7 ms·

When I was an engineer on Microsoft Office, users would often request features that the product already had. It was great that their problem was quickly fixed (

• taeric 5y ago
  This isn't limited to software. Many don't know that cars indicate where this the fuel tank is. Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Really, the list of hidden features on products is such that nobody has solved discovery. Affordances that work are ones that mimic already learned behaviors. But shared learning is not as universal as folks think it is. Interactive systems that let you ask "what will this do?" Or "why did that happen?" Are very good. But even that is hard to work with sometimes. Consider how few folks use the apropos utility.
  • brimble 5y ago
    > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Haha, I'd think only people who were never in a car as a child wouldn't know that. An adult might not mess with them enough to suss out that behavior, but kids loooove playing with seat belts.
    • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
      Or people born before seatbelts were invented
  • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. My brother-in-law is large enough that when he pulls his seatbelt out far enough to actually go around him, it locks, and he absolutely hates it. Is there a reason this "feature" even exists?
    • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
      I assume he's not a parent? That feature is used every time you install a child's carseat. Edit: Gah! As a Dad myself I am compelled to add that his lack of experience with carseats is clearly aparent to me.
      • oxfeed65261 5y ago
        This is no longer true, at least since 2003 in the US. Car seats are now attached using the far-more-secure three-point LATCH system. I never once “used this feature” when installing a car seat for my now-twelve-year-old.
        • bradstewart 5y ago
          For what it's worth, whilst my car and carseat have the LATCH system, this particular carseat requires use of the seat belt instead of the LATCH lower anchors for kids over 30 pounds.
        • mh- 5y ago
          yeah, I had no idea this was the purpose behind the feature until this thread - my kids are young enough that our cars have always had LATCH since they were born.
        • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
          The LATCH system has a maximum combined weight of the carseat plus child of 65 pounds. As a result, the threshold varies with the weight of your carseat and weight of your child, but a typical 4- or 5-year old probably should be using the belt. https://csftl.org/whats-the-deal-with-weight-limits/ https://csftl.org/whats-the-deal-with-weight-limits/ Personally, I don't think that was a good threshold to set. I agree that the LATCH anchors are better. In 2003, I suppose people were mostly using carseats for infants and toddlers in little 10-pound styrofoam shells, now we know kids are safer in carseats until they're significantly older and heavier, and they're in 25-pound adjustable, heavily bolstered bucket seat style carseats.
    • lloeki 5y ago
• jcelerier 5y ago
  > but it shows the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them. how many users is this in proportion of the silent majority which has no trouble finding what they want in the menus ? you can't base a judgment on complaints alone
  • thfuran 5y ago
    And you can't presume that a majority of people were able to find it rather than just giving up.
    • titzer 5y ago
      Agreed, which is why user studies are (or should still be) a thing. You can't just add telemetry and hope A/B testing will surface the real struggles people have with your products. Likewise, you can't remove the 1% case of "restore backup after critical failure" feature because it's used rarely. It'd be like removing seatbelts from cars or fire extinguishers from kitchens.
  • crispyambulance 5y ago
    > you can't base a judgment on complaints alone Nor can you assume that the users who are are NOT complaining are happy. They may just be enduring the crappiness until they can jump to something that's better. "Discoverability" is perhaps not exactly the right word here. Just because something is "there" (SOMEWHERE) doesn't mean it's discoverable. The users might have completely different vocabulary to describe features that are are present but which have an unexpected name. Or they might have a workflow in mind that doesn't give a name to what they need, but which is nonetheless there. I think this is hard problem. With any "complex-enough" tools, one just needs guidance or straight-up training. Fusion-360 comes to mind. It's a very popular and rather nice CAD tool that has enormous, wide-ranging capabilities. Autodesk has a never-ending stream of training videos and courses dedicating to showing users how to do things with it. Without these, its just too difficult for people to "discover" how to use the thing.
• barnabee 5y ago
  I think it's ok that people don't know. Doing better at discovery is obviously better but if there is a manual/help function that explains all the features... good enough. Some people want to take the effort to become proficient with their tools, others are doomed to wish they had features that are right in front of them. But being less powerful, efficient, and adaptable to keep the design clean and simple and make everything discoverable should be an anti-pattern for serious apps and tools.
  • ako 5y ago
    My biggest problem with manual/help is when i don't know how to search for what i need. How is it called in the manual? You might even arrive at a page that explains it, but you may not recognize it. Often manual pages simple explain how to do something, without explaining why and when it is relevant.
• Groxx 5y ago
  One of my favorite things about OSX are the standardized menus... which includes a search field in the "Help" menu. Searching for things there will show you where the menu is - it's a wonderful tool for both discovery and future optimization. And it's in every application. I only wish it applied to more places. E.g. it searches help files, but they're basically always worthless, and it doesn't search non-menu things (settings, in-window toolbars, etc). Intellij has a nice cmd-shift-A which does most of this ("search everywhere" iirc), and I use it absolutely endlessly.
  • nicbou 5y ago
    Cmd + Shift + P has the same purpose in Sublime Text. It's a really useful feature indeed.
    • abdusco 5y ago
      Shift+Shift on Jetbrains IDEs. The best search feature by far. It fuzzy searches text, symbols, settings, actions, it also works with synonyms. No need to fiddle through settings.
