3 ms·

Reading the text didn't help much > The heresy implicit within is the premise that the user, not the system, gets to define what is most important at any given

by yodon 3y ago

Reading the text didn't help much > The heresy implicit within is the premise that the user, not the system, gets to define what is most important at any given moment Calling that a heresy is about the most arrogantly flawed statement you can make in the field of user experience design, which is saying a lot.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
clnq 3y ago
There's a footnote, attached in the wrong place, that explains the use of word "Heresy". It's used in a similar sense as "revolt", in the context of contrarianism. In that sense, it is "heresy" -- not the current norm -- to put the user in charge of constructing the view of information in a system. It might be true. Anyways, it took me a bit to understand what the author was saying, and the articles would be a lot easier to read if they used plain English. The articles are quite contextual and people with a different frame of view might interpret them differently, which is not good communication.
IshKebab 3y ago
There's a note at the bottom about the use of the word heresy. But it's still stupid. The system is still deciding.
- montagg 3y ago
  It’s worse than that. It forces the user to decide what’s most important from an interface design perspective at each moment while also doing the task. The fluidity is cool, and it helps maintain an understanding of hierarchy and context, but at some point the “system” needs to decide what’s important, or you’re just outsourcing design to your user. I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot of control over what they see and how, but just presenting this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a version of this that you could use for a window system, but I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very engaged and specialized users who can put in the work. Is there a version of this idea that could work for general computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it would just need to feel like it didn’t.
  - yodon 3y ago
    I've been using beautiful.ai to make slides. I like it, but it takes control over font size, and does so poorly - it frequently chooses a font size that is just too big for the space, in which case it blots out the text with an error message telling me I have too much text. If I ADD another character or word, it pushes the font size selector to the next smaller font size and now my longer text is ok where my shorter text was previously too long. There is no direct control over the font size, just this badly implemented system-controlled size picker.

by yodon 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

clnq 3y ago

There's a footnote, attached in the wrong place, that explains the use of word "Heresy". It's used in a similar sense as "revolt", in the context of contrarianism. In that sense, it is "heresy" -- not the current norm -- to put the user in charge of constructing the view of information in a system. It might be true. Anyways, it took me a bit to understand what the author was saying, and the articles would be a lot easier to read if they used plain English. The articles are quite contextual and people with a different frame of view might interpret them differently, which is not good communication.

IshKebab 3y ago

There's a note at the bottom about the use of the word heresy. But it's still stupid. The system is still deciding.

montagg 3y ago
It’s worse than that. It forces the user to decide what’s most important from an interface design perspective at each moment while also doing the task. The fluidity is cool, and it helps maintain an understanding of hierarchy and context, but at some point the “system” needs to decide what’s important, or you’re just outsourcing design to your user. I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot of control over what they see and how, but just presenting this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a version of this that you could use for a window system, but I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very engaged and specialized users who can put in the work. Is there a version of this idea that could work for general computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it would just need to feel like it didn’t.
- yodon 3y ago
  I've been using beautiful.ai to make slides. I like it, but it takes control over font size, and does so poorly - it frequently chooses a font size that is just too big for the space, in which case it blots out the text with an error message telling me I have too much text. If I ADD another character or word, it pushes the font size selector to the next smaller font size and now my longer text is ok where my shorter text was previously too long. There is no direct control over the font size, just this badly implemented system-controlled size picker.