8 ms·

I'm not a designer, but I have done a fair bit with HCI for whatever that's worth. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", which I understood to be a s

I'm not a designer, but I have done a fair bit with HCI for whatever that's worth. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", which I understood to be a seminal text in the UX world. In it, Norman argues that no one-size-fits-all product actually fits all and leaving off 1% of the population is still a rather large number of people, so in the spirit of human-centered designed you should provide options or settings to support those people as well. I've been struggling to reconcile that with UX of many software products in the time since. The modern UX ethos seems to be that settings indicate a failing of the product and if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else. I think the book also makes the argument that constantly breaking workflows isn't very user-friendly either, but SaaS products routinely change their UI and workflows around. I suppose I can see the business justification for that, but that doesn't necessarily make it good UX. Of course, Norman could just be wrong or my interpretation of his text could be wrong. Either way, something feels off to me with modern UX. I suppose if you've run actual user studies (not just A/B tests), then you have more contextual data than I do. But, I came away from reading the book really wishing more software products (both SaaS and the recent spat of "opinionated" frameworks/tools) followed the principles he championed.

bo1024 5y ago
It's simple. Most software today is not created to serve the user. It is created to accomplish certain goals (e.g. obtaining money, attention, data, or prestige from the user) and only serves the user as incidental to accomplish those goals.
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  I think that's probably true in the SaaS world. I'm seeing the same mentality take hold in the open source world with "opinionated" or "curated" software. Tools that have limited options or actively remove options and expect the developer to conform to them. I think it's being driven by this same notion of "options = bad" that we see in UX in general, but maybe they're coincidental, but unrelated phenomena.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    I agree with this. Most software doesn't need to be "opinionated" and would be made better with more options and carefully chosen defaults. I think it's sometimes appropriate to reduce options, mainly in cryptography libraries. There the library should provide all the secure options and none of the wildly insecure options, maybe with some "secure if used correctly" options behind some heavy warnings. Likewise for anything else that might similarly be used in safety-critical situations: it MUST be easy to use, and hard to misuse. That tends to mean having fewer options, and making very careful choices about defaults.
yccs27 5y ago
It might be an over-adjustment from the software designers. In the early days of software, there was a larger fraction of power users, who wanted lots of options and were willing to fiddle with them. However, settings were often an excuse for not having sensible defaults, auto-detection, context-sensibility and other things for a fluid user experience. Then came a wave of companies focusing on UX with great success, who often dropped settings to focus on "magic" functions etc. This means UX becomes correlated with less settings, but removing options does not help users - on the contrary! But unfortunately it gives the impression that settings are bad for UX.
- tormeh 5y ago
  Options do become dangerous to the team building the UI, though. It's easier to add another option and the keep the previous behavior as default than to do the hard work of figuring out what the best behavior is and then, if the new behavior is better, having the courage to change the default. Having no options is good for discipline as it removes the temptation of doing it the easy way. There's also the problem of bugs. Software with more settings have more code paths. It's harder to test, and harder to refactor.
  - nirvdrum 5y ago
    These are all valid concerns, but UX is purportedly concerned with serving the user. Reducing expenses is a competing concern. Together, they influence the design, but I don't think it follows that removing options leads to a better user experience. It could, but it's not a given. > It's easier to add another option and the keep the previous behavior as default than to do the hard work of figuring out what the best behavior is and then, if the new behavior is better, having the courage to change the default. Having no options is good for discipline as it removes the temptation of doing it the easy way. Ideally, you already knew what the trade-offs are before you built the feature. That should have come out of a user study. Human psychology simply doesn't change as substantially or as frequently as modern UX seems to suggest. Of course, things can fall through the crack and you can learn new things (even that previous conclusions were misguided). But, setting up all options as a choice you need to make for the user isn't necessarily helping the user experience. Some portion of the world prefers a 12 hour clock, some portion a 24. If you're adamant about only showing one of those and it's not configurable, you haven't helped the people with a different preference. You're inflicting your design on people without really taking their cultural norms into account. I'd go a step further and suggest changing defaults on people is something that should never be taken lightly because the user experience isn't a point-in-time thing. Changing workflows on existing users is a negative user experience in many cases. As a concrete example, the ReasonML language forked into another language call Rescript. The code formatting tool in Rescript works almost identically to the one in ReasonML and that's by design, since it's supposed to facilitate migration. But, for whatever reason, the