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I will leave this comment here by an ex Windows desktop experience team developer which says that designers have lots of control but don't even use Windows, the
by smusamashah 8mo ago
I will leave this comment here by an ex Windows desktop experience team developer which says that designers have lots of control but don't even use Windows, they use Macs.
> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows
This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.
I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
- conception 8mo agoThe most hilariously ironic thing about this is Office for Mac is trash and has been always.
- belZaah 8mo agoThe weird thing is the way it’s trash. It breaks weird things no dev should ever have to touch. At one point Excel left horizontal lines on screen, when scrolling. Bullets and numbering just straight up refuses to restart numbering. It _worked_ why did you break it? Who gained what out of you breaking it?
- ido 8mo agoBecause the one thing about bugs that is universally true is that developers intentionally create them?
- exe34 8mo agowhere I work, we're not allowed to merge them. we test every change, and we review everything to make sure there are no regressions in all the obvious features. scrolling through our webpage will never break in production, because we use people with a full set of eyes to check before merge.
- ido 8mo agoI believe you but I've literally not worked at a single place that puts that much scrutiny on PRs and I've been working as a professional programmer for 20 years.
- exe34 8mo agoI did luck out with the $current_job. Software engineering is a tool to do the job right. I'd hate to work somewhere where software is the product.
- Zanfa 8mo ago> It _worked_ why did you break it? Who gained what out of you breaking it? This applies to so much of modern software it's not even funny.
- mahrain 8mo agoOffice for Mac 2008, when they shifted to a new codebase, was pretty good for a while, just slooooow.
- tim333 8mo agoPersonally I'm very happy with Office for Mac 2019. Everything works, no cloud nonsense. What's supposed to be wrong with it?
- lokimedes 8mo agoAs a Mac user, ironically, it seems like the Mac design team only uses iPhones or worse, not Macs themselves. I think we are at a stage where the “design rules the world” dominate rather than the full product experience. And there seems to be zero vision left in these products as well.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- joe_mamba 8mo agoSame how sex sells for humans, design and looks sell the same way for objects, from phones, to PCs, cars, washing machines, etc. Consumers don't understand tech specs, so if you show them something that triggers their lizard brains because it genuinely looks really good, appealing, futuristic, trustworthy, etc, then they'll buy it for that. The issue is that most designers are snake oil salesmen, so from the perspective of management and C-suite who approves designs, you can't objectively verify the claims and buzzwords of the design team. See the pepsi logo redesign fuckup.
- AnonC 8mo ago> As a Mac user, ironically, it seems like the Mac design team only uses iPhones or worse, not Macs themselves. It seems certain that they use iPhones for everything. They can’t even subject themselves to using an iPad. They just copy things from iOS straight into iPadOS and macOS and let others (end users) deal with the fallout. Craig Federighi doesn’t seem to pay any attention to software anymore.
- tim333 8mo agoI'm sure they use macs but those are only about 8% of Apple sales vs 50+ for iPhone and 22% for services. So I guess they stuff that makes money gets prioritized.
- lokimedes 8mo agoIf only it didn’t - I’d much prefer the UI of a few versions back.