3 ms·
You're right, but are also ignoring that branding, appearance, etc., is simply not important to some people. They prefer function over form, which is where I th
by imiric 6mo ago
You're right, but are also ignoring that branding, appearance, etc., is simply not important to some people. They prefer function over form, which is where I think the author is coming from. They're wrong in thinking that most people share this opinion, and the idea of LLMs creating UIs seems awful to me, but as you can see from the comments here, this is appealing to some. It's niche, but this website is not exactly mainstream.
I partly share this opinion because most branding and UIs, products that are primarily marketed as a "lifestyle", etc., are obnoxious. Yes, appearance is a factor of anything we interact with, but when using technology my primary thought is if it solves a practical problem. Not if it's broadcasting an image, or even if it's enjoyable to use. The latter is important, but often companies prioritize it over functionality, which is backwards to me.
So starting with a mostly functional product, and giving me the choice of how to style it, is appealing to me. This is why I still use RSS, custom style sheets, the CLI and simple GUI wrappers, etc.
There is an audience for this type of product, but it's of the magnitude of a rounding error, so naturally most companies don't, and likely shouldn't, focus on this segment.
- mattlondon 6mo agoI totally agree that there is an often loud minority calling for this sort of thing: "I am an expert. I don't need styling or white space. I want every last square centimeter of space filled with 8pt font. I demand information density!" (aside: these are also the same people who say that JS-based UIs are slow and server-side HTML is faster, despite the fact that backend latency is 99.999% of the problem but that is another discussion...) And yet, in my lived-experience at an unnamed Big Co when we did lots of UXR work in the on-call, monitoring, and incident management software/tooling, when it came to people being the primary on-caller handling a page for an incident when the company is losing millions for every minute of downtime that the 8pt font information dense UI they said they wanted actually led to increased stress, more mistakes, longer time-to-mitigation etc. Turns out that a carefully and deliberately designed UX and information architecture and - gasp - white space (that was all carefully and minutely tuned to specific CUJs over many rounds of research and prototyping) is really important. Even if you have all the information available, just throwing stuff at the screen doesn't always help IME. Less is often more.
- advancespace 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]