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I'm curious: what about the italics, specifically, bothers you? Those are important points or modifiers and italics are a way I draw attention to them. Everyon

I'm curious: what about the italics, specifically, bothers you? Those are important points or modifiers and italics are a way I draw attention to them. Everyone takes many of the interfaces they use for granted. I certainly do-- I regularly take my phone's simple, clean mail client for granted despite my first mail client being mutt, but it's really, really clean and gives far more features than mutt ever could. (And a phone is one of the few places I would not prefer using vim style editing.) Having had hundreds of discussions with dozens of developers about interface design, I can assure you that they are no different. It's just that developers often have competing needs in software projects, so it turns into a point of contention. In a regular development organization, the product manager or whoever has the final say. In FOSS projects, the maintainers do. If they're not keenly aware of how much more valuable a good, expertly defined interface brings to a piece of software, they're going to make a worse piece of software, unnecessarily. I've served in both roles professionally and have seen these issues from both sides, many times. An organization controlled by designers would probably be even worse. So with the amount of shit I've had slung at me when acting as a software designer, I think what I wrote is a pretty measured addition to a conversation that is very important to me. I see most end-user-facing FOSS software getting absolutely no adoption among non-technical users because it sucks for them to use, and I see a lot of developers not entirely sure why that is and coming up with a bunch of folk explanations like "commercial software has advertising" or "their version is dumbed down and looks pretty and end users are dumb and refuse to read docs." I've got important insight into the real reasons why, and as someone that's probably contributed 10k hours of my time to writing FOSS code (admittedly, some of it was paid,) I think I'm entirely justified in sharing it. If you disagree, I'd be interested to hear why, but even if you're not interested in explaining why, I respect your stance on the matter. I apologize if I bothered you with my wording or even just the what I was expressing (seriously), generally, but I failed to bring attention to these ideas presenting them meekly. The Mastodon situation is exactly the sort of thing I was trying to prevent. Not only did Mastodon repel a giant influx of users with it's usability problems-- big and small-- it gave many, if not most of those users the impression that FOSS software is weird, confusing, and exclusively for nerds, and that's the sort of thing that's going to keep open source alternatives alternative instead of having commercial alternatives to the default, free option.

chefandy 2y ago
Additionally: > Everyone takes many of the interfaces they use for granted. For example, I've seen many people in the HN comments over the years cite the HN interface as evidence that interfaces are better without designers involved, or something similar. In reality, HN has some of the best interface design out there. It does exactly what it needs to do, simply and intuitively, is much easier to visually orient yourself and navigate than a paged forum discussion, despite being compact it's completely obvious where individual elements begin and end using implied lines, type hierarchy, and gestalt rather than adding a bunch of boxes and lines, works great on multiple screen sizes, needs nearly no documentation beyond policy docs... it's a brilliant, clean, polished interface. It even keenly takes its audience into account-- many end users would be fatigued by the loooong lines of text when you fully expand the window and generally prefer a limited width for text blocks, but users that look at a computer text all day long prefer the flexibility of stretching out the lines horizontally to reduce the vertical footprint and get more on their screen at once. That doesn't just happen-- it was deliberately designed that way. Good interface design is very different from good branding and identity design, or similar-- it should be invisible. The choices should seem natural, or even obvious... but how many sites were set up like HN before HN did it? Compare it to Slashdot, the gold standard when HN got up-and-running. HN is incomparably cleaner and more focused on its core use case, even though it has fewer features and visible controls, which is usually what developers lament the lack of. HN is a great mix between newsgroup/email chain type visuals worked into a forum format, and I hadn't seen anyone else doing that. Many of the interfaces we use that look obviously designed and function poorly were either made by purely visual designers, or developers trying to make something look "designed" and using inspo from dribbbbble or whatever. Beautiful looking is quite distinct from optimally usable, and interface designers generally concentrate almost entirely on the latter.

chefandy 2y ago

Additionally: > Everyone takes many of the interfaces they use for granted. For example, I've seen many people in the HN comments over the years cite the HN interface as evidence that interfaces are better without designers involved, or something similar. In reality, HN has some of the best interface design out there. It does exactly what it needs to do, simply and intuitively, is much easier to visually orient yourself and navigate than a paged forum discussion, despite being compact it's completely obvious where individual elements begin and end using implied lines, type hierarchy, and gestalt rather than adding a bunch of boxes and lines, works great on multiple screen sizes, needs nearly no documentation beyond policy docs... it's a brilliant, clean, polished interface. It even keenly takes its audience into account-- many end users would be fatigued by the loooong lines of text when you fully expand the window and generally prefer a limited width for text blocks, but users that look at a computer text all day long prefer the flexibility of stretching out the lines horizontally to reduce the vertical footprint and get more on their screen at once. That doesn't just happen-- it was deliberately designed that way. Good interface design is very different from good branding and identity design, or similar-- it should be invisible. The choices should seem natural, or even obvious... but how many sites were set up like HN before HN did it? Compare it to Slashdot, the gold standard when HN got up-and-running. HN is incomparably cleaner and more focused on its core use case, even though it has fewer features and visible controls, which is usually what developers lament the lack of. HN is a great mix between newsgroup/email chain type visuals worked into a forum format, and I hadn't seen anyone else doing that. Many of the interfaces we use that look obviously designed and function poorly were either made by purely visual designers, or developers trying to make something look "designed" and using inspo from dribbbbble or whatever. Beautiful looking is quite distinct from optimally usable, and interface designers generally concentrate almost entirely on the latter.