3 ms·

Well, if that wasn't the worst slippery slope argument I've seen in a while. That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say

Well, if that wasn't the worst slippery slope argument I've seen in a while. That's like me saying "dogs and cats are both mammal pets" and you jump in and say "WELL JELLYFISH IS AN ANIMAL WITH DNA TOO SO OBVIOUSLY PEOPLE CAN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN JELLYFISH AND DOGS/CATS". Uhhh, no, that's a massive jump to an extreme conclusion. There's a BIG difference between someone typing "facebook" into a URL bar, and them putting their trash in their mailbox. I'm not saying you should put literally everything including "change settings" or "access your bookmarks" in the omnibar, merely that combining the URL bar and the Search bar was clearly a common sense UI idea, and even Firefox bowed in after a while. Your job as a developer isn't to force the user to learn more things. Your job as a developer is not to be arrogant and insist that the user must understand some technical model they don't care about. If they want to go to BankOfAmerica.com, and they typed in "BOA", your job is to make it easier for them to do their banking, even if they're massive idiots when it comes to tech. Human brains have a universal structure, which merely means you need to target the lowest common denominator when it comes to design. As an aside, this is why Apple products historically are known for being very easy to use by the elderly. I certainly am grateful for the fact that my grandparents were able to learn to use Facetime and looked forward to using that software before they passed away. I'm not sure if Apple's ease-of-use is still true, for what it's worth- they've added a lot of complexity in recent years. --- Addendum: This is HN, full of very smart tech people who also happen to be terrible at empathy, so I'll give the usual spiel on empathy (which is usually disregarded by people with overly large egos): The person who typed "BOA" into the URL bar might be a tech idiot, but that tech idiot may just be a really good neurosurgeon, and that person may just prefer to spend their brain cells dealing with their own specialty. Humans are good at specialization, and I'd rather my brain surgeon not know or care or spend too much of their energy in understanding DNS, or the difference in how Chrome distinguishes URLs from search queries. For that matter, I'd rather not have to teach my grandparents the difference between a URL and a search query, either. If you (the reader) is anything like the average tech guy, there's a good chance you're physically unhealthy in multiple ways, and in an alternate universe there's an internet forum of doctors lacking empathy who are shaking their heads and saying "why can't our patients simply spent a bit of their brain cells and time on eating correct amounts of the precise macronutrients, identifying each of the 13 major muscle groups and stretch and exercise them every day, actually doing the correct amount of cardio where they track if they hit 160bpm and sustain that amount (under age 45), sleep at the precise time each day for optional functioning of the central nervous system, etc". There's probably a mechanic forum that's complaining about tech guys who own cars and saying "why can't they just do a blackstone oil test to know what's the optimal amount of mileage for their car to do an oil change, why don't they routinely fill up their tires to the labeled air pressure to maximise fuel economy, etc". None of what these doctors or mechanics are suggesting something /unreasonable/ per se... but most of that stuff just aren't priorities for an average person to learn and deal with. In conclusion, you can be extremely smart in the tech industry (or any other field) and still be an absolute idiot in so many ways, and that's okay- but you need to keep in mind that the same thing applies to your users for their fields of non-specialty. In summary: https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ Full disclosure, I started writing this after I took my sleeping pills for the night, so ignore any grammatical issues or bad structure

