>Github
wtf? I wish other things had as good UI/UX as GH has.
Git's CLI on the other hand, ugh.
Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#32Hahahahaha. Engineering manager at a FAANG here, churning out collective crap that is far worse than what myself or any individual member of my team would come up with. Here's the dynamic: Executive sets strategic priorities. Executive may be a user of the product, but their experience (and the things they care about) are usually very different from the average user, simply by virtue of being a millionaire . They're…
Thanks for your insightful reply!
> they're not trying to win over users; they're trying to extract money from them.
Fair enough. But was there ever an attempt to extract money and/or data from the users through third-party apps? For example by forcing third-party to serve ads?
I'm actually questioning if it's in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. My guess is that current big tech apps don't even serve their purpose of maximizing profits & data extraction optimally. I'd expect a talented indie dev to be able to provide a better UX & monetizing users at the same time.
I mean if we want to go the evil route, we might even incentivize 3rd party devs. Let everyone build a Twitter or Reddit client, but they must serve ads and might get a fixed or percentage share. If someone can build an app where users actually like and click on the served ads, great.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#33>Github wtf? I wish other things had as good UI/UX as GH has. Git's CLI on the other hand, ugh.
I'm fine with GitHub in general, but I find browsing repositories extremely slow. And I don't remember it always being like that. See my comment here for what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39403789
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#34Hahahahaha. Engineering manager at a FAANG here, churning out collective crap that is far worse than what myself or any individual member of my team would come up with. Here's the dynamic: Executive sets strategic priorities. Executive may be a user of the product, but their experience (and the things they care about) are usually very different from the average user, simply by virtue of being a millionaire . They're…
Thanks for your insightful reply! > they're not trying to win over users; they're trying to extract money from them. Fair enough. But was there ever an attempt to extract money and/or data from the users through third-party apps? For example by forcing third-party to serve ads? I'm actually questioning if it's in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. My guess is that curr…
Of course it's not in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. Nobody cares about the long-term at a public company, because you can just sell your stocks as long as doom is at least a quarter away. In many cases the subpar user experiences are in service of short-term monetary interests, which the stock market (and by extension, your management chain) very much cares about. It also probably doesn't matter all that much, as the only thing that matters in business is transactions, and relatively few users are going to quit using Reddit because the client sucks compared to the third-party options.
The "here, run ads in your third-party app and we'll give you a cut" business model has been tried, and is actually pretty successful. Try for example AdSense or an Android F2P game or AdMob. The difference is that the app itself is usually branded separately from the ad network, so users know they are using the 3rd party app and not the main service. I think that's the main concern for say a 3rd-party Twitter or Reddit client - at some point a critical mass of users start to think of say RIF as "Reddit", what's stopping them from redirecting their client at a new service and cutting off the real Reddit backend? This was basically how Imgur started, as "Image hosting for Reddit" and then they became a site in their own right.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#35UX/UI design is an entirely different job than coding. In mature development places there are UX designers that design the UI layout and user interaction and developers that implement the UI and the backend.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#36Getting UX right is a lot harder than people realize for several reasons: - You have the usual BigCo problems in software with prioritization and incentives and pressure to deliver new features - Front-end work is less mathematically complex and is generally undervalued by large companies that rely on complexity as a metric for difficulty/value - When you use a piece of software all day for months/years, you learn th…
> Front-end work is less mathematically complex
Absurd.
In general UI is more complex because of state. Primitively speaking complexity of state machine grows exponentially with every new screen, dialogue.
But people often underestimate this.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#37Getting UX right is a lot harder than people realize for several reasons: - You have the usual BigCo problems in software with prioritization and incentives and pressure to deliver new features - Front-end work is less mathematically complex and is generally undervalued by large companies that rely on complexity as a metric for difficulty/value - When you use a piece of software all day for months/years, you learn th…
> Front-end work is less mathematically complex Absurd. In general UI is more complex because of state. Primitively speaking complexity of state machine grows exponentially with every new screen, dialogue. But people often underestimate this.
> In general UI is more complex because of state.
Not just that, but there is a lot of craft (and state) involved in handling excellent micro-interactions correctly. For example, multi-column dropdowns where you're handling the current selection, keyboard focus & navigation, live filtering, matching international characters in the filter, disabled items, direction of expansion, accessibility...
Each "tiny" feature, when done well, will improve the UX through a small micro-interaction without getting in the way. But together, handling state well becomes an exercise in very careful, thoughtful, tedious programming. Between the tedium and the corporate resistance to long-tail excellence, only a developer who really cares will be able to accomplish it.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#38This is like asking why UX sucks at code. It's a different job.
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Front-end work is less mathematically complex Absurd. In general UI is more complex because of state. Primitively speaking complexity of state machine grows exponentially with every new screen, dialogue. But people often underestimate this.
> In general UI is more complex because of state. Not just that, but there is a lot of craft (and state) involved in handling excellent micro-interactions correctly. For example, multi-column dropdowns where you're handling the current selection, keyboard focus & navigation, live filtering, matching international characters in the filter, disabled items, direction of expansion, accessibility... Each "tiny" feature, w…
> only a developer who really cares will be able to accomplish it
great point
Unfortunately "caring" is hard to measure and => usually overlooked and don't help you get bigger salary
Re: Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
#40Developers are not responsible for UX/UI. Product designers and managers are.
As someone who has been using software since the 80s, I would say awareness of UX/UI in industry has steadily risen. However, there are some dynamics that are detrimental to software quality, such as the principal-agent problem in business software (where the buyer is not the user) and the promotion-driven design problem in large companies (where the UX may take a back seat to other criteria for promotion).