4 ms·

Dumb Software Isn’t Dumb

27 points by blasdel 17y ago

quant18 17y ago
Well yes, probably everyone on HN is computer-savvy enough that when they type some input into a general consumer application, they damn well mean what they said, not what the application thinks they meant. I wonder if there's cases where this has degenerated into a game of "guess two-thirds of the average": your app starts out with a level of automatic input cleaning which is not enough to catch all the mistakes of the least savvy 1/3 of your users, is mildly helpful to the next 1/3, but annoys the top 1/3 enough that they switch to another product. Then the least savvy users are half of your userbase, so you lower the focus of your product to account for them ... (this assumes that the least savvy users don't know how to switch products, since if they knew that much they wouldn't belong in the "least savvy" category).
kristiandupont 17y ago
As a general principle, I guess that I want my software to be smart and make suggestions in an unobtrusive way. It shouldn't make the decisions - just show me what it thinks I might want to do and make it easy for me to accept that suggestion.
- andymism 17y ago
  Yes, software we use should make smart suggestions based on our basic usage patterns, but not decisions. Good point. Bernstein misunderstands Seth's calendar example: defaulting to PM when I select 2 o'clock is definitely not the same thing as changing my 2AM entry to 2PM automatically. In that straw man example, the "smart" feature is actually a bug. What I took from Seth's post is not that software should be able to read our minds, but that opportunities to delight our users abound, especially in features/functions that we would consider trivial.
jrockway 17y ago
In fact, server-side developers are likely to be short on CPU, so lots of clever inductive strategies that are viable on the desktop won’t work in Web apps. Well, they’ll work in beta, and for the press briefing when the system has maybe ten users. Once things get built out? Fail whale. Sigh, that is a vast oversimplification. I love it when non-programmers debate each other over programming. Counterexample: Google Search. My desktop does not have enough CPU or disk to analyze the entire Internet and suggest spelling corrections for me. But Google does.
- blasdel 17y ago
  Mark Bernstien is definitely a programmer: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/
edw519 17y ago
...machine learning is hard... Hard is relative. I remember Seth's post and pretty much agreed with all of it. Nothing in it struck me as particularly difficult or unusual. We routinely do these things all the time: - provide options in most likely order - default to the most likely option - auto-complete based on indexed options - auto updating software - auto maintaining databases Users don't necessarily want more "features". They just want their software to work the way they do. The developer's job is to find that out and make it work, no matter "hard" it is to do.
shrikant 17y ago
The so-called "smart" features in office suites annoy me so much, that the first thing I do on any fresh install is ensure to switch all of them off. Basically Seth was saying the software needs to read his mind..

27 points by blasdel 17y ago

Well yes, probably everyone on HN is computer-savvy enough that when they type some input into a general consumer application, they damn well mean what they said, not what the application thinks they meant. I wonder if there's cases where this has degenerated into a game of "guess two-thirds of the average": your app starts out with a level of automatic input cleaning which is not enough to catch all the mistakes of the least savvy 1/3 of your users, is mildly helpful to the next 1/3, but annoys the top 1/3 enough that they switch to another product. Then the least savvy users are half of your userbase, so you lower the focus of your product to account for them ... (this assumes that the least savvy users don't know how to switch products, since if they knew that much they wouldn't belong in the "least savvy" category).

kristiandupont 17y ago

As a general principle, I guess that I want my software to be smart and make suggestions in an unobtrusive way. It shouldn't make the decisions - just show me what it thinks I might want to do and make it easy for me to accept that suggestion.

andymism 17y ago
Yes, software we use should make smart suggestions based on our basic usage patterns, but not decisions. Good point. Bernstein misunderstands Seth's calendar example: defaulting to PM when I select 2 o'clock is definitely not the same thing as changing my 2AM entry to 2PM automatically. In that straw man example, the "smart" feature is actually a bug. What I took from Seth's post is not that software should be able to read our minds, but that opportunities to delight our users abound, especially in features/functions that we would consider trivial.

jrockway 17y ago

In fact, server-side developers are likely to be short on CPU, so lots of clever inductive strategies that are viable on the desktop won’t work in Web apps. Well, they’ll work in beta, and for the press briefing when the system has maybe ten users. Once things get built out? Fail whale. Sigh, that is a vast oversimplification. I love it when non-programmers debate each other over programming. Counterexample: Google Search. My desktop does not have enough CPU or disk to analyze the entire Internet and suggest spelling corrections for me. But Google does.

blasdel 17y ago
Mark Bernstien is definitely a programmer: http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/

edw519 17y ago

...machine learning is hard... Hard is relative. I remember Seth's post and pretty much agreed with all of it. Nothing in it struck me as particularly difficult or unusual. We routinely do these things all the time: - provide options in most likely order - default to the most likely option - auto-complete based on indexed options - auto updating software - auto maintaining databases Users don't necessarily want more "features". They just want their software to work the way they do. The developer's job is to find that out and make it work, no matter "hard" it is to do.

shrikant 17y ago

The so-called "smart" features in office suites annoy me so much, that the first thing I do on any fresh install is ensure to switch all of them off. Basically Seth was saying the software needs to read his mind..