new formatter dropped the option to configure line width. So, if you used to set your line width to 120 characters, too bad. You have to use 80 characters or don't use the tool. Also, you need to chance your workflow and any configurations using the old flag. Having the option to change a numeric variable is not some overwhelming burden. Forcing a fixed value isn't some courageous decision and it's not based on any human factors studies. It feels like an overreach of "opinionated software" that ultimately made my code harder to read (both languages use annotations that artificially increase line length). In the end I abandoned the migration, which I suppose means if they poll community members, they'll have something of an echo chamber. > There's also the problem of bugs. Software with more settings have more code paths. It's harder to test, and harder to refactor. This sounds like a failing of software engineering to me. To the extent that this field's raison d'être is to make computers perform work for humans with minimal fuss, our tooling should be geared towards supporting that goal. Dropping functionality that would be beneficial to people because it's more difficult to support sounds like trying to mold people to the machine rather than the machine to people. Certainly, you can have a product that functions, but it's similar to all the other things we have to put up with because a better option doesn't exist. This take isn't drawn from the book I mentioned, but I think the book has influenced my opinion on the matter. If settings/options lead to a better user experience but our tooling and development processes make adding settings/options difficult, we should try to improve our tools and processes. With that said, we have to operate with the constraints we have. I just don't think we should convince ourselves it makes for a better user experience. That sort of thinking tends to snowball.
eternalban 5y ago
Haven't read the book but per your comment it occurs that assuming the reality of the 'left off 1%', it is possible that these are distinct market segments. Did Norman or anyone else ever try to correlate demographic aspects with product mis-fit? In other words, the disconnect is possibly at the market/product level and the same unsatisfied with defaults 1% may be perfectly happy with another product that is designed for them (thus having few knobs). Not asserting this but wonder if this is indeed the case.
- XorNot 5y ago
  The other problem is that each thing your decide should definitely be "this way and no other" is probably shaving off a different 1% of the population. I maintain that the Ribbon on office is this problem writ large: I'm sure Microsoft did a lot of user studies, and I'm equally sure that by averaging out all those results they managed to prioritise nothing useful to any actual business - hence why the product feels bizarrely unprofessional these days and is now impossible to configure to suit any specific type of writing.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The real trick with Ribbon is that in MS Office it makes it somewhat easier to find functionality (the search interface helps with that) and it tries to expose keyboard shortcuts easier. AFAIK the research behind the ribbon showed that 1) there was no way to find features easily 2) Main menu was too cluttered and undiscoverable. Of course if you actually found the features you wanted before that, it was a big negative change.
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      An easy fix would have been adding tool search functionality like intellij
      - p_l 5y ago
        A crucial part of Ribbon, as implemented by MS Office, is a search interface. It could be nicer like intellij, but I suspect they hit some threshold of changing keyboard shortcuts and end user reaction.
dkbrk 5y ago
In the 1950s the United States Air Force wanted to figure out what pilot dimensions they should design to. Things like the exact position of the controls and position and size of the seat. They measured over 4,000 pilots on 140 different dimensions. The hope was that they could design to the average pilot. What a Lieutenant named Gilbert Daniels found was that even if you only looked at the 10 most important dimensions, not a single actual pilot was within 15% of them all. Even just a handful of dimensions would fit almost no-one. The consequence of this was that everything became adjustable.
- traviscj 5y ago
  Gotta love military-grade pragmatism.
  - eru 5y ago
    The military can be quite pragmatic, when they want to / need to. Compare https://www.gwern.net/Backstop https://www.gwern.net/Backstop Basically, war (or the threat of war) is what keeps militaries honest. Competition and the threat of bankruptcy keeps companies on their toes. Evolution keeps brains honest. But those forces are rather blunt, so the day to day optimization has to proceed by other means.
    - medstrom 5y ago
      I would counter your evolution point. Evolution hates brains and wants them to be as small as possible, because they cost a lot of energy. Saving energy is the reason our brains rely so much on biases and heuristics.
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        I’d like to find someone with more citations to back up this claim, but my hypothesis is that evolution favors the biggest, baddest, and most intelligent during stable times. In an unstable environment, small stupid generalists are what survive (thanks to their lower caloric needs).
nfw2 5y ago
I don't think there is some absolute law of design* that says all users must be supported. If a startup is still struggling to reach profitability, they generally will invest all their efforts into supporting one niche really well, not create universally useful products. *There are actual laws that say those without disability must be supported, and I think companies should strive to meet those, but that's more of a moral argument
