3 ms·

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

kingsley_20 17y ago
Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game. For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.
FooBarWidget 17y ago
With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.
- philh 17y ago
  With that kind of attitude, user interface changes get carefully considered and tested before being rolled out.
  - FooBarWidget 17y ago
    That's like saying that before writing a blog post, one should consult a psychologist to research every word's implications on human readers. If you have a multi-billion dollar budget to test every pixel of the user interface then fine, but what if you're an indie developer and have to do with a budget of $100?
    - Retric 17y ago
      Then do A / B testing. The "cheep" way to do A / B testing is for B to always be the existing system. Roll out changes to 10% of your users and see how they respond. Just remember if your users hate it then fix the problem and test it again or abandon the idea. So, this only works when you can measure how they resound to changes.
      - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
        Allow for the change to bed in. When the awesome bar came out I immediately disliked it, possibly hated it even: now I find it both useful and generally awesome. It [the awesome bar] takes time to learn the best response to each key string, now i rarely need to type more than 3 letters to find the address i want, often just one letter. Also a UI change can get more plaudits by virtue of the placebo effect, IMO (I've not done double blind tests!), making things appear better simply cause the look has changed.
  - nailer 17y ago
    With that kind of attitude, people will never understand each others differing viewpoints in a respectful way. :^)

kingsley_20 17y ago

Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game. For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.

FooBarWidget 17y ago

With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.

philh 17y ago
With that kind of attitude, user interface changes get carefully considered and tested before being rolled out.
- FooBarWidget 17y ago
  That's like saying that before writing a blog post, one should consult a psychologist to research every word's implications on human readers. If you have a multi-billion dollar budget to test every pixel of the user interface then fine, but what if you're an indie developer and have to do with a budget of $100?
  - Retric 17y ago
    Then do A / B testing. The "cheep" way to do A / B testing is for B to always be the existing system. Roll out changes to 10% of your users and see how they respond. Just remember if your users hate it then fix the problem and test it again or abandon the idea. So, this only works when you can measure how they resound to changes.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      Allow for the change to bed in. When the awesome bar came out I immediately disliked it, possibly hated it even: now I find it both useful and generally awesome. It [the awesome bar] takes time to learn the best response to each key string, now i rarely need to type more than 3 letters to find the address i want, often just one letter. Also a UI change can get more plaudits by virtue of the placebo effect, IMO (I've not done double blind tests!), making things appear better simply cause the look has changed.
- nailer 17y ago
  With that kind of attitude, people will never understand each others differing viewpoints in a respectful way. :^)