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If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

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Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#71

Post by nottorp »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #21
ChadNauseam wrote: post #5

Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week…

> my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Something wrong with your iPad then. All three of mine would easily hold a charge for more than 2 days even when turned on but unused (so asleep).

I think sometimes we should believe a vendor when they say "a small number of users were affected".

I doubt the OP is making stuff up, but all my iPads (including an original model) simply don't show any significant battery loss when left unused.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#73

Post by Cockbrand »

robbak wrote: post #12

> For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability. This was great snark.

Probably hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people still suffer from this truth each and every day.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#74

Post by gunapologist99 »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #5

Apple messed up one thing about the iPad, which made me never use mine and eventually give it away. Basically, my iPad would die in a couple days if left unplugged. Because I only want to use it about once a week, that means I have to leave it plugged in all the time. Of course I or someone else inevitably wants to plug something else into that charger, so the iPad gets unplugged and forgotten about. Then, in a week…

Was yours 3G? The first-gen was offered with 3G (mobile) as an option. I imagine that killed battery life much faster and might not have been tested as well as the wifi-only option.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#75

Post by michaelbuckbee »

sph wrote: post #40
jonplackett wrote: post #3

Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman. The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add. Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.

I have been thinking deeply about this problem. I bought a great, silent fan from Rowenta, with beautiful housing and does what it says on the tin with no fancy accessories. 3 speed + 1 very silent mode for sleep. Hey, it’s a European product, not some Chinese knockoff. At some point during design, one person must have said “you know, why not add a brilliant white light that turns on in silent mode? Wouldn’t that be…

Something that's improved my life has been buying a sticker sheet of those LED darkening dots. They're only a couple bucks and look much cleaner than other solutions I've tried while still allowing for _some_ light to come through.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#76

Post by ben_w »

Angostura wrote: post #52
jonplackett wrote: post #3

Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman. The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add. Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.

You include it but with no mention of it. Allow recoding to be activated with an obscure undocumented button push. Leave a subtle hong somewhere that someone clever can find out. Wait for news of the functionality to go viral and additional products to walk off the shelf bought by people who feel clever.

More likely to go viral in that case, a headline saying "Walkmans sometimes record over your tapes!"

When I was about 10, someone lent the school a tape of Holst's The Planets for a school play, one of the other students pressed the record button, and shortly thereafter the teacher played to the class a recording of me shouting "no stop" as I rushed for the stop button having seen what they'd done just a moment too late.

Now imagine that happening by undocumented feature, where nobody knows it would happen before it does.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#77

Post by knollimar »

ryandrake wrote: post #16
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a solution. Something like “shutdown after n hours of inactivity” would fix it though.

Or a power button that actually removes power from the device rather than just turning the display off. The "actually shutdown long press + UI" process has --just-- enough friction to make me forget to do it or not bother with it.

Oh man I want to vent about the Nintendo switch.

"actually shutdown long press + UI" process"

This plus if you plug it in after to charge it it turns back on

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#78

Post by fusslo »

jraph wrote: post #72

> But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design. Obviously GenAI. The author time-traveled to us, stole that sentence and put it in his article. He got encoding issues on blogspot so he typed the dash himself.

im thinking about making a hackernews but only for articles written before 2021 (or so).

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#79

Post by bflesch »

fusslo wrote: post #78
jraph wrote: post #72

> But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design. Obviously GenAI. The author time-traveled to us, stole that sentence and put it in his article. He got encoding issues on blogspot so he typed the dash himself.

im thinking about making a hackernews but only for articles written before 2021 (or so).

The underlying problem of distinguishing honest contributors from AI hustlers is quite hard, but worthwhile to solve properly.

Maybe there is a way to reduce incentives for AI hustlers to join a certain platform, while attracting honest contributors. But even honest contributors might have a bad day or a new project and suddenly they're out in promotion mode.

Re: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good (2010)

#80

Post by maekoos »

bflesch wrote: post #79
fusslo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im thinking about making a hackernews but only for articles written before 2021 (or so).

The underlying problem of distinguishing honest contributors from AI hustlers is quite hard, but worthwhile to solve properly. Maybe there is a way to reduce incentives for AI hustlers to join a certain platform, while attracting honest contributors. But even honest contributors might have a bad day or a new project and suddenly they're out in promotion mode.

Sadly I don’t believe ai slop is a solvable issue - we will never be able to filter out AI slop, because it is indistinguishable from human slop (and AI used right could be better than what that person could produce otherwise, eg fixing spelling and language).

I think the real problem is just trash content - content I could produce without AI in almost as quickly. The solution is probably more about determining if the content is interesting and well written, no matter who wrote it or how.

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