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Ya but how many of the results of what you're describing as obvious are evaluated critically afterward, based on their intention? If you're working on a piece

Ya but how many of the results of what you're describing as obvious are evaluated critically afterward, based on their intention? If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome? Often times, software just adds gets in the way and makes life less easy than it would have been otherwise. The opposite of these principles is often easier to reason about. For example, people attempting to make "better" versions of Hacker News seem to rarely be aware of these, and when they post to Show HN, hopefully realize that the way it is is hard to beat because it follows at least some of the principles. To make something better, you'd absolutely need to follow similar principles more effectively.

lelanthran 2y ago
> If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome? It depends; A/B testing sorta does that at the very granular level. Not so much at a high level.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  My impression is that not teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and nobody's incentivized to actually measure quality by how effectively it does anything for users, so a tone of ~"obviously we thought of that" rings a little hollow. The exception is a few of the design studios that have arrays of devices on hand to ensure that whatever they built feels great in as many scenarios as possible, on the web specifically
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    Edit: "My impression isn't that teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and I wouldn't blame them since there don't often seem to be incentives for getting things right." I'd add that it's often the case that we're building software as software people, not necessarily as people who came from the domain we're building software for, so dogfooding isn't always easy.

lelanthran 2y ago

> If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome? It depends; A/B testing sorta does that at the very granular level. Not so much at a high level.

brailsafe 2y ago
My impression is that not teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and nobody's incentivized to actually measure quality by how effectively it does anything for users, so a tone of ~"obviously we thought of that" rings a little hollow. The exception is a few of the design studios that have arrays of devices on hand to ensure that whatever they built feels great in as many scenarios as possible, on the web specifically
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Edit: "My impression isn't that teams take hallway usability testing at all seriously, and I wouldn't blame them since there don't often seem to be incentives for getting things right." I'd add that it's often the case that we're building software as software people, not necessarily as people who came from the domain we're building software for, so dogfooding isn't always easy.