesting videos about UX design in this space - not affiliated). Word processors, IDEs, etc. share similar fates. Frankly, I'm often annoyed when some programs pretend that I don't need some functionality and prefer to present their minimalist UI to me that doesn't let me do advanced stuff. A lot of macOS software IMHO suffers from this problem which is maybe great if you just want a barebones e-mail reader, say, but then you get something like XCode which doesn't even have proper refactoring support because "look at how complicated IntelliJ is".
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
> Not everybody does user testing where you sit down with new users and watch them use it. I'd really like to. Management rarely lets me. When they do, they don't take my advice.

by pfraze 6y ago

atoav 6y ago

I'd add: 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the problem. A minimalistic UI isn't automatically more or less powerful than a complex one if it combines well with other tools. To make every part combine well with the other parts to get out more than the sum of the parts is worth it, but find the right degree of minimalism vs complexity. 5. Make sure you waste the cognitive energy of people by having them figure out the same things over and over again. Rhe work of programmers multiplies: if you make one tiny thing a little bit nicer, it might make a hundred moments on a thousand days for a thousand people nicer. Same goes for making things that suck. So things should be obvious — if they are not (e.g. because the underlying problems are hardcore) make sure your software reduces the cognitive energy needed to solve that hard problem. Never claim that a hard problem is simple unless you really managed to simplify it.

hacknat 6y ago
I'll add: 6. Not every software project even has a UI 7. Some software projects have a very specialized set of users or barely interact with users and solve very technical problems or data problems (the software I work on now runs 24/7 in perpetuity, and as long as it works, they interact with it only once).
Zenbit_UX 6y ago
> 4. Not everything needs to be a minimalistic sleek Webapp. All of this depends on who your target audience is and on which level they want to deal with the problem. A minimalistic UI isn't automatically more or less powerful than a complex one if it combines well with other tools. To make every part combine well with the other parts to get out more than the sum of the parts is worth it, but find the right degree of minimalism vs complexity. It doesn't have to be sleak but minimalist ! = sleak. A UX designer makes things minimalist while a UI designer makes them sleak. A minimalist UI is a strong sign that care was put into abstracting away unnecessary and complex features that most users do not need - which is the job of a UX designer.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I think this only works for certain classes of applications. Applications that professional users use do typically need lots of features, no matter how you present that. The idea of "most users don't need this" is misguided because while most of the functionality won't be necessary for most users, users don't necessarily agree on which features they will need, every one of them requiring a different subset of the features. Just take something like a sheet music composer (something like Sibelius, Finale or Dorico). There's no way in hell you can just strip out a significant chunk of the features because doing that would totally break the product for many, many users (incidentally, the YouTube channel tantacrul has some interesting videos about UX design in this space - not affiliated). Word processors, IDEs, etc. share similar fates. Frankly, I'm often annoyed when some programs pretend that I don't need some functionality and prefer to present their minimalist UI to me that doesn't let me do advanced stuff. A lot of macOS software IMHO suffers from this problem which is maybe great if you just want a barebones e-mail reader, say, but then you get something like XCode which doesn't even have proper refactoring support because "look at how complicated IntelliJ is".

ReactiveJelly 6y ago

> Not everybody does user testing where you sit down with new users and watch them use it. I'd really like to. Management rarely lets me. When they do, they don't take my advice.