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  The point or question I was raising was specifically about UX. Design, which includes UX, isn't done in a vacuum. There's many competing interests and environmental considerations that ultimately influence a product. Norman spends a good deal of time reinforcing that idea, I think mostly to drive home the point that reality doesn't match the platonic ideal. That's what I was alluding when I said "I suppose I can see the business justification for that." Carving out a niche when getting started is probably quite prudent. But, that doesn't mean it's a good user experience. There's a lot of retorts in this comment section about how any amount of settings is tantamount to total design failure. I think that's too reductive and I'm trying to reconcile that research on the topic.
  - nfw2 5y ago
    It seems weird to talk about something as "good user experience" or "bad user experience" in a universal sense without a specific use case in mind. Something can be a good experience for one set of users and a poor experience for others.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Settings allow you to customize a software beyond its developer-intended path, while that doesn't take away from the "default" path, it maximizes the total amount of good experience. That's how it's universal.
      - mark-r 5y ago
feanaro 5y ago
It is a no-brainer that software must, in fact, have settings and the modern UX principles are heavily in the wrong. Having too many options is a curse too however, so that doesn't mean that one should add options without thought nor that sane defaults are unimportant (in fact, they are extremely important). Like most good things in life, the solution is not in either extreme but in the golden middle.
munchbunny 5y ago
I don't think that he necessarily doesn't address settings. I think it fits into the overall ethos pretty well: it should require as little mental energy as possible to figure out what the settings do and why you would use them. Where things get murky and become a matter of judgement and data is whether you are exposing settings gratuitously and therefore just making things confusing, or whether you are not offering enough settings and therefore not addressing common use cases.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
It's probably not a coincidence that fewer settings means less complex software, and less costly to produce
- ed 5y ago
  In my experience it's the exact opposite. It's almost always easier to leave product decisions to the user and add a new setting. And if you have very few settings, your software needs to "just work," which means quietly handling edge cases you would normally rely on the user to troubleshoot.
da_chicken 5y ago
> The modern UX ethos seems to be that settings indicate a failing of the product and if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else. I think the book also makes the argument that constantly breaking workflows isn't very user-friendly either, but SaaS products routinely change their UI and workflows around. I suppose I can see the business justification for that, but that doesn't necessarily make it good UX. Yeah, I think the issue is that once you've finished designing an interface or your software is feature complete, the company is faced with a problem: You don't have any actual work, but you absolutely need to maintain your expertise and sales. What features can you really add to Excel at this point? What do you do when your market analysis says your application and interface are about the best they can possibly be? What do you do with your engineers when your product is, by nearly all measures, complete? This is the problem that Google search has. And Microsoft's Windows and Office teams. We had basically everything on lock for quite awhile. Changes now are seldom improvements. They're just changes to justify the engineers' salaries that the company has to keep paying because maintaining that is a core competency. Moving all of them to a new project spoils your expertise in your own product so you can't just do that. At this point, UX design for these products should probably shift to aesthetics, much like the auto industry did. And that's largely exactly what Windows has been since Windows 7. Aesthetic changes.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  > What features can you really add to Excel at this point? Aren’t there actually lots of good features Microsoft added in say the last 19 years (office 2003 having, for this argument, a perfectly capable Excel with all the features)? Off the top of my head: - Ribbon and context-aware toolbox made it easier for infrequent or novice users. - good default styles for tables, which is what lots of people actually use Excel for - Better support for actual tables (ie defined extendable ranges of cells) - OFFSET/MATCH instead of VLOOKUP (maybe this was a culture change. Not sure when OFFSET or MATCH were introduced) - improvements to default graph appearance (though I still dislike them for just showing the data) - Lambda functions - Relational models for data - bigger spreadsheets - flash fill(?) which is a magical programming by example thing - fancy conditional formatting with colour changing smoothly with values - possibly faster evaluation. I don’t know if it was actually improved - maybe someday: collaborative editing I’d like to point out that some improvements were made for power users and others for more ordinary users.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
>if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else This is a reasonable limitation. If you implement infinite features, you end up with a bloatware, so some features can't be implemented, and users should use something else.
- numpad0 5y ago
  It’s not about features, parent comment is arguing about adjustments. Sure you don’t need 65535 choice of colors for a chair; but you do need the height to be adjustable(ideally within -327.68 to +327.68 mm).
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    But should it have wheels?
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      No you're right, a wheeled chair would not be really useful, would it