    • WallowingInShit 5y ago
      M-x in emacs
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Reminds me of the search in iOS. I can find an app but it doesn’t tell me on what page or folder the f…ing app is.
    • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
      Page, no, but spotlight definitely tells you the app's folder (if it's in one)
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    This works in Windows too, but with one major flaw. If your Windows are localized (e.g. Czech), you will have to enter the correct name of the setting or service in Czech and entering its English name won't help you. Which is a problem, because the vast majority of StackOverflow-like Q&As are in English and mention the necessary setting in English, of course. And you cannot rely on your translational abilities, because many of the translations in Windows are stilted.
• hbn 5y ago
  This isn't really the point of the discussion, but I've always found MS Office features particularly hard to discover because even if you Google for it, half the results are for a different version that has a totally different UI from your version.
  • frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Why are you getting results for Office 2003 and earlier? I doubt people are still writing stuff for 19-year-old software.
    • spaetzleesser 5y ago
      Same problem in StackOverflow. I always have to check how old the answer is.
      • drexlspivey 5y ago
        Sounds like SO needs a setting to hide old answers
        • hinkley 5y ago
          Sounds like SO needs to stop closing questions as duplicates when the accepted answer is seven years old.
          • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
            They should have a way to close the _old_ question as a duplicate and point it at the new one for handling outdated answers.
            • hinkley 5y ago
              That might require SO to do some light semver tracking but I don't think that's too much to ask. Maybe people don't need to see questions asked when Tomcat 8.mumble was new now that we're on 10.something.
• DavidVoid 5y ago
  > the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them Any modern application that has more than 20 settings should have a good search function in its settings menu. That way you can have as many configurable options as you like without them being impossible to find. The defaults should ofc be the most common (or best) ones, but some users really do value customizability and respecting the users is (almost) always a good idea.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  It's almost axiomatic that "Users don't read instructions," and a corrolary is that they don't explore settings pages or read the captions and tooltips that may be there. If the software doesn't do something they want, most users will either use it as-is but be somewhat annoyed, or develop a (possibly manual) workaround. Most will not explore settings or read instructions, so spending a lot of time on "discoverability" is probably time better spent elsewhere.
• danShumway 5y ago
  The other side of this is that you were getting requests for those settings, users wanted to be able to set them. Agreed that discoverability was a problem, but behind the discoverability, people wanted the ability to define custom behaviors or change default behaviors. I think you sum it up perfectly with: > If you can do the right thing automatically I think a lot of software will shoot for doing the right thing automatically when they don't actually know what the right thing is. Or they'll remove the options because they think that the users don't want settings at all. But users do often want all of the behaviors (even the contradictory behaviors) that settings enable -- they just also want those settings to be discoverable and intuitive, and ideally they don't want to think about what they're set to most of the time. As an analogy, as a user I like automatic high beams in my car if they work well. And having an automatic mode that's turned on by default might mean that I don't need to spend as much time messing with my high-beam brightness, and that's great. In a world where they worked perfectly, I might never even need to learn how to adjust the beam brightness myself. But I still want the behavior of different beam brightness in different contexts. There's a trap designers fall into sometimes where they say, "settings are too hard for users, therefore the headlights should only have one brightness." If a bunch of users are asking you about something, that means they're engaged with and care about the functionality they're asking about. It might of course indicate that different defaults should be set, or that UI should be reorganized. And if you can do the right thing automatically, then you might be able to get rid of a lot of those support calls by doing that instead. But make sure you actually can first, because users are signaling with those support calls that they do care about that feature/behavior.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  Is there any problem whatsoever about users regularly requesting features that the product already has? That doesn't seem distinct from customer support helping you understand how to use the product, which also doesn't seem like a problem. Of course, you could use data about customer service conversations to inform design decisions intended to make certain features more or less prominent in the UI.
• dschuessler 5y ago
  > but it shows the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them. I wonder to what extent command palettes are the solution. At least for me, they are the pinnacle of discoverability. Throw the list of all settings and actions into an easily discoverable command palette and let the user search for them by filtering the list. Make it fuzzy enough to account for different formulations of the problem. VSCode does it (mostly) right.
• snarfy 5y ago
  They are all kitchen sink apps these days. I want purpose built apps not multi apps. Teams e.g. does not need excel integration. Instead of the engineers moving on to a new app to develop they cram more features into the existing one, until it's a multi app zombocom that can do anything.
• mitchdoogle 5y ago
  It's wild that anyone could consider something to have too many features - just don't use the features you don't want!
  • rjmorris 5y ago
    Not wild at all if those extra features get in the way and make it harder to do the subset of things you want to do. Those extra features also occupy the developers' attention, leaving less time for them to focus on the things you care about.
• max49 5y ago
  >but it shows the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them. I A hard to find setting is better than not having the feature to begin with. The main prblen with "modern" UIs is that they are strait up removing feature and acting like its a good thing. I know it's partially off-topic... but Instagram removing the ability to view content without and account and pretending they did it for the benefit of the users is pure BS and it gets even worse when you consider how agressive they are at requesting your phone number.
• Bolkan 5y ago
  Jetbrains handled it pretty well by adding a search box to the settings screen.