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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#261

Post by djsamseng »

> So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters.

I’d take this with a grain of salt (pun intended). There’s a lot of bugs that you cannot reproduce without certain permissions or a particular environment. Let alone the race conditions or user setup. In my experience, most bugs would not have been uncovered using this brute force approach. A few tests using your understanding of the code and critical thinking goes a lot further in my opinion.

Re: Sanding UI

#262

Post by parpfish »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #186
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…

Mobile games, especially those with microtransactions. They're highly incentivized to offer a satisfying user interface. So as to get more money, of course.

They don’t optimize for satisfying interfaces, they optimize for driving engagement.

I find the aesthetics of free to play games very stressful and unsatisfying (lots of notifications and popular to distract you), but they ARE effective at getting me to click into menus to make those nuisances go away

Re: Sanding UI

#263

Post by parpfish »

steve_taylor wrote: post #244
youssefarizk wrote: post #216

I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.

People tend to underestimate the competitive advantage of a nice UI.

Absolutely.

Having well sanded features doesn’t necessarily remove bugs directly drive conversion, but it gives the entire product an established professional “feel.

Even though your customers feel it, they won’t explicitly articulate it

Re: Sanding UI

#264

Post by TimTheTinker »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #232
youssefarizk wrote: post #216

I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.

The good use of time is that OP learned that labels should wrap their inputs, so the next 10,000 times they write a control on a form, they'll just do it off the bat. That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has, especially when you see them disparage UI development as something unworthy of their time / expertise.

> That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has

Or maybe it's our collective frustration with processes and expectations that make it very difficult to be a craftsman--and that make web app UI bad in general.

I remember my boss being frustrated with how long it was taking me to build a set of filtering dropdown components from scratch (one of the most difficult to get right). I stuck with it and put in some extra hours to really get all the small details right. Later that year, he asked me to tech-lead a newly forming team of UI engineers.

A year later, everyone called it great work and no one remembered how long it took.

Re: Sanding UI

#265

Post by linux2647 »

djsamseng wrote: post #261

> So I click around, using the UI over and over, until I finally cannot give myself any more splinters. I’d take this with a grain of salt (pun intended). There’s a lot of bugs that you cannot reproduce without certain permissions or a particular environment. Let alone the race conditions or user setup. In my experience, most bugs would not have been uncovered using this brute force approach. A few tests using your u…

“Sanding” shouldn’t be the only approach to testing an app. Developers should test using a variety of techniques. Some bugs are discovered through unit or integration tests, others by brute force, others still from end users

Re: Sanding UI

#266

Post by Viliam1234 »

richardlblair wrote: post #214
crazygringo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agile isn't entirely irrelevant, it's also not the main issue. It's a cultural one. If someone tells me they work on an 'Agile Development' team my immediate perception is that they are a culture of cargo culting and bike shedding, without putting a ton of thought or care into their product, process, or users. These systems are designed to maximize output, not the quality of the output. Management is likely out of to…

Business is trying to maximize money. It seems like quality has much less of an impact on sales than many of us would wish. I am not sure why it is like that, but as long as it is... it is a financially rational decision to throw unpolished products on the market as fast as possible.

It would be easy to blame the customers. But let's look in the mirror -- how do I make purchase decisions as a customer?

Actually, not a good example, because I usually don't buy software. OK, I buy Windows, but... I don't feel like I have a choice between more polished and less polished versions of Windows. Other than that, I use free software. When I use software at work, someone else made the decision and I had zero input. And that kind of software usually sucks (now I am thinking of Confluence, Jira, and other user-hostile monstrosities).

So I guess a part of the answer is that if you sell software to business, there is no need to make it nice, because the people who decide whether the company buys it are not the ones who will be stuck with using it.

Re: Sanding UI

#267

Post by Viliam1234 »

JimDabell wrote: post #224
exe34 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's not agile, it's the environment that led to agile/scrum being adopted: not that it leads to better products, but that it gives management more control over every decision of how time is spent. essentially they can arbitrarily reduce the time/budget you have, and hire standard code monkeys, etc, to get something made. I think in a company like Steve Job's Apple, where it needs to look perfect (within…

> I agree that it's not agile, it's the environment that led to agile/scrum being adopted: not that it leads to better products, but that it gives management more control over every decision of how time is spent. essentially they can arbitrarily reduce the time/budget you have, and hire standard code monkeys, etc, to get something made. This is the exact opposite of agile. Direct from the Agile Manifesto: > Build pro…

Perhaps the problem is that there are few self-organizing teams in companies. Managers needs to justify their salaries.

Re: Sanding UI

#268

Post by dclowd9901 »

Bike shedding kind of: I think the real failure here is not using a “cursor: pointer” directive. Easy to tell what’s clickable when your cursor changes based on what’s clickable.

Re: Sanding UI

#269

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

As far as app UIs go, I just started using Duolingo and their app seems to be tremendously well polished.

Re: Sanding UI

#270

Post by dclowd9901 »

perfunctory wrote: post #248

Alan Kay was right classifying most software engineering as pop culture. It's 2024 and we are still fiddling with spaces around radio buttons, a problem that should have been solved decades ago.

I don’t get this take. “Still fiddling with spaces around radio buttons.” It’s design. Design is unique to the creation. We still fiddle around with spacing around radio buttons because one spacing doesn’t work for every design.

Unless you’re talking about the clicking dead zone, which I would argue is more a problem with not using the right cursor than the dead zone the gap introduces.

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