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It applies more to design software, where a user is creating durable things and needs to understand those things themselves. Google Maps is more of an agent: It
by unholiness 6mo ago
It applies more to design software, where a user is creating durable things and needs to understand those things themselves. Google Maps is more of an agent: It's responsible for understanding its own complexity and answering your queries.
- argee 6mo agoMy point is that, sometimes, going for the lowest common denominator or "noun" and declaring it to be your primitive (focusing on minimalism), is a worse approach than picking a larger set of primitives that suits your design. Take Hangul (한글) for example, where the primitives are designed to serve a goal, and there's no effort to "ruthlessly" minimize the number of primitives, and this is something you can learn to read in 10 minutes, or at least in a day. Whereas if you go over to something like Chinese, your numbers 1, 2, and 3 look nice thanks to your stroke primitive, but your needs quickly overwhelm your design and you end up with something quite unwieldy compared to if you had picked a more complex set of primitives — you will never learn to read all Chinese in your whole life even as a native speaker. It's a counter-intuitive design lesson.