bo1024 5y ago

It's simple. Most software today is not created to serve the user. It is created to accomplish certain goals (e.g. obtaining money, attention, data, or prestige from the user) and only serves the user as incidental to accomplish those goals.

nirvdrum 5y ago
I think that's probably true in the SaaS world. I'm seeing the same mentality take hold in the open source world with "opinionated" or "curated" software. Tools that have limited options or actively remove options and expect the developer to conform to them. I think it's being driven by this same notion of "options = bad" that we see in UX in general, but maybe they're coincidental, but unrelated phenomena.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  I agree with this. Most software doesn't need to be "opinionated" and would be made better with more options and carefully chosen defaults. I think it's sometimes appropriate to reduce options, mainly in cryptography libraries. There the library should provide all the secure options and none of the wildly insecure options, maybe with some "secure if used correctly" options behind some heavy warnings. Likewise for anything else that might similarly be used in safety-critical situations: it MUST be easy to use, and hard to misuse. That tends to mean having fewer options, and making very careful choices about defaults.

yccs27 5y ago

It might be an over-adjustment from the software designers. In the early days of software, there was a larger fraction of power users, who wanted lots of options and were willing to fiddle with them. However, settings were often an excuse for not having sensible defaults, auto-detection, context-sensibility and other things for a fluid user experience. Then came a wave of companies focusing on UX with great success, who often dropped settings to focus on "magic" functions etc. This means UX becomes correlated with less settings, but removing options does not help users - on the contrary! But unfortunately it gives the impression that settings are bad for UX.

tormeh 5y ago
Options do become dangerous to the team building the UI, though. It's easier to add another option and the keep the previous behavior as default than to do the hard work of figuring out what the best behavior is and then, if the new behavior is better, having the courage to change the default. Having no options is good for discipline as it removes the temptation of doing it the easy way. There's also the problem of bugs. Software with more settings have more code paths. It's harder to test, and harder to refactor.
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  These are all valid concerns, but UX is purportedly concerned with serving the user. Reducing expenses is a competing concern. Together, they influence the design, but I don't think it follows that removing options leads to a better user experience. It could, but it's not a given. > It's easier to add another option and the keep the previous behavior as default than to do the hard work of figuring out what the best behavior is and then, if the new behavior is better, having the courage to change the default. Having no options is good for discipline as it removes the temptation of doing it the easy way. Ideally, you already knew what the trade-offs are before you built the feature. That should have come out of a user study. Human psychology simply doesn't change as substantially or as frequently as modern UX seems to suggest. Of course, things can fall through the crack and you can learn new things (even that previous conclusions were misguided). But, setting up all options as a choice you need to make for the user isn't necessarily helping the user experience. Some portion of the world prefers a 12 hour clock, some portion a 24. If you're adamant about only showing one of those and it's not configurable, you haven't helped the people with a different preference. You're inflicting your design on people without really taking their cultural norms into account. I'd go a step further and suggest changing defaults on people is something that should never be taken lightly because the user experience isn't a point-in-time thing. Changing workflows on existing users is a negative user experience in many cases. As a concrete example, the ReasonML language forked into another language call Rescript. The code formatting tool in Rescript works almost identically to the one in ReasonML and that's by design, since it's supposed to facilitate migration. But, for whatever reason, the new formatter dropped the option to configure line width. So, if you used to set your line width to 120 characters, too bad. You have to use 80 characters or don't use the tool. Also, you need to chance your workflow and any configurations using the old flag. Having the option to change a numeric variable is not some overwhelming burden. Forcing a fixed value isn't some courageous decision and it's not based on any human factors studies. It feels like an overreach of "opinionated software" that ultimately made my code harder to read (both languages use annotations that artificially increase line length). In the end I abandoned the migration, which I suppose means if they poll community members, they'll have something of an echo chamber. > There's also the problem of bugs. Software with more settings have more code paths. It's harder to test, and harder to refactor. This sounds like a failing of software engineering to me. To the extent that this field's raison d'être is to make computers perform work for humans with minimal fuss, our tooling should be geared towards supporting that goal. Dropping functionality that would be beneficial to people because it's more difficult to support sounds like trying to mold people to the machine rather than the machine to people. Certainly, you can have a product that functions, but it's similar to all the other things we have to put up with because a better option doesn't exist. This take isn't drawn from the book I mentioned, but I think the book has influenced my opinion on the matter. If settings/options lead to a better user experience but our tooling and development processes make adding settings/options difficult, we should try to improve our tools and processes. With that said, we have to operate with the constraints we have. I just don't think we should convince ourselves it makes for a better user experience. That sort of thinking tends to snowball.

