27 ms·

Want a killer product? Become more opinionated

265 points by adilaijaz 5y ago

adilaijaz 5y ago
Product conventions create an opinionated product; opinionated product creates user delight; user delight creates business success.
js8 5y ago
My company is somehow big on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking, and I feel like the lack of product/engineering people being opinionated is one of its main flaws.
scriptstar 5y ago
It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  AKA support doing the entire work, and pay attention to what defaults you choose. Don't stop at the first part. He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it. I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
- rakoo 5y ago
  The two are not exclusive; in fact, "convention" means that out of all the possibilities a certain set is chosen and used by default. It is not possible to have a "convention" if there is no "configuration", otherwise it's just a limited set of features. What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
- Mauricebranagh 5y ago
  And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW. Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion. But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
  - mhluongo 5y ago
    Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
    - will4274 5y ago
      Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow - seems like catering to people who have a political issue with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.
      - mhluongo 5y ago
        Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to interface with their office software. Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
> Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”. I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
jhunter1016 5y ago
If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
- a4isms 5y ago
  Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus). This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs. Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems. Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused. Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
  - JohnStrangeII 5y ago
    Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing. If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
  - cma 5y ago
    It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
    - 5y ago
hermannj314 5y ago
Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration). That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site. Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
- dgb23 5y ago
  > I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach. This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia. We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
  - fnimick 5y ago
    Unfortunately, companies that don't extract maximum revenue from their customers/workers get outcompeted and put out of business by those that do.
    - dgb23 5y ago
      I hear that often but is it really true? There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to medium ones, who provide quality services and products and have earned the trust of their customers, workers and partners over the years without screwing them over left and right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in regards to environmental issues on top of all of this. Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche. Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts people into positions where they have overwhelming levels of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.
amelius 5y ago
Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit: Paternalistic (adjective) (of people in authority) making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives Source: Cambridge Dictionary
- RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
  > rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
  - anoncake 5y ago
    There's nothing wrong with having good defaults, just with not being able to override them. "Opinionated" usually means latter.
    - corty 5y ago
      Not just usually, opinionated means exactly paternalistic: "opinionated" is the opposite of "configureable". That is a basic tenet of the article.
    - bobthechef 5y ago
      That makes it sound easy. Overriding means the capacity to be overriden. I.e., if you can change the default, then it presupposed that you have a mechanism for dealing with various options PLUS some other options. That's additional work.
      - anoncake 5y ago
        Yes, you need to implement a configuration mechanism, but you almost always do anyway.
- bobthechef 5y ago
ccity88 5y ago
I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
- Jenk 5y ago
  Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
- giancarlostoro 5y ago
  "Why this HN comment is correct on design", "Why said revered HN comment is incorrect on design", "HN comment creates cult" Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
- fnord77 5y ago
  yes, lots of philosophy and little actual science (testing hypotheses etc)
  - hellomyguys 5y ago
    Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps' buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.
rob74 5y ago
> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
- onion2k 5y ago
  The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for. Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  That's fine, then they won't use it. Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
- mojuba 5y ago
terminalserver 5y ago
This article made no sense. The example were unrelated to the thesis being put forward. It had nothing to do with making a killer product.
bullen 5y ago
I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell it to do and nothing more. Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.
some1else 5y ago
Regarding the "paste without formatting by default" opinion: - Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting. - Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting. Other remarks: - Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research. - There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...
- hexa22 5y ago
  There are certainly two use cases here. One is pasting complex blocks where you want the whole thing to copy over. And the other is copying text out of an email or website where you want it treated as dumb text. Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
  - some1else 5y ago
    > Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word. Yes. The Tweet was advocating for making that the default paste logic.
- HermanMartinus 5y ago
  As an anecdote, Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev was created for a very specific kind of person and has been cracking along well because of it.
