Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 414 posts

Re: Sanding UI

#171

Post by xorcist »

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.

"Waterfall" is not a development process. But plenty of the processes that give space for planning, also give space for QA. So surely agile, in the broad sense of development processes, is relevant to the comparison.

Re: Sanding UI

#172

Post by martinsnow »

bl4ckm0r3 wrote: post #149
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 w…

Apple does many things right but things like Mail.app got thrown to the side for years. There's still many odd utilities here and there that have not seen any love like grapher.

Re: Sanding UI

#173

Post by bartread »

necovek wrote: post #131
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. […

The idea behind "agile" is to recognize when something isn't working and improve it. You obviously have a process that does not serve your customers' needs: work with your team to fix it. If you have SCRUM ceremonies, a retrospective is where you can raise it, but really, any time works (retrospectives are to purposely look at the past few weeks, but things you notice along the way, look to solve along the way).

Stop drinking the koolaid, will you?

I didn't get into software development to spend my entire time focussed on fixing broken processes. I'd bet almost none of us did. I got into it because I like building software and, more than that, I like building high quality software.

At the end of the day it comes down to this: I've worked a bunch of different places over 25 years. I've seen a lot of different processes but, certainly for the past 17 or 18 years, mostly some flavour of agile that most closely aligned with Scrum. It's not been that great anywhere, and there are a handful of places it's been outright terrible.

Reality check: if agile never gets any better than "not that great" then maybe agile is the problem.

Re: Sanding UI

#174

Post by SSLy »

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…

> I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there?

premium iOS apps. Procreate {,Dreams}, Photomator, Overcast, Crouton, Mela, Carrot Weather, Apollo.

Re: Sanding UI

#175

Post by jurgenkesker »

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.

Agree, we have some time in sprints to do whatever we want, and then you finally can fix those minor annoyances that are probably the users annoyance too. But in general I think more time should be there reserved for it. It's now once in x sprints.

When working on my own apps it's really obvious that non focused time leads to lots of improvements. Instead of only the business wishes. In that regard it seems that the potential of a dev is a bit diminished when you don't have time to do things according to your own priorities.

Re: Sanding UI

#176

Post by webprofusion »

This is (potential) an advantage of small teams and individual developers. In more formal teams developers are often handed a UI and that's what they have to build, no variation permitted.

However, not every developer will craft a great UI just given time, I've seen some truly inspired monstrosities.

Re: Sanding UI

#177

Post by meindnoch »

selimco wrote: post #95
two_handfuls wrote: post #94

Meanwhile, some other UI uses square boxes for radio buttons. Or have a highlighted button but the enter key doesn't activate it. Or there are three different menus all behind a different symbol (ellipsis, hamburger, kebab). There is a lot of variance in quality. Those of you who polish your UI: you are appreciated. Truly.

I think space is usually the key that performs a click on focused buttons, not enter.

It's up to the user agent. On one platform it's the spacebar, on another it's the return key. Of course, fake controls written in JS wouldn't be able to do this. Which is why it's the wrong thing to do.

Re: Sanding UI

#178

Post by raincole »

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.

It's just a general romanticization of how programmers work: if we have more time we'll fix everything.

No we don't.

Re: Sanding UI

#179

Post by 7bit »

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. […

> 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.

Man, Discord does have a "posts" feature that works similar like a forum. If you draft a text there, the HOME/END keys are all messed up and you can't select text with shift, or move by word holding CTRL (I don't remember the specifics at the moment).

I have reported that a couple of times over the past 3 years, because that makes the drafting text *extremely* difficult and frustrating.

As a web dev myself, I wonder how this even broke in the first place. Meaning, I wonder what kind of incompetency is needed to break something, that works out of the box. Anyhow, this should be a fix that cannot possibly take longer than 30 minutes to fix and would immediately make the user experience 1000 times better for everyone. Yet, the bug is still there 3 years after reporting it.

I also reported a bug in Teams, where you cannot use the HOME/END keys in the phone number input, to Microsoft, through Premiere Support. The reply was: This works as designed.

I am not surprised that customers don't report these kind of bugs any longer, because neither the employees/developers, nor the company doesn't give a shit anyway.

Re: Sanding UI

#180

Post by 7bit »

userbinator wrote: post #121
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…

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? Windows 2000. Everything newer has been slowly downhill.

Windows 3.1 was better. Windows 2000 introduced a lot of point and click, which just distracts from what you actually want to do on a computer.
Post reply on HN