Products For People Who Make Products For People
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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
#2If there were Zed Shaw fanboys I would be one.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#3You know Zed - this was a really good read. There's not much I can personally disagree with here, especially your final point (which I won't give away so people will read it).
Very well written; and some great advice. I much prefer this to ranty-zed :)
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#4I think his "longbeards" actually do quite well on iOS where it says "Do X just SO" and you get a pretty decent design if you just follow the 1-2-3s
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#5You know Zed - this was a really good read. There's not much I can personally disagree with here, especially your final point (which I won't give away so people will read it). Very well written; and some great advice. I much prefer this to ranty-zed :)
I was thinking the same thing, "Well reasoned with 75% less hyperbolic rant". Good stuff Zed, keep it up.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#6I hear a lot of "programmers don't do good Ui" as well as "marketers dictate bad UI" in my travels. I used to try to work out some sort of theory about which statement is true, and why. But then I experienced a revelation, Sturgeon's Revelation:
90% of everything is crap.
Therefore, if handed ten UIs designed by programmers, nine will be crap. If handed ten UIs designed by marketers, nine will be crap. Perhaps there is a characteristic way in which the nine programmer crap UIs are crap, but the observation that most programmer UIs are crap is not insightful and doesn't magically justify the idea of turning UI design over to product management.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#7Looks like Zed got some different Cooper's book than I did.
Or misread it completely.
"Inmates are running the asylum“ was one of the most useful books I ever read, it completely changed my attitude. It's not "don't let programmers to do interfaces", it is "build interfaces for intended users and intended usage".
If Zed thinks that Cooper's book is idiotic then he is just unable to get what it's all about (like many other nerds — and that explains why open-source is good for servers and sucks in UI department). I hope he sticks to building awesome web servers nobody needs.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#8Excellent 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 myself. In one particular project an MBA type brought me valuable information about what we were doing well, how we compared against competitors, and what he thought our customers wanted. He then told me to run with it and stepped out of the way. I thought that was pretty neat.
Another thought - A quote from the article:
"A sudden rise in Long Beards simply copying Product People Products but doing it cheaper using their cost reducing backend skills."
reminded of the Paul Graham essay "Copy What You Like"
http://paulgraham.com/copy.html
... and copying something you like is probably a good way to bridge the gap between back end "long beard" and product designer.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#9I hear a lot of "programmers don't do good Ui" as well as "marketers dictate bad UI" in my travels. I used to try to work out some sort of theory about which statement is true, and why. But then I experienced a revelation, Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap. Therefore, if handed ten UIs designed by programmers, nine will be crap. If handed ten UIs designed by marketers, nine will be crap. Perhaps there…
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 person.
That attitude has to change - I don't care that the business people think hackers are Eloi fit for the slaughter while they are the Morlocks - the intelligent ones. Good business people don't have that attitude, good business and product people do care about scalability, supportability and quality. Those that don't will fail.
On the other hand, the constant refrain I hear from people in my own community and profession about making something usable and intuitive just makes me upset. I can't change the broken business people - I can try to make my corner of the world better.
Re: Products For People Who Make Products For People
#10[deleted]