bwb 5y ago
I always feel with titles like this I want to respond back with one of the following: 1. Maybe or 2. Until it is too much x aka "opinionated" But, still a good read :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 5y ago
>> Opinionated products are better than flexible products. But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former. There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  This is there the Proctor & Gamble branding approach to products begins to make sense. In development, there is one code base, but multiple configurations of build. In the market the company has a "product line" of software, each opinionated towards a different work flow. Similar to being multi-lingual, this is multi-opinionazation to address different process styles.
jfengel 5y ago
Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion. Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use. Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way. The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
- config_yml 5y ago
  It probably matters how this opinion is formed. Often it’s formed first by your own pain, and if you start talk to people and do user research you might discover that you’re on to something.
xrd 5y ago
Killer product is such an amorphous phrasing. If the author meant best product, I agree. If the author meant best selling, I'm not sure I agree. MS Word needs to have all those configuration options for IT to check their boxes AND write the enterprise sized check. If you are making a consumer app, this all seems like good advice. But I'm not sure it is good general advice.
gwbas1c 5y ago
About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.) In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts. In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app. Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=1...
- thejosh 5y ago
  Isn’t that ctrl+shift+v? It is for Linux and I think windows too?
  - gwbas1c 5y ago
    Yeah, but who knows that? Apparently the author of the article doesn't know that. Anyway, my app lets you see what's in the clipboard and adjust how much you want it cleaned.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    The simpler keystroke should do the more common operation. My guess is 90-99% of the time, users want to paste text and match the format to the existing doc or app. Therefore, cmd+v should strip formatting if done according to that rule.
  - cuddlybacon 5y ago
    On Mac, the apps I happened to check use cmd+shift+alt+v. I checked MS Teams, Outlook, Mail.app, and Safari.
polote 5y ago
This article mix a bit of everything. There are no rules to create a killer product. That's the whole purpose of the product management domain. Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated. But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?
teekert 5y ago
Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.) And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair. Other than this, I agree with the premise.
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
I understand where the author is coming from, and that it tends to work sometimes, blablabla, but if I saved a dollar every time an "opinionated" application, framework, library, or programming language appeared on Github, I would have likely saved for a slightly used Toyota by now.
mistercow 5y ago
I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, the formatting is completely wrong. I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
- ako 5y ago
  I use copy/paste in powerpoint explicitly with the intent to copy over the formatting of the original to the destination deck. Easiest way to add a theme to an existing deck.
- joe_fishfish 5y ago
  So if you make paste match the formatting of the destination not the source, both you and the tweeter are happy. Make a funky shortcut to override this if you want but this should be the default.
- akarma 5y ago
  In my case, I almost always want paste to override most formatting — if I copy something from a website, I want it to match my formatting. What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained. A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  Not only that, but I think the "average user" probably has lesser taste than the tweeter. They see a blue font on the text they are copying from some random web page, they expect a blue font when they paste it. This would be especially important to the average user if they are copying a lot of text with bullets and headers. So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
jhaile 5y ago
Maybe Microsoft did the user research and knows that most users want to preserve formatting when they paste in text. You prefer it to match style when pasting, but how do you know most users don't prefer it the way it is now? User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.
mattacular 5y ago
I want to paste without formatting sometimes though?
cblconfederate 5y ago
It has been a long time since programs were written in a sane way: with lots of functionality so that experienced users can figure out a routine speed and become blazingly fast. Modern computing has decided to make people dumb. They like them like that, mindless drones who can only scroll and press YES. In life you get what you pay for, and right now we get users who don't care because they don't know, and big tech keeps feeding them more of the same. When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.
aantix 5y ago
In order to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgement. Value judgements take courage. Value judgements require saying this is more important, these types of users will not be included.
tremoloqui 5y ago
The place for opinion in your product is in its configuration. Applications need to be flexible, otherwise they are useless to anyone who doesn't share your opinion. Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time. Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.
smoldesu 5y ago
All of my favorite products are completely unopinionated. Of course, aligning yourself with a specific audience will move units, but it won't make your product any better or worse. The only way you can actually improve your product is by becoming less opinionated and listening to the community who uses your product. Oftentimes their insight will be much more valuable than just "being opinionated".
dchuk 5y ago
This is the actual key to building MVPs. A good MVP provides exactly 1 way to do something impactful for a certain target customer base. If you have alternative paths/options/configurations, you built too much before testing in the market.
anon_christian 5y ago
"Opinionativeness is the lust of conquering" Augustine
anti-nazi 5y ago
that's not good advice at all
ryanmcbride 5y ago
No.

