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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#141

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

crazygringo wrote: post #86
aetherspawn wrote: post #83

This is so lost in Agile. Engineers should get the time to “sand” their products, but we just don’t. If QA doesn’t make a ticket for the space between, it’ll never get fixed. The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it. […

What does agile have to do with anything? You think waterfall explicitly provided time to test out the UI and "sand" it? This is a process that generally requires a product manager to choose to prioritize, together with a capable UX engineer and/or designer. That prioritization can be inserted into any development methodology if you want it. Agile is irrelevant here.

I don't think you even need PMs and UX to be involved here. Let the eng get a little bored and they'll find stuff to fix. The way it actually works though is we set some arbitrary impossible deadline, rush to meet it, creating a wake of tech debt, launch, and then straight on to the next thing.

Re: Sanding UI

#142

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

Linear app is quite polished.

Stripe is also quite excellent but not entirely bug free. I think they have a bit more surface area though.

Re: Sanding UI

#143

Post by meowface »

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #101
meowface wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cool and very polished, but my advice (which may not resonate with you) is that you should channel this attitude into some user-facing app instead of letting it basically go to waste on a personal website most people won't see or won't use for more than a second or two.

It may surprise you, but some people like to program computers for reason other than money. Makes no sense right? Weirdos, all of them!

I definitely didn't necessarily mean an app that had a way to make money. I mean exposing the work to more people who would get fun or utility out of the painstaking effort put into it. The world could use this sort of taste in a game, an activity, a tool, etc.

Re: Sanding UI

#144

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

duckmysick wrote: post #112
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

Linear (of linear.app) has a highly polished UI. In fact they had a dedicated period for fixing just usability issues: https://linear.app/changelog/2022-12-01-polishing-season-202... https://web.archive.org/web/20231003205004/https://linear.ap...

I wish they'd make more apps. I use Linear but with a team of 1, it's not exactly the best fit for me.

Re: Sanding UI

#145

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

brailsafe wrote: post #31
ddtaylor wrote: post #29

The goto tactic for this specific ` ` problem is: Foo

Back in the day I used to think this was taboo for some reason, but maybe it was only for XHTML to enforce one-to-one label -> input association. Flexbox seemed a bit redundant, since even with the non-nested syntax I'd think it would lay out inline and you can just add some padding in the same way.

The alignment is not exactly the same when you just put them side by side. Flex can center the radio with the text a bit nicer. Otherwise it sits above the text baseline I believe.

Re: Sanding UI

#146

Post by hipadev23 »

duckmysick wrote: post #111
hipadev23 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumption is quite wrong. https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/why-software-engineers-like-wo...

What does this suppose to prove? The OP said "very few" not none. Of course there will be a few anecdotes of overlap. A better way would be to compare the size of Stack Exchange boards at https://stackexchange.com/sites . It's not perfect but it's as good as it can get. Stack Overflow has 26 million users. Woodworking has 17 thousand. A fraction. Further still, not every woodworker will use a belt sander. It's used f…

You and him are incorrigible. Him for the naive assumption and stereotype that “techies” don’t do any manual trades or crafts, you for looking at the count of activity on stack fucking overflow for woodworking.

Re: Sanding UI

#147

Post by whazor »

aetherspawn wrote: post #83

This is so lost in Agile. Engineers should get the time to “sand” their products, but we just don’t. If QA doesn’t make a ticket for the space between, it’ll never get fixed. The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it. […

You can recommend adding analytics to all your flows. Then recommend some of these sanding tasks in order to improve metrics such as drop-off rate. Managers are more inclined to say yes when there is data involved.

Re: Sanding UI

#148

Post by ustad »

darepublic wrote: post #84
DustinBrett wrote: post #44

I've been "sanding" my personal website ( https://dustinbrett.com ) for nearly 4 years now, and it feels like it could go on forever. Luckily I enjoy working on it.

very nice. though you cannot have > 1 nesting of dustinbrett.com afaict

On my iphone I can! Tested to 3 levels deep.

Re: Sanding UI

#149

Post by bl4ckm0r3 »

aetherspawn wrote: post #83

This is so lost in Agile. Engineers should get the time to “sand” their products, but we just don’t. If QA doesn’t make a ticket for the space between, it’ll never get fixed. The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it. […

priority matters though, if you want to go full Apple with UI/UX then you need to lock the UI/UX for years, like Apple does, and refine every little thing to bring a fully ecstatic UX to the user. Or accept that most users won't notice that or wouldn't mind it behaving like that and build new features that will bring useful behaviours to the app (and revenue to the company). If you have to spend 50 hours to explain why it's a bug, most likely only you care about it. In some cases it may matter to be THAT precise with UI/UX and it's cool, not saying i don't appreciate quality but you can't have everything. One thing I'd like to point out is that most of the time it isn't even a matter of priority, lots of dev energy gets wasted in useless refactors and picking "the right library/framework" and building the "next outdated design library", instead of being used to improve things ;)

Re: Sanding UI

#150

Post by cocoflunchy »

xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

Probably Netflix?
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