eternalban 5y ago

Haven't read the book but per your comment it occurs that assuming the reality of the 'left off 1%', it is possible that these are distinct market segments. Did Norman or anyone else ever try to correlate demographic aspects with product mis-fit? In other words, the disconnect is possibly at the market/product level and the same unsatisfied with defaults 1% may be perfectly happy with another product that is designed for them (thus having few knobs). Not asserting this but wonder if this is indeed the case.

XorNot 5y ago
The other problem is that each thing your decide should definitely be "this way and no other" is probably shaving off a different 1% of the population. I maintain that the Ribbon on office is this problem writ large: I'm sure Microsoft did a lot of user studies, and I'm equally sure that by averaging out all those results they managed to prioritise nothing useful to any actual business - hence why the product feels bizarrely unprofessional these days and is now impossible to configure to suit any specific type of writing.
- p_l 5y ago
  The real trick with Ribbon is that in MS Office it makes it somewhat easier to find functionality (the search interface helps with that) and it tries to expose keyboard shortcuts easier. AFAIK the research behind the ribbon showed that 1) there was no way to find features easily 2) Main menu was too cluttered and undiscoverable. Of course if you actually found the features you wanted before that, it was a big negative change.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    An easy fix would have been adding tool search functionality like intellij
    - p_l 5y ago
      A crucial part of Ribbon, as implemented by MS Office, is a search interface. It could be nicer like intellij, but I suspect they hit some threshold of changing keyboard shortcuts and end user reaction.

dkbrk 5y ago

In the 1950s the United States Air Force wanted to figure out what pilot dimensions they should design to. Things like the exact position of the controls and position and size of the seat. They measured over 4,000 pilots on 140 different dimensions. The hope was that they could design to the average pilot. What a Lieutenant named Gilbert Daniels found was that even if you only looked at the 10 most important dimensions, not a single actual pilot was within 15% of them all. Even just a handful of dimensions would fit almost no-one. The consequence of this was that everything became adjustable.

traviscj 5y ago
Gotta love military-grade pragmatism.
- eru 5y ago
  The military can be quite pragmatic, when they want to / need to. Compare https://www.gwern.net/Backstop https://www.gwern.net/Backstop Basically, war (or the threat of war) is what keeps militaries honest. Competition and the threat of bankruptcy keeps companies on their toes. Evolution keeps brains honest. But those forces are rather blunt, so the day to day optimization has to proceed by other means.
  - medstrom 5y ago
    I would counter your evolution point. Evolution hates brains and wants them to be as small as possible, because they cost a lot of energy. Saving energy is the reason our brains rely so much on biases and heuristics.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      I’d like to find someone with more citations to back up this claim, but my hypothesis is that evolution favors the biggest, baddest, and most intelligent during stable times. In an unstable environment, small stupid generalists are what survive (thanks to their lower caloric needs).

