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When I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person. One knowledgeable individual combining the fields
by atoav 3y ago
When I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person.
One knowledgeable individual combining the fields programming, design and usability can sometimes outperform big teams, because there is something to the way big teams decide that dillutes clear ideas and leads to inconsistencies throughout the resulting piece of software. These inconsistencies can be an problem for the user.
UX people generally may claim otherwise, but it is easy to make software without them and often the user experience is better when they are not involved. Imagine two situations. We are going to improve the user experience of the famous text editor vim. Who will make a better job:
1. Random dude who has been teaching vim to people, with some experience in creating user interfaces and a lot of experience with terminal based software
2. UX researcher armed with all the newest knowledge in usability
My money would be on the former, because the latter has a high chance of misunderstanding why people use vim in the first place. I might be mistaken, but my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator.
That is okay for software that you use once a year and where things should be self explainatory. But there is software where it is okay to have a little hurdle in the start if it means you are going to be so much more productive later. Ideally you will have both a low entrance barrier and a good usability when you use it day in, day out. Newer UX-based software is good at the former, but sucks at the latter.
- simulo 3y agoI agree with the "single people can create good software without involvement of a UX expert". That does not only apply to UX experts, but any other expert role (You do not even need a person who sees themselves as a programmer; a person using Excel, Access, Godot… might create something useful). A lot of roles and best practices are for making software creation work in large organizations. I disagree with the "dumbing down" idea: "old UX" (90s, early 2000s) focussed a lot on beginner-friendlieness and at this time a lot of people might have seen this sofware as being "dumbed down" from its predecessors. Menus e.g. are a staple of making GUIs more discoverable than command line interfaces, and at that time there were already criticism that urged for building more efficient text based interfaces (See "canon cat" and the "anti mac interface")
- abwizz 3y ago> my feeling is that in the past 15 years user interfaces have broadly been "dumbed down" or driven towards the smallest common denominator. maybe because the userbase grew over tenfold in that timeframe (most of which are not vim users ;)
- yourapostasy 3y ago> When I read this I can't help about stellar pieces of usable software that have been produced by one person. A possible example of this is C. E. Steuart Dewar's DateBk for Palm, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) software title he published through his company Pimlico Software [1]. The sheer density of the UX/UI (he packed an enormous amount of visual indicators and manipulables into very few pixels, and the pinpoint precision of the stylus helped here) is anathema to current Web and smartphone sensibilities, but it was the closest I have felt to the intertwingle-ness [2] of the Emacs Org mode experience on a smartphone. If you had a "power user" mindset, then the software was productivity hacking catnip. Still looking for the data storage layout of the Apple Newton, the densely-packed yet layered feature set (progressive disclosure UX) of Pimlico DateBk3, hackability of GNU Emacs Org mode, and an LLM-powered index to organize my personal information in an open, introspectable, future-proofed format. [1] http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity