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Novelties should not be discounted. Even if it’s not used seriously it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Even if it’s nostalgic or an old guy who checked the
by dmix 4y ago
Novelties should not be discounted.
Even if it’s not used seriously it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Even if it’s nostalgic or an old guy who checked the paper for 50yrs and today still likes checking on a couple of his pet stocks once in while on paper.
This was the thesis of the Emotional Design book (the follow up to famous tea kettle design book) that engineers and amateur designers often over focus purely on function and ignore emotion - they overvalue the most rational approach. For ex: programmers always want the least amount of clicks to do x, when an extra step with an info box and a button might help ease worries and anxieties and smooth the UX.
Often there is value in the pure visceral experience, sometimes emotion, or nostalgia, or pure beauty of the design. This is often what creates a great product that people become religious about. So such things can’t be dismissed out of hand simply because the value cant be reduced to going from point A to B faster/efficiently/cheaper.
- RajT88 4y agoThis. Playing around with a Nintendo Wii is far more fun than any other console. It has nothing to do with games - it is just simply a joy to use.
- haswell 4y agoI’m trying to understand this comment in the context of its parent. What is being dismissed out of hand? The concepts of emotional design and the accuracy of data on a financial website seem rather unrelated?
- dmix 4y agoDid you not read the article? Most of the post was about how the data being wrong wasn’t the big deal it’s that they shouldnt have the numbers section at all since it means no one reads it. The fact FT messed up by automating it and not doing basic QA is a signal but it’s not the whole story. A few extra pages for nostalgia reasons, style, and a few hardcore fans is hardly a big burden on a product. But who knows. Maybe it is useless.
- raverbashing 4y agoAnd basic QA usually checks for things that should be there, not the other way around. You don't want your QA to break every time a new data source is added You can't check to see something you don't know is not there without losing a ton of flexibility
- haswell 4y agoI’m just dense today, apparently.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoSome variant of logical positivism is typically drilled into engineers pretty hard. If it can't be quantified, it's not meaningful. In fairness, this is largely true within the context of engineering-related fields, but generalizes poorly outside of that area. But same way a fish is the last to discover water, it's very hard to discover these assumptions while inundated in them. That "not meaningful" slips by very easily, because nobody stops to ask meaningful in what sense. It already sounds so abstract it's easy to think the line of thought is complete.