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> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for t

> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time. I’ll do you one better: try making a chart in Google Sheets.

bitpush 1y ago
Really? It's that hard for you to make a chart in Google Sheets? What's your preferred way? Matplotlib? Seaborn? R?
- noleary 1y ago
  Mostly the details are a problem. For example, adding data labels to a scatterplot. Completely insane how they want you to do it. Or removing the Y axis from a bar chart. Have to make the text size 11 and white. Why? There's a lot of little things like this that are just mind-numbing. I like native PowerPoint charts (not Excel) and R's ggplot2 personally.
  - bitpush 1y ago
    Would you be surprised if I told you there might be people who prefer sheets way and dislike PowerPoint and ggolot2? These are subjective things. We can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'
    - sfink 1y ago
      We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either. Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors." People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions. UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say. </rant>
sfink 1y ago
Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy. The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations. Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.

bitpush 1y ago

Really? It's that hard for you to make a chart in Google Sheets? What's your preferred way? Matplotlib? Seaborn? R?

noleary 1y ago
Mostly the details are a problem. For example, adding data labels to a scatterplot. Completely insane how they want you to do it. Or removing the Y axis from a bar chart. Have to make the text size 11 and white. Why? There's a lot of little things like this that are just mind-numbing. I like native PowerPoint charts (not Excel) and R's ggplot2 personally.
- bitpush 1y ago
  Would you be surprised if I told you there might be people who prefer sheets way and dislike PowerPoint and ggolot2? These are subjective things. We can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'
  - sfink 1y ago
    We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either. Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors." People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions. UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say. </rant>

sfink 1y ago

Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy. The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations. Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.