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Products For People Who Make Products For People

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Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#41

Post by ojbyrne »

In my opinion usability requires a lot of grunt work. You have to craft error messages for any and all user input. You have to degrade gracefully if the user's interface (no JS, IE6, small screen on a phone, etc) doesn't meet the ideals for which you've designed the interface. Usable is much more work than functional.

Most programmers are aware of that, and are willing to put the time and effort in to making what's required. But often the product people, besides deciding what things should look like overall, are also in control of the budget and schedule, and they expect all those kinds of things to just magically appear.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#42

Post by jimbokun »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
neilk wrote: post #12

There is really no mystery about UI. Yes, it requires skill and a deep knowledge of how humans process information, and even a touch of design genius. But the real problem is that most shops can't measure usability in a fine-grained way. And yet everyone does have some idea that it's really important. Consequently they are bamboozled by anyone who purports to have such expertise. For the most part, so-called usabilit…

You know, I thought I had UI design mostly figured out, using a few simple rules: * Minimise the total number of clicks needed to access the sum of the program's functionality. * Make frequently-used functionality easier to reach than rarely-used functionality. * Don't have more elements in the UI than is easy to parse quickly. * No surprises. However, after reading this article, I get the feeling that it's a more ar…

If you nail all the things you mention, you'll probably be far ahead of most software out there.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#43

Post by jimbokun »

jpr wrote: post #18

Great stuff. I think I'm developing a severe case of nerd crush on Zed. The part about linguistic experience was especially good. I have thought for some time now that all configuration files, command-line options etc. should have simple and clearly defined syntax. Some already do. My dislike of weird, inconsistent and complex syntax (and semantics) is so severe that I've semi-intentionally not learnt shell-scripting…

"I have come to think that GUIs as we know them are based on fundamentally flawed ideas - pointing and grunting - instead of using a language, the feature that separates humans from other animals."

The dilemma is that human language is staggeringly ambiguous. This works because human beings have an extremely sophisticated model of other human beings in their head and a really good pattern matching facility, which makes us really good at selecting the intended interpretation without even noticing the ambiguities. Presented with the languages we use to instruct computers, designed to be perfectly unambiguous, normal humans quickly get upset that the computer doesn't understand them if they veer the slightest bit from the tightrope of a language they're given to use.

In other words, if you have a computer that faithfully and consistently passes the Turing Test, you may have something. Otherwise, pointing and grunting might be less frustrating for normal people.

Another aside: pointing or at least gesturing is much better than even the perfect language interface for editing a photo or playing a video game. So it depends on the application.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#44

Post by jimbokun »

andjones wrote: post #8

Excellent read. I found myself relating this to the division between hacker types and the MBA types. I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people. As a hacker, I enjoy having large blocks of time to create what I think is good and not coding some autocratic vision of a product. As I've grown older though, I have come to appreciate and value the interaction between MBA types and m…

"I think the comparison is close as sometimes the product people are the MBA people."

One of the founding principles of Y Combinator is to make the Hackers the product people.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#45

Post by c00p3r »

Yet another blog post for the sake of a blog post.

Every educated software engineer know, that by respecting and following a fundamental programming methodologies, such as data-abstraction, modularity, encapsulation of details, and other basic techniques for managing the complexity of large systems, you will get maintainability and programmer-friendliness for free.

The problem is - most of in-house back-end developers and their public teachers doesn't have a even a basic engineering education.

People who have managed to understand the ideas on which the SICP book is based upon, let alone MIT graduates, never write such long but empty posts.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#46

Post by jacobolus »

binomial wrote: post #30
alextgordon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to redefine the meaning of a term if it's rendered as an acronym. User Interface Designer = "white space" User Experience Designer = "mental space" Now how arbitrary is that? What is it about "Experience" that implies thinking and "Interface" that implies a lack thereof? What about all the designers unfortunate enough to come before the term "UX" was invented? I suppose Jef Raskin was only ever about white…

Well, there's also the fact that some "UX" guys don't have any great ability in graphic design, but are great when designing the use and flow of an interface. It's not necessary that an ability in the latter implies similar ability in the former.

