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The rise of user-hostile software

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Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#131

Post by yawboakye »

It is a universal and fractal problem: toolmakers make tools they don't use. They include a manual in the box because your intuition alone won't be enough to understand and use the tool (see React, especially React hooks where several blog posts later no one is finding them easy to use). The unhappy users make even more bad tools they don't use (and, mind you, the badness is exponential from one layer to the next).

The first toolmaker in the chain will be a user of the final product. They'll see all the badness in the product and rage about it. But they won't see their contribution. They don't make bad tools; it's their users who refuse to MTFM (master the [scrubbed] manual), they think.

The reward of doing the job is the money. Ergo, focus on what brings more of it, as patio11 advised. This is the natural destination of the "Profit Center" advise. Bad experience for the user, yes, but Excel is having a great time.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#132

Post by mrweasel »

As someone who do operations, shitty software is increasingly pissing me off. We get software from customers and their suppliers with declining quality. The developers will try to “fix” or improve their work by bolting on things like ActiveMQ, Kafka, ElasticSearch, NoSQL and everything but the kitchen sink. They rarely give production deployment much though, and if they do it’s just a bunch of people yelling Kubernetes.

The sad part is that many of these problems aren’t THAT hard.

I’m really facinated by the lack of quality and that no one seems to care.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#134

Post by thefr0g »

danuker wrote: post #121
kstenerud wrote: post #80

You'll notice that all of his examples of user-hostile software lack a universally accepted standard. This is not new. Do you need to install special vendor software to use your bluetooth devices? No - everyone follows the standard, so your OS just knows how to hook up your headset. With USB it's different, because the standards are insufficient for the gadgets that we use, resulting in specialized software for your…

> everyone follows the standard Try sharing a file via Bluetooth between an Apple and an Android device.

So everyone except Apple?

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#135

Post by titzer »

vbezhenar wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not "needs of developers" the problem, but the "needs of product manager, marketing, c-level asshole". Not entirely. Developers still make choices to use slow and bloated software stacks to save themselves time, which definitely negatively affects the user experience.

What stacks? I've yet to encounter a popular stack claiming itself as slow and bloated. React? Angular? Electron? There are very slim and fast apps built with those stacks. And if someone built slow Electron app, I'm sure that he would build slow Qt app (not sure if Qt considered slim nowadays). It comes either from lack of experience or lack of focus on performance. And that does not depend on stack.

Pardon me, but slim and fast? Xclock from the 1980s (long, long before Qt) was tens of kilobytes. "XClock" on Android is 2.6MB. "XClock" as an Electron app would weigh tens of megabytes.

This isn't progress, no matter how pretty those clock hands are.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#137

Post by TheTruestKyle »

swiley wrote: post #16
southerntofu wrote: post #4

Would be nice to have more communities dedicated to bloat-free, user-respecting UX... that are not complete pro-hitler neonazis like the suckless clique. I'm all ears for links and suggestions!

That's pretty upsetting except Apple is getting racist and attacking sexual deviants as well. The difference is vanishing and in that case I'd rather be using software I know I can throw out and replace.

Wasn't your generation taught to not judge a book by its cover. Or did I lose your attention to tik tok and neolibralism?

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#138

Post by fleddr »

This article needs a part two. It does a good job of pointing out the misalignment between user needs and organization needs, but fails to address why this misalignment exists.

The flow diagram assumes the naïve situation that this is a just a matter of awareness, education, or people becoming somehow a "better" person.

Whilst I don't have all answers, it's a complex problem set, allow me to speculate.

When you look at the type of products discussed, say a mouse, they are low margin products. Ultra quick time to market, yearly iterations, and hardly ever built to have a long time span.

That's not us though. We're "Good Corp". We do it properly. The mouse comes with a basic driver, no app needed. We do build an optional app for the lights. It's a native app, built from scratch. Smooth and fast. We build this app for 2 or 3 operating systems, natively. And we respect standards, the app can also control lights of devices from other manufacturers. Our enormous test lab tests every possible combination across operating systems and competing mouses, and will keep doing this as these underlying systems are constantly updated. Finally, we build our mouse to last, from better materials, and also design for repairability.

Our good corp mouse costs 120$. The evil corp mouse costs 50$. It has the exact same features, just a lot of cutting corners, but functionality is comparable.

Which mouse will customers buy? Will they recognize quality? More importantly, will they pay for it? Or will they just go for the cheapest and tolerate the annoyances, and buy another one 3 years from now?

I think you know the answer. When the market does not reward quality, quality will not be delivered. There will be no magical moment where developers turn "good", they cant do good, because good is expensive, and nobody buys it.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#139

Post by dasil003 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

The problem is too much money came into tech. Even 10 years ago software companies had only a fraction of today's representation among blue chip companies. Once the industry is recognized as a top place to make money then the wrong sort of people start worming their way in slowly but surely undermining whatever integrity came out of the early engineering culture and values that built the foundation.

Re: The rise of user-hostile software

#140

Post by abecedarius »

api wrote: post #53
TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Agreed on all points. Interesting to see this: > You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar. What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole soft…

> Something weird happened over the past decade. I blame free (as in beer). If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways. This creates a huge forcing function to push acceptance of surveillance, adware, and worse as hard as possible. It’s hard to complete with free. A free thing can build a network effect fast, then monetize with roundabout methods like surveillance. Payment also adds friction, and I…

Worth noting that 'crypto' creates an opening for new ways to fund open-source development. Let's try not strangling that in its crib? We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto, and if the older funding models were going to take free software beyond the niches it's found, we'd see that by now.
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