265 points by adilaijaz 5y ago

Product conventions create an opinionated product; opinionated product creates user delight; user delight creates business success.

js8 5y ago

My company is somehow big on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking, and I feel like the lack of product/engineering people being opinionated is one of its main flaws.

scriptstar 5y ago

It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.

marcosdumay 5y ago
AKA support doing the entire work, and pay attention to what defaults you choose. Don't stop at the first part. He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it. I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
rakoo 5y ago
The two are not exclusive; in fact, "convention" means that out of all the possibilities a certain set is chosen and used by default. It is not possible to have a "convention" if there is no "configuration", otherwise it's just a limited set of features. What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user. But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share? I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.

Mauricebranagh 5y ago
And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW. Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion. But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
- mhluongo 5y ago
  Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
  - will4274 5y ago
    Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow - seems like catering to people who have a political issue with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.
    - mhluongo 5y ago
      Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to interface with their office software. Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.

resoluteteeth 5y ago

> Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”. I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.

jhunter1016 5y ago

If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.

a4isms 5y ago
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus). This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs. Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems. Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused. Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
- JohnStrangeII 5y ago
  Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing. If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
- cma 5y ago
  It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
  - 5y ago

hermannj314 5y ago

Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration). That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site. Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.

dgb23 5y ago
> I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach. This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia. We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
- fnimick 5y ago
  Unfortunately, companies that don't extract maximum revenue from their customers/workers get outcompeted and put out of business by those that do.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    I hear that often but is it really true? There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to medium ones, who provide quality services and products and have earned the trust of their customers, workers and partners over the years without screwing them over left and right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in regards to environmental issues on top of all of this. Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche. Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts people into positions where they have overwhelming levels of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.

amelius 5y ago

Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit: Paternalistic (adjective) (of people in authority) making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives Source: Cambridge Dictionary

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
- anoncake 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with having good defaults, just with not being able to override them. "Opinionated" usually means latter.
  - corty 5y ago
    Not just usually, opinionated means exactly paternalistic: "opinionated" is the opposite of "configureable". That is a basic tenet of the article.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    That makes it sound easy. Overriding means the capacity to be overriden. I.e., if you can change the default, then it presupposed that you have a mechanism for dealing with various options PLUS some other options. That's additional work.
    - anoncake 5y ago
      Yes, you need to implement a configuration mechanism, but you almost always do anyway.
bobthechef 5y ago

ccity88 5y ago

I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".

Jenk 5y ago
Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
giancarlostoro 5y ago
"Why this HN comment is correct on design", "Why said revered HN comment is incorrect on design", "HN comment creates cult" Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
fnord77 5y ago
yes, lots of philosophy and little actual science (testing hypotheses etc)
- hellomyguys 5y ago
  Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps' buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.

rob74 5y ago

> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.

onion2k 5y ago
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for. Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
That's fine, then they won't use it. Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
mojuba 5y ago

terminalserver 5y ago

This article made no sense. The example were unrelated to the thesis being put forward. It had nothing to do with making a killer product.

bullen 5y ago

I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell it to do and nothing more. Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.

some1else 5y ago

Regarding the "paste without formatting by default" opinion: - Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting. - Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting. Other remarks: - Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research. - There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...

hexa22 5y ago
There are certainly two use cases here. One is pasting complex blocks where you want the whole thing to copy over. And the other is copying text out of an email or website where you want it treated as dumb text. Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
- some1else 5y ago
  > Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word. Yes. The Tweet was advocating for making that the default paste logic.
HermanMartinus 5y ago
As an anecdote, Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev was created for a very specific kind of person and has been cracking along well because of it.

bwb 5y ago

I always feel with titles like this I want to respond back with one of the following: 1. Maybe or 2. Until it is too much x aka "opinionated" But, still a good read :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 5y ago

>> Opinionated products are better than flexible products. But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former. There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.

bsenftner 5y ago
This is there the Proctor & Gamble branding approach to products begins to make sense. In development, there is one code base, but multiple configurations of build. In the market the company has a "product line" of software, each opinionated towards a different work flow. Similar to being multi-lingual, this is multi-opinionazation to address different process styles.