Which "UX guys" are these you’re thinking of, who don't have a competent understanding of graphic design? I posit that it is irresponsible to claim to be a "UX guy" and not try to learn quite a bit about spatial hierarchies, data presentation, human response to colors and visual relationships, etc.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#47

Post by jimbokun »

Another word for programmers who "make products for people who make products" are systems programmers.

I'm sure Apple values systems programmers. And Google. And Oracle (at least they certainly should). Microsoft could not possibly build their products without systems programmers. Amazon could not have created its cloud products without systems programmers.

In Apple's case, their products would be impossible without the capabilities that the systems people build. Without an operating system that they could strip down and fit on a phone, while keeping much of its core functionality, no iPhone. Likewise if they didn't have the technology underlying Safari under their control.

Much of the eye candy that wowed people in Mac OS X came as a thin layer on top of the technology built by systems programmers. Like the graphics APIs underlying Expose. And the fast, system wide indexing behind Spotlight.

So, if you want to be appreciated as someone who "makes products for people who make products," work for a software company that makes products requiring innovation in systems software.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#48

Post by cool-RR »

I agree with many of the things said in the article.

I'm so annoyed with people who make open source projects that don't comply to the principles that Zed listed. (Clear code, documentation, easy to get started, reasonable defaults, support, etc.) It happens so often that I interact with such OSS projects and it's so hard to work with them.

I feel bad for all the honest effort that these people put into the core parts of their OSS projects, without realizing that if they concentrated a bit more on the things that Zed mentioned, their project would become so much easier and fun to work with, and they'd have a bigger healthier community around it.

Sometimes when I see one of these projects, (let's call it, as an example, project FooBar and say that it converts between image formats,) I fantasize about forking the project, fixing up all the documentation to be good, make a good UI, give installers, make a nice logo, etc. Then rename it, sell it as a commercial project and become a millionaire, without crediting the authors of FooBar. Then I will drive in my fancy car to visit the core developers, and I will show them a wad of $100 notes and tell them: "You see this? This could have been yours. This could have been yours if only you documented your freaking code. You worked so hard on this code, and if you would have only taken care of the things around it, like documentation and binaries and design and UX, you could have made a lot of money. But you didn't. You suck." Then maybe for their next project they'll write freaking documetation.

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#49

Post by raganwald »

wallflower wrote: post #35
jnoller wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good point - but I think a really big issue is that a lot of programmers (and I don't know why) seem to think that a good User Interface (API, Visual, Docs, etc) is just not needed. That; and the attitudes range from "who cares" to downright hostile "if you can't understand it, you're stupid". I say this as a programmer (who spends a lot of time on the "user" facing components), not as a business pers…

As a software developer who has at times thought that as long as the user interface is functional by the engineering definition that it is good enough, I've found it enlightening and interesting to go to local CHI (Computer Human Interaction) meetings where UX professionals present to one another. Programmers are a commodity but programmers who can understand and create user-friendly interfaces are less of one. http:…

Take this a step further and join! I was an active member of ToRCHI for a few years and it was an amazing experience. Alas, it didn't make me a fully functional UX professional or even competent, but it did make me consciously incompetent, and that was valuable early in my career.

http://torchi.org/

Now that I think about it, what was valuable then that isn't valuable now? I just rejoined!

Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People

#50

Post by binomial »

jacobolus wrote: post #46
binomial wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's also the fact that some "UX" guys don't have any great ability in graphic design, but are great when designing the use and flow of an interface. It's not necessary that an ability in the latter implies similar ability in the former.

Which "UX guys" are these you’re thinking of, who don't have a competent understanding of graphic design? I posit that it is irresponsible to claim to be a "UX guy" and not try to learn quite a bit about spatial hierarchies, data presentation, human response to colors and visual relationships, etc.

Though graphic design surely includes all those things you've mentioned, I was using it in the sense that most "web designers" might use it, as in the ability to make pretty stuff in photoshop. I'm not sure that someone who can, for instance apply Tufte's advice on data representation, necessarily also makes nice looking logos.
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