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The Diminishing Returns of Everything
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Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#12I don't feel like this applies to UX. The third or fourth pass in this area can often make a huge difference.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#13That's the Pareto principle [0]: 80% of the effects come from roughly 20% of the causes (or effort, in this case).
Very hand-wavy but I think that's also the reason things like expertise exhibit a power law distribution - if as you progress each "unit" of improvement requires 4x the effort of the previous "unit", it makes sense that only about 1/4th of people will make it through. Of course that's very oversimplified but I think you get the gist.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#14This is disingenuous. Sure, the first X hours of working on a new project are a lot of fun and you can set up the framework for what you're doing and feel like you're making great progress.
But what you're missing is detail and quality. For example, I can set up the structure of my thesis by working out chapter titles, headings, subheadings and drafting bullet points per section. Straightforward. But doing the research and writing up takes years, it's often boring, laborious and the net addition to the document can be as low as a couple of hundred words a week. It doesn't mean the actual work is less valuable as time progresses.
Likewise let's consider a software development project. We can make grand strides in the first X weeks, gathering requirements, creating user stories, creating tasks, sprints, assigning work, setting deliverables, setting up the various ceremonies. But at some point it boils down to writing some code, often boring, time-consuming, detailed and slow. It doesn't mean the contributions made later in the project are any less valuable than the frantic hive of activity in the beginning.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#15> The first couple hundred lines of code of your project will have a much larger impact than the last few thousand lines of code ever will.
With this explanation, the author explains the diminishing returns by the fact that their value decreases ("impact"). I disagree: returns diminish because their cost increases. Assuming a thing can generate 100% of some value, the range 0-20% generates as much value as the range 80%-100%, but the latter range is more costly than the first range.
The return of centering the buttons is significant, because if they're not centered then the product will look unprofessionnal, which is not good for business. It just happens than the cost of centering them is high, in this case as high as setting up the REST service in a first place.
The return of having your company survive is extremetely high. It just happens that this cannot be done with the first few dozens employees but with hundreds more, which is of course way more expensive.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#16I can see why it feels this way, but often times it seems to me the opposite is true, like a phase transition: it remains a bunch of commits until at some point it 'suddenly' becomes a product, usable by the designated users, solving a problem, possibly generating revenue. Like water that cools and cools and eventually turns to ice, even though that last quarter degree didn't change the temperature a lot.
That’s an interesting analogy! To take it a bit further, there’s no change in temperature for the final stretch (meaning no apparent progress) until you overcome the latent heat of the liquid.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#17I don't really like the emphasis on "wasting" time, the way he wrote it in the bathroom light automation section. If you do not enjoy tinkering with voice activation (or X thing in the general sense), then I can see why you wouldn't like losing time, but I would probably feel like it was 5 hours spent learning about home automation and voice control, which could maybe be applicable in other cases, both within home automation and outside of it. I don't see the 3 hours mentioned as "lost", but as time spent learning.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#18Centering a button with css should not take two days. If you haven't solved the problem already, feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to help.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#19> The first couple hundred lines of code of your project will have a much larger impact than the last few thousand lines of code ever will.
I think it's easy to underestimate the importance of polish and fit and finish. In my experience a product's success or failure is made in the last 20% of development, when all the fine tuning and bug fixing goes in to overdrive, and user experience is honed.
Re: The Diminishing Returns of Everything
#20Oh, how many hours of my life have I wasted trying to center align. Sad and all too true.