jfengel 5y ago

Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion. Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use. Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way. The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.

config_yml 5y ago
It probably matters how this opinion is formed. Often it’s formed first by your own pain, and if you start talk to people and do user research you might discover that you’re on to something.

xrd 5y ago

Killer product is such an amorphous phrasing. If the author meant best product, I agree. If the author meant best selling, I'm not sure I agree. MS Word needs to have all those configuration options for IT to check their boxes AND write the enterprise sized check. If you are making a consumer app, this all seems like good advice. But I'm not sure it is good general advice.

gwbas1c 5y ago

About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.) In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts. In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app. Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=1...

thejosh 5y ago
Isn’t that ctrl+shift+v? It is for Linux and I think windows too?
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Yeah, but who knows that? Apparently the author of the article doesn't know that. Anyway, my app lets you see what's in the clipboard and adjust how much you want it cleaned.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  The simpler keystroke should do the more common operation. My guess is 90-99% of the time, users want to paste text and match the format to the existing doc or app. Therefore, cmd+v should strip formatting if done according to that rule.
- cuddlybacon 5y ago
  On Mac, the apps I happened to check use cmd+shift+alt+v. I checked MS Teams, Outlook, Mail.app, and Safari.

polote 5y ago

This article mix a bit of everything. There are no rules to create a killer product. That's the whole purpose of the product management domain. Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated. But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?

teekert 5y ago

Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.) And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair. Other than this, I agree with the premise.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago

I understand where the author is coming from, and that it tends to work sometimes, blablabla, but if I saved a dollar every time an "opinionated" application, framework, library, or programming language appeared on Github, I would have likely saved for a slightly used Toyota by now.

mistercow 5y ago

I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, the formatting is completely wrong. I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.

ako 5y ago
I use copy/paste in powerpoint explicitly with the intent to copy over the formatting of the original to the destination deck. Easiest way to add a theme to an existing deck.
joe_fishfish 5y ago
So if you make paste match the formatting of the destination not the source, both you and the tweeter are happy. Make a funky shortcut to override this if you want but this should be the default.
akarma 5y ago
In my case, I almost always want paste to override most formatting — if I copy something from a website, I want it to match my formatting. What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained. A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
Not only that, but I think the "average user" probably has lesser taste than the tweeter. They see a blue font on the text they are copying from some random web page, they expect a blue font when they paste it. This would be especially important to the average user if they are copying a lot of text with bullets and headers. So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.

jhaile 5y ago

Maybe Microsoft did the user research and knows that most users want to preserve formatting when they paste in text. You prefer it to match style when pasting, but how do you know most users don't prefer it the way it is now? User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.

mattacular 5y ago

I want to paste without formatting sometimes though?

cblconfederate 5y ago

It has been a long time since programs were written in a sane way: with lots of functionality so that experienced users can figure out a routine speed and become blazingly fast. Modern computing has decided to make people dumb. They like them like that, mindless drones who can only scroll and press YES. In life you get what you pay for, and right now we get users who don't care because they don't know, and big tech keeps feeding them more of the same. When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.

aantix 5y ago

In order to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgement. Value judgements take courage. Value judgements require saying this is more important, these types of users will not be included.

tremoloqui 5y ago

The place for opinion in your product is in its configuration. Applications need to be flexible, otherwise they are useless to anyone who doesn't share your opinion. Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time. Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.

smoldesu 5y ago

All of my favorite products are completely unopinionated. Of course, aligning yourself with a specific audience will move units, but it won't make your product any better or worse. The only way you can actually improve your product is by becoming less opinionated and listening to the community who uses your product. Oftentimes their insight will be much more valuable than just "being opinionated".

dchuk 5y ago

This is the actual key to building MVPs. A good MVP provides exactly 1 way to do something impactful for a certain target customer base. If you have alternative paths/options/configurations, you built too much before testing in the market.

anon_christian 5y ago

"Opinionativeness is the lust of conquering" Augustine

anti-nazi 5y ago

that's not good advice at all

ryanmcbride 5y ago

No.