4 ms·

This anecdote is not about white space. It sounds like some junior designer was allowed to go nuts and do whatever they wanted with zero regard for the actual u

This anecdote is not about white space. It sounds like some junior designer was allowed to go nuts and do whatever they wanted with zero regard for the actual users. The designer just found a bunch of stuff they liked online and just did whatever. The first thing their manager should’ve done upon seeing this work is correct them about the nature of their job: Designers must first understand problems and then solve problems. It’s a creative field, but at the end of the day designers produce business outcomes. Having sexy portfolio pieces and creative work that truly expresses the inner experience of the artist is great — but it has to take a back seat to what the designer is being paid to do. Maybe “being oblivious to the needs of paying customers killed an enterprise app” is a better title.

Andrex 3y ago
It's hard to do design right the same way it's hard to do kanban right or Jira right. Less skilled people chase the trends without understanding the fundamentals.
keybored 3y ago
> I don’t know who this was but it sounds like a junior developer Why has HN in the last three years or so gotten this collective irresistible urge to insert “junior developer” into every conceivable ill and malaise? The thesis sounds straightforward. Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better.
- thrawa8387336 3y ago
  AI insecurity
- chasing 3y ago
  Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move? Although, as I kind of allude to, I also place a lot of blame on management: Employees will make mistakes. Big ones. That’s life. A company needs to be structured so there are checks before those mistakes go out into the wild. But, yes: Senior designers can also make mistakes. I’d argue they make less glaringly obvious mistakes, but humans will human.
  - csydas 3y ago
    while i get what you’re saying i also know many senior devs who swim in dogma of their own creation, finding some trend they personally aspire to and enforcing it religiously. i think the relative experience of a dev is not a clue for me on if they are going to do research on what the end users actually need.
    - chasing 3y ago
      I was talking about designers, specifically. But I have found that senior people on any I’ll are generally more capable of making considered choices. Not all, of course. And engineers definitely will bias towards tools they understand and have had good past experiences with. Again, to be “senior” at something means being aware of these biases and making reasoned choices despite them.
      - ivan_gammel 3y ago
        I see in your comments some bias too. You assume that UX designer made wrong choices, hence this person was junior. In fact, many designers have specialization and the choices made were good from a perspective of a printed media designer (management error - wrong hire/assignment). Or the designer was not aware of specific use cases, that were not communicated by the product manager. It is very easy and straightforward to blame the designer, but the root causes are very often somewhere else. Too often it’s just failure to understand specialization and hiring wrong people for the job.
  - keybored 3y ago
    > Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move? That sounds like every single sad tale where a change of management/executives forces some new process or tool on their underlings without any input. (Perhaps those are junior developer CTOs?) So the thesis of the OP was straightforward and clear because of all the facts in the history. Replacing that with some generic tale about mismanagement and the accursed junior-run-amok is comparatively less interesting.
- chasing 3y ago
  Also: > Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better. This is exactly the sort of naive guess the designer made in the first place. It was not known what power users wanted, clearly, and users of different products will have different needs. It assumes power users are the users the company wants to appeal to: Maybe they’re trying to make life easier for new users. There’s no “lesson about power users” here. There’s a “lesson to understand your users and your business needs.” I am a power user of all sorts of software that I sorely wish had a less cluttered and “more white space” or “more aesthetic” experience. This designer may not have been wrong in their choices in that situation despite designing for software with “power users.” Design is a set of tools. You have to know what you’re trying to do before you start saying stuff like “screwdrivers are for newbs — when making things for power users only user chainsaws!”
  - keybored 3y ago
    This is exactly the sort of contrarian response that makes everything into a philosophical dilemma which cannot be concretely acted upon. The story reported: a new design was tried (for whatever reason) which didn’t work better (it worked worse) for the concrete users of that app: productivity-focused (or -forced) support staff. It is anyone’s guess why you want to argue over a retelling of the article which we are commenting on. Since that (following your own example) could be motivated by a thousand different reasons I guess it’s best to not speculate.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - shuntress 3y ago
