51–60 of 103 posts
Hah! If only! Actually they often (but not always) seem to design it for an SV audience with the latest-gen phone/computer, fast uninterrupted internet, familiarity with the latest "UX" fads, perfect eyesight, etc. Anybody that falls outside that narrow group can get shafted.
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
Web technologies were designed to let the user do what they want with the document they receive. But "the web" then evolved in a different direction.
Case in point: TFA, like many other sites, is unusable without Javascript. And it's not even "because CDN". Why do I have to execute code on a page that could be 1:1 replicated in pure HTML ?
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
The biggest issue that I come across, is users of my software, developing mental models of the software that I would never, in a million years, have developed, myself. They often work with the software, based on their "strange" mental model, and can have very weird workflows. In some cases, this is excellent, and it is worth it for me to learn the new model, and maybe add affordances for it.
One example for me is iMovie on macOS. They dedicate 50% of the screen to a sort of “project media library” where you put all videos and audio you want to use in your project and that also holds all titles, transitions etc. you can add. Literally everyone I ever see using this software drags videos directly from the finder onto the timeline, then pick a transition once and then just copy/paste it within the timeline.…
Are you saying that this is wrong because picking "assets" (rushes, transitions) is done once at the beginning of the edit process, so the screen space is wasted the rest of the time?
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter's "retweet" and "hashtag" were both folk innovations that became product features. People used to write 'RT @user "comment"' to retweet.
I found that a really interesting development, and they embraced it. Probably the best example of "go with where your users are going" I can think of. And it's silly as well, because anyone with a few weeks of software development knowledge could probably hack a Twitter-like together. Not that at that scale, admittedly, but still, prototype-twitter was nothing fancy.
Like when you see a worn path in the grass where hundreds of people took the same shortcuts instead of using the proper planned-out pathways.