saurik 5y ago
This isn't a slippery slope: this is an analogy. Your example of settings makes no sense as you have failed to draw a similar analogy and your example of bookmarks betrayal your own understanding of the system you like as bookmarks are in fact accessible via the omnibar :/. All of the things in my example were of a similar form, and frankly it would be convenient if anything you wanted to get rid of all went down the same hole: if you actually could solve that problem well, it arguably would be good UX. The only reason the recycling examples seem absurd is because 1) it simply isn't that difficult to remember "trash goes in a black in and recycling goes in a blue bin and mail goes in... a different blue bin ;P" and 2) it is obvious how hard it is to separate the two results in the general case and the ramifications seem silly to tolerate given the low effort that the user has to take on to prevent it. The exact same thing is true of the omnibar: there are a bunch of heuristics that often work well enough and people who are particularly lazy and don't want to learn the difference between the various bins don't have to because we figure it out for them... most of the time. I personally think that people shouldn't be so lazy, but it seems like the entire goal of "UX design" is to empower lazy people to "not have to think" (which is very different from "intuitive": after all, "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned"). The reason then I think it is "destructive" goes further, though, than "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy": it is because, as someone else pointed out, there is a cost to leaking a user's intent to the search engine when they wanted to type in an address (in the same way that mailing someone's trash out randomly might be a privacy violation). Google doesn't give two shits about this: they want all of your information. That Google is training people to conflate the process of searching for something with then process of navigating to something is great for them and sucks for Firefox as Firefox kind of has to follow or be screwed and yet it seems a bit antithetical to their mission (though I don't think they even know what their mission is anymore). (FWIW, the true original sin is the address bar itself: the address bar is a status display of where you are... making it editable is arguably sort of "intuitive"--using the typical kind of "just so" stories that allow people to claim random things are intuitive because the story was flowery enough--but frankly it just makes no sense and causes all kinds of problems. If you fix this, and return to the paradigm that some of the earliest browsers have, I think some of the other things the omnibar does are less awkward, and the "out" for true navigation wouldn't be affected as navigation would feel entirely unlike searching: it would become intuitive that these are separate concepts.) (Also: the fact that I am unhealthy is not because I don't want to know how to be healthy or because I am not prioritizing understanding it... it is because most of the time I can't for the life of me figure it out even in consultation with doctors, and when I do know things--such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it because I injured myself a couple years ago and I am now somewhat depressed over it. I point this out because it is very different from not knowing or not caring to know: a life un-analyzed and without curiosity at every level of scale and in every interaction would seem to me to be a life wasted. If you truly don't know anything about how a car works, I recommend spending some time to learn: it's fun! Tim isn't like the mechanic ever figured out what was wrong with my car until I finally pulled the error code of the ECU myself and rubbed it in his face. Learn to play at least one musical instrument of every class so that you can extrapolate the rest. Study linguistics as early and as often as you can in life so you can at least appreciate the beauty of other languages even if you don't choose to become fluent. Avoid hiring people to do things for you until you know how to judge if they did a good job, and decide how you wish things to be done before letting other people tell you what they like and then don't back down!)

saurik 5y ago

This isn't a slippery slope: this is an analogy. Your example of settings makes no sense as you have failed to draw a similar analogy and your example of bookmarks betrayal your own understanding of the system you like as bookmarks are in fact accessible via the omnibar :/. All of the things in my example were of a similar form, and frankly it would be convenient if anything you wanted to get rid of all went down the same hole: if you actually could solve that problem well, it arguably would be good UX. The only reason the recycling examples seem absurd is because 1) it simply isn't that difficult to remember "trash goes in a black in and recycling goes in a blue bin and mail goes in... a different blue bin ;P" and 2) it is obvious how hard it is to separate the two results in the general case and the ramifications seem silly to tolerate given the low effort that the user has to take on to prevent it. The exact same thing is true of the omnibar: there are a bunch of heuristics that often work well enough and people who are particularly lazy and don't want to learn the difference between the various bins don't have to because we figure it out for them... most of the time. I personally think that people shouldn't be so lazy, but it seems like the entire goal of "UX design" is to empower lazy people to "not have to think" (which is very different from "intuitive": after all, "the only intuitive design is the nipple; after that, everything is learned"). The reason then I think it is "destructive" goes further, though, than "people who are lazy do not deserve our sympathy": it is because, as someone else pointed out, there is a cost to leaking a user's intent to the search engine when they wanted to type in an address (in the same way that mailing someone's trash out randomly might be a privacy violation). Google doesn't give two shits about this: they want all of your information. That Google is training people to conflate the process of searching for something with then process of navigating to something is great for them and sucks for Firefox as Firefox kind of has to follow or be screwed and yet it seems a bit antithetical to their mission (though I don't think they even know what their mission is anymore). (FWIW, the true original sin is the address bar itself: the address bar is a status display of where you are... making it editable is arguably sort of "intuitive"--using the typical kind of "just so" stories that allow people to claim random things are intuitive because the story was flowery enough--but frankly it just makes no sense and causes all kinds of problems. If you fix this, and return to the paradigm that some of the earliest browsers have, I think some of the other things the omnibar does are less awkward, and the "out" for true navigation wouldn't be affected as navigation would feel entirely unlike searching: it would become intuitive that these are separate concepts.) (Also: the fact that I am unhealthy is not because I don't want to know how to be healthy or because I am not prioritizing understanding it... it is because most of the time I can't for the life of me figure it out even in consultation with doctors, and when I do know things--such as that I need to walk more every day--I don't prioritize doing it because I injured myself a couple years ago and I am now somewhat depressed over it. I point this out because it is very different from not knowing or not caring to know: a life un-analyzed and without curiosity at every level of scale and in every interaction would seem to me to be a life wasted. If you truly don't know anything about how a car works, I recommend spending some time to learn: it's fun! Tim isn't like the mechanic ever figured out what was wrong with my car until I finally pulled the error code of the ECU myself and rubbed it in his face. Learn to play at least one musical instrument of every class so that you can extrapolate the rest. Study linguistics as early and as often as you can in life so you can at least appreciate the beauty of other languages even if you don't choose to become fluent. Avoid hiring people to do things for you until you know how to judge if they did a good job, and decide how you wish things to be done before letting other people tell you what they like and then don't back down!)