5 ms·

Good default settings are great but please let me tweak. I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. Why not allow me to search for 10-

Good default settings are great but please let me tweak. I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. Why not allow me to search for 10-12? Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies “we know better than you what you need”.

jagged-chisel 5y ago
I’m on the fence about intent. It could easily be a team that wishes to limit the inputs to something “manageable.”
kristopolous 5y ago
It's a valley culture. The structure of the team gets reproduced in the product. Read "The soul of a new machine" for a great example. There is an unhealthy elitest hierarchy at many companies which manifests itself as interfaces to users on the assumption they're totally incompetent. It's a reproduction of an insular culture. The worst part is that it's reinforcing. The thing you've probably heard of is the Stanford prison study but there's many similar ones; essentially you set up a context for how you engage with your customer and the customer plays the roles dictated by the context. So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way. Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order. We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us. The core problem of UX is the extreme focus of what kind of user they want as opposed to what kind of context they want to facilitate. The latter is how sustainability, growth, and value happen. It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion". So long as it is within reason, this is possible. People will do difficult things of value (such as a gym) if you're willing to adequately facilitate it. We don't need to limit ourselves to a fast food internet. See the project known as wikipedia for an example.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Yes yes yes. You've nailed it so well that I can hardly believe it. I've worked first-hand with a number of different teams and this is exactly what happens. Around the time I started becoming aware of this, I once brought up in a meeting that I thought we should support keyboard shortcuts for users who prefer keyboard interaction. You would have thought I had desecrated a religious symbol. I did figure out a hack though. The next time we met I pretended like the previous conversation had never happened, and instead brought up that for a11y we really needed keyboard shortcuts :-D They had no choice but to agree because prioritizing a11y is another religious tenet. I love a good win-win/two birds/etc.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    The last product I worked on, we had constant problems sometimes trying to reproduce bugs. Accessing a feature through a keyboard shortcut vs. a menu might take you down a completely different code path, and it was critical to know which way the user was using.
    - freedomben 5y ago
      Yes I agree, although having gone through that several times in different frameworks, I am now a believer that you can avoid the majority of issues like that by keeping state centralized (like redux pattern) and building components in a functional-reactive way (no state in components). Of course this doesn't help much if you're using Java Swing, but the vast majority of products that I run into this are web-based. The "always re-render" approach of React can help a ton. With that you have two separate event handlers (one for the click, one for the key press) but both of them simply update the "state" variable for whatever it is. The framework then figures out what needs to change and does it.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Sounds like a poor design. The events should call the same function.
- mrandish 5y ago
userbinator 5y ago
I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success. I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources. Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763

jagged-chisel 5y ago

I’m on the fence about intent. It could easily be a team that wishes to limit the inputs to something “manageable.”

kristopolous 5y ago

It's a valley culture. The structure of the team gets reproduced in the product. Read "The soul of a new machine" for a great example. There is an unhealthy elitest hierarchy at many companies which manifests itself as interfaces to users on the assumption they're totally incompetent. It's a reproduction of an insular culture. The worst part is that it's reinforcing. The thing you've probably heard of is the Stanford prison study but there's many similar ones; essentially you set up a context for how you engage with your customer and the customer plays the roles dictated by the context. So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way. Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order. We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us. The core problem of UX is the extreme focus of what kind of user they want as opposed to what kind of context they want to facilitate. The latter is how sustainability, growth, and value happen. It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion". So long as it is within reason, this is possible. People will do difficult things of value (such as a gym) if you're willing to adequately facilitate it. We don't need to limit ourselves to a fast food internet. See the project known as wikipedia for an example.

freedomben 5y ago
Yes yes yes. You've nailed it so well that I can hardly believe it. I've worked first-hand with a number of different teams and this is exactly what happens. Around the time I started becoming aware of this, I once brought up in a meeting that I thought we should support keyboard shortcuts for users who prefer keyboard interaction. You would have thought I had desecrated a religious symbol. I did figure out a hack though. The next time we met I pretended like the previous conversation had never happened, and instead brought up that for a11y we really needed keyboard shortcuts :-D They had no choice but to agree because prioritizing a11y is another religious tenet. I love a good win-win/two birds/etc.
- mark-r 5y ago
  The last product I worked on, we had constant problems sometimes trying to reproduce bugs. Accessing a feature through a keyboard shortcut vs. a menu might take you down a completely different code path, and it was critical to know which way the user was using.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    Yes I agree, although having gone through that several times in different frameworks, I am now a believer that you can avoid the majority of issues like that by keeping state centralized (like redux pattern) and building components in a functional-reactive way (no state in components). Of course this doesn't help much if you're using Java Swing, but the vast majority of products that I run into this are web-based. The "always re-render" approach of React can help a ton. With that you have two separate event handlers (one for the click, one for the key press) but both of them simply update the "state" variable for whatever it is. The framework then figures out what needs to change and does it.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Sounds like a poor design. The events should call the same function.
mrandish 5y ago

userbinator 5y ago

I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success. I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources. Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763