Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

Post by npizzolato » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 12:16 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #119

someguydave wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and…

Word is the perfect example of a lazy, mediocre product dominating a space through sheer inertia. The current Mac version can't even keep track of recently opened files. Working with styles is torture. (You can't search them, you can't group them, you can't sort them, the ribbon selection seems to be random.) The ribbon itself is an unusually eccentric example of software design. A competitor could easily produce a l…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 12:34 AM UTC

melvinmt wrote: post #125

zer0th wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some years ago I came up with a system which I still use extensively. I added these lines to my .bashrc file: log(){ pushd ~/logs; echo >> $*; date >> $*; cat >> $*; } So whenever I have a piece of information that I'd like to keep - a thought on a project, a word from a foreign language I am learning, ideas for christmas gifts, some bash-fu and so on... - I fire up a terminal (mod+return, in my case) and enter log f…

> So either the file already exists and I thus add to it or a new file is created instantly. If you want the same thing but want to do it in an app instead of manually in the terminal you should check out Notational Velocity ( http://notational.net ).

Post by obelisk_ » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 12:43 AM UTC

zepolen wrote: post #117

mentos wrote: post #14

Imagine facebook is a spherical magnet with ten thousand small lead balls clung to it. If you're trying to create a better magnet it can't just be the same as facebook's. Putting the same magnet near facebook's will only collect a small handful of peripheral users. If you want to capture the critical mass you have to energize a magnet with an attractive force so great that it will begin to vibrate users close to the…

I found a better analogy to be a fire. Think of products/startups as fires, they start small, can't use large logs straight away, need constant attention, you could use a lot of petrol (financing) to get it started faster, but it could also just fizzle out immediately if the large logs don't catch fire as well. Once they get going, you don't have to watch it so closely, you can just add a log here and there, maybe re…

Post by ams6110 » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 2:36 AM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #66

someguydave wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and…

Absolutely; no one uses Office because they can "quickly pick up any of its applications". People use Office because they already "picked up" its applications. LibreOffice? Lemmee see here, I'm a bookkeeper/lab research assistant/factory supervisor that just wants to get my shit done and go home. There's this FOSS thing that mostly works but sometimes doesn't, or this Microsoft thing that I already know how to use an…

Post by Outdoorsman » Sat, Jan 30, 2016, 3:41 AM UTC

hawleyal wrote: post #30

Designers often describe the terms convention and intuition as contributing to good user experience. Convention is the "institutional knowledge" described in the article. Intuition is how easy something is to use without prior experience or convention. For instance, a car steering wheel is not intuitive but is rather conventional. If you make a car without a steering wheel, it may be better, but it won't be as popula…