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One only needs to look at how professionals operate to find already iterated to a close perfection user interfaces. Take a professional kitchen at a restaurant

by omega3 4y ago

One only needs to look at how professionals operate to find already iterated to a close perfection user interfaces. Take a professional kitchen at a restaurant and compare it with a gadget filled home kitchen.

tunap 4y ago
My dinosaur 5 Star Range cannot be beat. Despite the large knobs, it does everything I want it to do, how I want it done. No UX getting in the way to "assist" in deviating me from my intended settings.
thfuran 4y ago
I work on software for professional use and while I'd never say our UX is near perfection, we do get a bunch of tickets if things change and some process starts taking an extra click or two. We're at least pressured to avoid UX regressions and needless changes.
nicbou 4y ago
I had a similar experience with accounting software recently. The ugly software is built for someone entering 20 invoices in a row, and automates as much of it as it can. The shiny startup software was designed by a very skilled designer who never had to do accounting.
MajorBee 4y ago
That's not always the right way to go either. A professional using a particular device on the daily will be proficient in its usage regardless of how terrible the user interface, simply on the basis of how often they use the thing. On the other hand, how quickly an amateur can pick up a device and start using it will be heavily dependent on how intuitive and instructive the interface is. These two can often be conflicting, though not always. For a product that has a lot of "amateur" users (many home appliances), a touch screen can often be the right paradigm to choose. A classic example of this is the situation where an experienced cashier on an "analog" system can just fly through the buttons and complete transactions in no time, while at the same time a rookie would take that much more time to ramp up, figure out, and internalize the various button mappings. A darker interpretation of this would be that the system is optimization for fungible workers, where swapping out one cashier at will for another has negligible impact on productivity.

by omega3 4y ago

tunap 4y ago

My dinosaur 5 Star Range cannot be beat. Despite the large knobs, it does everything I want it to do, how I want it done. No UX getting in the way to "assist" in deviating me from my intended settings.

thfuran 4y ago

I work on software for professional use and while I'd never say our UX is near perfection, we do get a bunch of tickets if things change and some process starts taking an extra click or two. We're at least pressured to avoid UX regressions and needless changes.

nicbou 4y ago

I had a similar experience with accounting software recently. The ugly software is built for someone entering 20 invoices in a row, and automates as much of it as it can. The shiny startup software was designed by a very skilled designer who never had to do accounting.

MajorBee 4y ago

That's not always the right way to go either. A professional using a particular device on the daily will be proficient in its usage regardless of how terrible the user interface, simply on the basis of how often they use the thing. On the other hand, how quickly an amateur can pick up a device and start using it will be heavily dependent on how intuitive and instructive the interface is. These two can often be conflicting, though not always. For a product that has a lot of "amateur" users (many home appliances), a touch screen can often be the right paradigm to choose. A classic example of this is the situation where an experienced cashier on an "analog" system can just fly through the buttons and complete transactions in no time, while at the same time a rookie would take that much more time to ramp up, figure out, and internalize the various button mappings. A darker interpretation of this would be that the system is optimization for fungible workers, where swapping out one cashier at will for another has negligible impact on productivity.