I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
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Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#12It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
The two are not exclusive; in fact, "convention" means that out of all the possibilities a certain set is chosen and used by default. It is not possible to have a "convention" if there is no "configuration", otherwise it's just a limited set of features.
What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#13> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#14This article made no sense. The example were unrelated to the thesis being put forward. It had nothing to do with making a killer product.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#15> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people,…
That's fine, then they won't use it.
Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#16If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus).
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#17If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#18Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit: Paternalistic (adjective) (of people in authority) making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives Source: Cambridge Dictionary
> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives
It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#19> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people,…
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions.
Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
Re: Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
#20> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses. The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people,…
It's usually how corporate programming languages are designed: they have corporate environments in mind which is the exact opposite of hacking. Strict standards, predictability and low bars to entry. Hence opinionated approach even to source code formatting and pretty much everything else. Java, C# and Go are all examples of this. Swift is kind of there too, though it's probably the least opinionated language of them all, the corporate ones. (Some would say C# is also kind of okay. Probably)
But the point of the article was a bit broader. Opinionated products can build a strong devoted userbase around them. The question is only how reasonable your opinions are.
An example from Apple's UI: the way multiple windows of the same app are cycled on the desktop with Cmd-` is absolutely beyond any logic. It tries to be smart but makes cycling so unpredictable that it becomes practically useless. It's probably even worse than MS Word's copy/paste one (actually I'm not sure which is worse).
This is someone's opinion and I can't imagine anyone on Earth except the creator of this logic being happy with it. It's an edge case that illustrates the point: your opinion should resonate with enough people to sustain your business, that's all.