    > I am a power user of all sorts of software that I sorely wish had a less cluttered and “more white space” or “more aesthetic” experience I would add to this with the observation that the existence of "power users" is very likely a sign that the system is poorly designed. Obviously some things are just really complex and there is no way around that. But most things are not. A good system will easily and intuitively solve the user's problems without them needing a degree from NASA to understand how to use it.
- preommr 3y ago
  It's not just Hacker News, it's all over the place. The term has lost all meaning and basically just means someone that's making a mistake or does something the writer disagrees with. I see it all over social media where before it would've been "10 pitfalls of X", it's "10 mistakes Junior devs make when learning X". Or if somebody disagrees with someone else about technological discussion, the goto insult is that the other person is a junior dev, instead of maybe thinking that other people have different perspectives.
- darby_eight 3y ago
  > Power users need the app to be efficient. Can we dispense with this "power user" bs? The reason anyone uses software is efficiency. The end goal is to deliver value (measured by productivity/$ spent) with a specific toolset you are tasked with building and maintaining. Stratifying your customer base by ephemeral computer literacy ideas will just distract from delivering a product that addresses everyone's needs.
  - seabird 3y ago
    Productivity unit per dollar spent is going to follow making your system most efficient for the people that spend their entire day in it (the power user) and just workable enough for an outsider to do occasional work. Compromising the workflow of your full time SCM expert in your ERP system for the sake of somebody who spends an hour or two a month filling out purchase orders is just stupid.
    - darby_eight 3y ago
      > Productivity unit per dollar spent is going to follow making your system most efficient for the people that spend their entire day in it (the power user) and just workable enough for an outsider to do occasional work. Well, why bother making this distinction to begin with? The whole concept of a power user just reeks of lazy product design. > Compromising the workflow of your full time SCM expert in your ERP system for the sake of somebody who spends an hour or two a month filling out purchase orders is just stupid. Yes, this is lazy product design in the other direction. It's not clear why you can't just satisfy both groups.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      But see, there often are more of those "hour or two a month" people. If you have, say, 20 times as many "non power users" as "power users", then "an hour or two a month" times 20 adds up to a significant amount - still less than the "power users", but not negligible. And that's the problem of a lot of enterprise apps. The UI design is one that makes sense and is efficient for power users, but a large number of regular users use the app too, and the UI design absolutely stinks for them.
seabird 3y ago
>junior designer Well, I guess damn near all designers are junior in 2024! It's getting hard to find software that hasn't been severely fucked up by some "UX artisan" padding their resume at the users' expense. Windows 11 is a marked step backward (I just love when new options load into my Explorer context menu as I'm trying to click on things). "New" Outlook is quite obviously designed by people that don't use Outlook. Android 12+ and Material You feels like some sick freaks who get off on other people being frustrated got a blank check to do whatever they want. Read this and tell me that the people responsible have your best interests at heart: https://material.io/blog/announcing-material-you https://material.io/blog/announcing-material-you >They’re seeking experiences that are more than just practical and functional—experiences that also evoke emotion. The experience evokes emotion alright! My phone with a 6 inch tall screen can only fit ~3 notifications when I pull the shade down. In that menu, 1.5 inches (25%) of my screen are taken up by setting toggles, and it's not like we don't know how to do better -- Android 11 fit 6 toggles in half the space that this dogshit takes up. There is so much fucking whitespace that reliably making gesture inputs has become a challenge. I could go on and on and on and on. We're past the point where this is even appealing to the lowest common denominator. I haven't been able to find a single person of any background who appreciates this shit. Modern UX is shameless navel-gazing and at risk of sounding like an asshole, I think the world would be better off if leaders would just let go of the bulk of their design teams once they have a working product. It is laughable that you run into non-power-users that tell you "we had it good with AS/400 greenscreens, but then my company "modernized" my most important tool and it takes me twice as long to do my work".