nfw2 5y ago

I don't think there is some absolute law of design* that says all users must be supported. If a startup is still struggling to reach profitability, they generally will invest all their efforts into supporting one niche really well, not create universally useful products. *There are actual laws that say those without disability must be supported, and I think companies should strive to meet those, but that's more of a moral argument

nirvdrum 5y ago
The point or question I was raising was specifically about UX. Design, which includes UX, isn't done in a vacuum. There's many competing interests and environmental considerations that ultimately influence a product. Norman spends a good deal of time reinforcing that idea, I think mostly to drive home the point that reality doesn't match the platonic ideal. That's what I was alluding when I said "I suppose I can see the business justification for that." Carving out a niche when getting started is probably quite prudent. But, that doesn't mean it's a good user experience. There's a lot of retorts in this comment section about how any amount of settings is tantamount to total design failure. I think that's too reductive and I'm trying to reconcile that research on the topic.
- nfw2 5y ago
  It seems weird to talk about something as "good user experience" or "bad user experience" in a universal sense without a specific use case in mind. Something can be a good experience for one set of users and a poor experience for others.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Settings allow you to customize a software beyond its developer-intended path, while that doesn't take away from the "default" path, it maximizes the total amount of good experience. That's how it's universal.
    - mark-r 5y ago

feanaro 5y ago

It is a no-brainer that software must, in fact, have settings and the modern UX principles are heavily in the wrong. Having too many options is a curse too however, so that doesn't mean that one should add options without thought nor that sane defaults are unimportant (in fact, they are extremely important). Like most good things in life, the solution is not in either extreme but in the golden middle.

munchbunny 5y ago

I don't think that he necessarily doesn't address settings. I think it fits into the overall ethos pretty well: it should require as little mental energy as possible to figure out what the settings do and why you would use them. Where things get murky and become a matter of judgement and data is whether you are exposing settings gratuitously and therefore just making things confusing, or whether you are not offering enough settings and therefore not addressing common use cases.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

It's probably not a coincidence that fewer settings means less complex software, and less costly to produce

ed 5y ago
In my experience it's the exact opposite. It's almost always easier to leave product decisions to the user and add a new setting. And if you have very few settings, your software needs to "just work," which means quietly handling edge cases you would normally rely on the user to troubleshoot.

da_chicken 5y ago

> The modern UX ethos seems to be that settings indicate a failing of the product and if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else. I think the book also makes the argument that constantly breaking workflows isn't very user-friendly either, but SaaS products routinely change their UI and workflows around. I suppose I can see the business justification for that, but that doesn't necessarily make it good UX. Yeah, I think the issue is that once you've finished designing an interface or your software is feature complete, the company is faced with a problem: You don't have any actual work, but you absolutely need to maintain your expertise and sales. What features can you really add to Excel at this point? What do you do when your market analysis says your application and interface are about the best they can possibly be? What do you do with your engineers when your product is, by nearly all measures, complete? This is the problem that Google search has. And Microsoft's Windows and Office teams. We had basically everything on lock for quite awhile. Changes now are seldom improvements. They're just changes to justify the engineers' salaries that the company has to keep paying because maintaining that is a core competency. Moving all of them to a new project spoils your expertise in your own product so you can't just do that. At this point, UX design for these products should probably shift to aesthetics, much like the auto industry did. And that's largely exactly what Windows has been since Windows 7. Aesthetic changes.

dan-robertson 5y ago
> What features can you really add to Excel at this point? Aren’t there actually lots of good features Microsoft added in say the last 19 years (office 2003 having, for this argument, a perfectly capable Excel with all the features)? Off the top of my head: - Ribbon and context-aware toolbox made it easier for infrequent or novice users. - good default styles for tables, which is what lots of people actually use Excel for - Better support for actual tables (ie defined extendable ranges of cells) - OFFSET/MATCH instead of VLOOKUP (maybe this was a culture change. Not sure when OFFSET or MATCH were introduced) - improvements to default graph appearance (though I still dislike them for just showing the data) - Lambda functions - Relational models for data - bigger spreadsheets - flash fill(?) which is a magical programming by example thing - fancy conditional formatting with colour changing smoothly with values - possibly faster evaluation. I don’t know if it was actually improved - maybe someday: collaborative editing I’d like to point out that some improvements were made for power users and others for more ordinary users.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

>if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else This is a reasonable limitation. If you implement infinite features, you end up with a bloatware, so some features can't be implemented, and users should use something else.

numpad0 5y ago
It’s not about features, parent comment is arguing about adjustments. Sure you don’t need 65535 choice of colors for a chair; but you do need the height to be adjustable(ideally within -327.68 to +327.68 mm).
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  But should it have wheels?
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    No you're right, a wheeled chair would not be really useful, would it