Andrex 3y ago

It's hard to do design right the same way it's hard to do kanban right or Jira right. Less skilled people chase the trends without understanding the fundamentals.

keybored 3y ago

> I don’t know who this was but it sounds like a junior developer Why has HN in the last three years or so gotten this collective irresistible urge to insert “junior developer” into every conceivable ill and malaise? The thesis sounds straightforward. Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better.

thrawa8387336 3y ago
AI insecurity
chasing 3y ago
Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move? Although, as I kind of allude to, I also place a lot of blame on management: Employees will make mistakes. Big ones. That’s life. A company needs to be structured so there are checks before those mistakes go out into the wild. But, yes: Senior designers can also make mistakes. I’d argue they make less glaringly obvious mistakes, but humans will human.
- csydas 3y ago
  while i get what you’re saying i also know many senior devs who swim in dogma of their own creation, finding some trend they personally aspire to and enforcing it religiously. i think the relative experience of a dev is not a clue for me on if they are going to do research on what the end users actually need.
  - chasing 3y ago
    I was talking about designers, specifically. But I have found that senior people on any I’ll are generally more capable of making considered choices. Not all, of course. And engineers definitely will bias towards tools they understand and have had good past experiences with. Again, to be “senior” at something means being aware of these biases and making reasoned choices despite them.
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      I see in your comments some bias too. You assume that UX designer made wrong choices, hence this person was junior. In fact, many designers have specialization and the choices made were good from a perspective of a printed media designer (management error - wrong hire/assignment). Or the designer was not aware of specific use cases, that were not communicated by the product manager. It is very easy and straightforward to blame the designer, but the root causes are very often somewhere else. Too often it’s just failure to understand specialization and hiring wrong people for the job.
- keybored 3y ago
  > Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move? That sounds like every single sad tale where a change of management/executives forces some new process or tool on their underlings without any input. (Perhaps those are junior developer CTOs?) So the thesis of the OP was straightforward and clear because of all the facts in the history. Replacing that with some generic tale about mismanagement and the accursed junior-run-amok is comparatively less interesting.
chasing 3y ago
Also: > Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better. This is exactly the sort of naive guess the designer made in the first place. It was not known what power users wanted, clearly, and users of different products will have different needs. It assumes power users are the users the company wants to appeal to: Maybe they’re trying to make life easier for new users. There’s no “lesson about power users” here. There’s a “lesson to understand your users and your business needs.” I am a power user of all sorts of software that I sorely wish had a less cluttered and “more white space” or “more aesthetic” experience. This designer may not have been wrong in their choices in that situation despite designing for software with “power users.” Design is a set of tools. You have to know what you’re trying to do before you start saying stuff like “screwdrivers are for newbs — when making things for power users only user chainsaws!”
- keybored 3y ago
  This is exactly the sort of contrarian response that makes everything into a philosophical dilemma which cannot be concretely acted upon. The story reported: a new design was tried (for whatever reason) which didn’t work better (it worked worse) for the concrete users of that app: productivity-focused (or -forced) support staff. It is anyone’s guess why you want to argue over a retelling of the article which we are commenting on. Since that (following your own example) could be motivated by a thousand different reasons I guess it’s best to not speculate.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- shuntress 3y ago
  > I am a power user of all sorts of software that I sorely wish had a less cluttered and “more white space” or “more aesthetic” experience I would add to this with the observation that the existence of "power users" is very likely a sign that the system is poorly designed. Obviously some things are just really complex and there is no way around that. But most things are not. A good system will easily and intuitively solve the user's problems without them needing a degree from NASA to understand how to use it.
preommr 3y ago
It's not just Hacker News, it's all over the place. The term has lost all meaning and basically just means someone that's making a mistake or does something the writer disagrees with. I see it all over social media where before it would've been "10 pitfalls of X", it's "10 mistakes Junior devs make when learning X". Or if somebody disagrees with someone else about technological discussion, the goto insult is that the other person is a junior dev, instead of maybe thinking that other people have different perspectives.
darby_eight 3y ago
> Power users need the app to be efficient. Can we dispense with this "power user" bs? The reason anyone uses software is efficiency. The end goal is to deliver value (measured by productivity/$ spent) with a specific toolset you are tasked with building and maintaining. Stratifying your customer base by ephemeral computer literacy ideas will just distract from delivering a product that addresses everyone's needs.
- seabird 3y ago
  Productivity unit per dollar spent is going to follow making your system most efficient for the people that spend their entire day in it (the power user) and just workable enough for an outsider to do occasional work. Compromising the workflow of your full time SCM expert in your ERP system for the sake of somebody who spends an hour or two a month filling out purchase orders is just stupid.
  - darby_eight 3y ago
    > Productivity unit per dollar spent is going to follow making your system most efficient for the people that spend their entire day in it (the power user) and just workable enough for an outsider to do occasional work. Well, why bother making this distinction to begin with? The whole concept of a power user just reeks of lazy product design. > Compromising the workflow of your full time SCM expert in your ERP system for the sake of somebody who spends an hour or two a month filling out purchase orders is just stupid. Yes, this is lazy product design in the other direction. It's not clear why you can't just satisfy both groups.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    But see, there often are more of those "hour or two a month" people. If you have, say, 20 times as many "non power users" as "power users", then "an hour or two a month" times 20 adds up to a significant amount - still less than the "power users", but not negligible. And that's the problem of a lot of enterprise apps. The UI design is one that makes sense and is efficient for power users, but a large number of regular users use the app too, and the UI design absolutely stinks for them.

seabird 3y ago

>junior designer Well, I guess damn near all designers are junior in 2024! It's getting hard to find software that hasn't been severely fucked up by some "UX artisan" padding their resume at the users' expense. Windows 11 is a marked step backward (I just love when new options load into my Explorer context menu as I'm trying to click on things). "New" Outlook is quite obviously designed by people that don't use Outlook. Android 12+ and Material You feels like some sick freaks who get off on other people being frustrated got a blank check to do whatever they want. Read this and tell me that the people responsible have your best interests at heart: https://material.io/blog/announcing-material-you https://material.io/blog/announcing-material-you >They’re seeking experiences that are more than just practical and functional—experiences that also evoke emotion. The experience evokes emotion alright! My phone with a 6 inch tall screen can only fit ~3 notifications when I pull the shade down. In that menu, 1.5 inches (25%) of my screen are taken up by setting toggles, and it's not like we don't know how to do better -- Android 11 fit 6 toggles in half the space that this dogshit takes up. There is so much fucking whitespace that reliably making gesture inputs has become a challenge. I could go on and on and on and on. We're past the point where this is even appealing to the lowest common denominator. I haven't been able to find a single person of any background who appreciates this shit. Modern UX is shameless navel-gazing and at risk of sounding like an asshole, I think the world would be better off if leaders would just let go of the bulk of their design teams once they have a working product. It is laughable that you run into non-power-users that tell you "we had it good with AS/400 greenscreens, but then my company "modernized" my most important tool and it takes me twice as long to do my work".