pulsewave

Why is good UI design so hard for some developers?

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:56:00 -0400

Let me say it directly:

Improving on this does not begin with guidelines. It begins with reframing how you think about software.

Most hardcore developers have practically zero empathy with users of their software. They have no clue how users think, how users build models of software they use and how they use a computer in general.

It is a typical problem when an expert collides with a laymen: How on earth could a normal person be so dumb not to understand what the expert understood 10 years ago?

One of the first facts to acknowledge that is unbelievably difficult to grasp for almost all experienced developers is this:

Normal people have a vastly different concept of software than you have. They have no clue whatsoever of programming. None. Zero. And they don’t even care. They don’t even think they have to care. If you force them to, they will delete your program.

Now that’s unbelievably harsh for a developer. He is proud of the software he produces. He loves every single feature. He can tell you exactly how the code behind it works. Maybe he even invented an unbelievable clever algorithm that made it work 50% faster than before.

And the user doesn’t care.

What an idiot.

Many developers can’t stand working with normal users. They get depressed by their non-existing knowledge of technology. And that’s why most developers shy away and think users must be idiots.

They are not.

If a software developer buys a car, he expects it to run smoothly. He usually does not care about tire pressures, the mechanical fine-tuning that was important to make it run that way. Here he is not the expert. And if he buys a car that does not have the fine-tuning, he gives it back and buys one that does what he wants.

Many software developers like movies. Well-done movies that spark their imagination. But they are not experts in producing movies, in producing visual effects or in writing good movie scripts. Most nerds are very, very, very bad at acting because it is all about displaying complex emotions and little about analytics. If a developer watches a bad film, he just notices that it is bad as a whole. Nerds have even built up IMDB to collect information about good and bad movies so they know which ones to watch and which to avoid. But they are not experts in creating movies. If a movie is bad, they’ll not go to the movies (or not download it from BitTorrent ;)

So it boils down to: Shunning normal users as an expert is ignorance. Because in those areas (and there are so many) where they are not experts, they expect the experts of other areas to have already thought about normal people who use their products or services.

What can you do to remedy it? The more hardcore you are as a programmer, the less open you will be to normal user thinking. It will be alien and clueless to you. You will think: I can’t imagine how people could ever use a computer with this lack of knowledge. But they can. For every UI element, think about: Is it necessary? Does it fit to the concept a user has of my tool? How can I make him understand? Please read up on usability for this, there are many good books. It’s a whole area of science, too.

Ah and before you say it, yes, I’m an Apple fan ;)

-Thorsten79

Life after college

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:05:16 -0400

Life after college

Clients From Hell: Really, I'm not.

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:01:54 -0400

Clients From Hell: Really, I'm not.:

My client wanted me to meet with his boss and asked me to ride with him. I agreed and got into the passenger seat of his car where I immediately noticed part of a girl’s weave on the floor.

Me: “What’s the hair on your floor from?”

Client: “Oh that’s just pet hair. Some dog or something must…

Can preschoolers be depressed?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:27:28 -0400

Can preschoolers be depressed?

alexainslie: liquidx: sebastian errazuriz: american kills

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:22:26 -0400

alexainslie:

liquidx: sebastian errazuriz: american kills

Why your firewall sucks

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:18:33 -0400

Why your firewall sucks

earsofthebeholder: Love Inks - Too Wild Love Inks are a band...

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:08:01 -0400

earsofthebeholder:

Love Inks - Too Wild

Love Inks are a band out of Austin, TX fronted by Sherry LeBlanc and backed by two gentleman and an analog drum machine. Sherry hit me up last week with an intro and link to their Bandcamp, which I suggest you visit too! It’s a nice collection of short and sweet pop songs that will easily grow on you. The band is currently looking for a label to put out their music, but I’m sure it won’t be long until we see a release from them.

Future-Proofing Your Passion

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:05:46 -0400

Future-Proofing Your Passion

"I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather…Not screaming in terror like the passengers in his..."

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 20:04:48 -0400

“I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather…Not screaming in terror like the passengers in his car.”

- Unknown

The Meaning and Secret of Inception

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:31:12 -0400

The Meaning and Secret of Inception:

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

Privates is a platform twin-stick shooter in which you lead a...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:45:00 -0400

Privates is a platform twin-stick shooter in which you lead a teeny-tiny gang of condom-hatted marines as they delve into peoples’ vaginas, mouths and bottoms and blast away at all manner of oozy, shouty monsters. It’s rude, funny, bitingly satirical and technically pretty accurate if you don’t count the tiny people or the germs with teeth. Coming, soon.

Cow Clicker

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:16:00 -0400

Cow Clicker:

At the 2010 Game Developers Conference, a schism seemed to erupt between “traditional” game developers, who make the sorts of console and casual games we’ve come to know well, and “social” game developers, who make games for Facebook and other networks. It was a storm that had been brewing for a few years, but the massive success of Zynga’s FarmVille along with the company’s publicly malicious attitude (as David Hayward calls it, a Fuck the Users design philosophy) had made even the most apathetic of game developers suddenly keen to defend their craft as art. An unfortunate award acceptance speech from the firm (cf“that Farmville asshole”) hammered the last nail in the coffin, making this the year the year to hate social games.

StarCraft II: Ghosts of the Past Trailer

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:17:00 -0400

StarCraft II: Ghosts of the Past Trailer

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:09:58 -0400

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years :

alexainslie:

“Here’s my recipe for programming success:

Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.

Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.

Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, “the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.” (p. 366) and “the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.” (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.

If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don’t enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won’t be enough. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter” says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you do it for them).

Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain it after you.

Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).

Remember that there is a “computer” in “computer science”. Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)

Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.

Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.”

- Peter Norvig

sudobyte: IBM and the Jeopardy Challenge (via ibm)

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:24:22 -0400

sudobyte:

IBM and the Jeopardy Challenge (via ibm)

RIAA accounting: why even major label musicians rarely make...

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:30:00 -0400

RIAA accounting: why even major label musicians rarely make money from album sales.

EPICWIN

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:18:00 -0400

EPICWIN:

(via sudobyte)

LOL. What a great idea.

The Creativity Crisis

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:46:56 -0400

The Creativity Crisis:

For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.

I'm Comic Sans, asshole.

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:40:07 -0400

I'm Comic Sans, asshole.:

“Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.”

Fighting with Teenagers: A copyright story

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:30:00 -0400

Fighting with Teenagers: A copyright story:

“I have known for a while that there are websites where you can essentially download sheet music for free, and I am certainly aware that a lot of the sheet music being downloaded in that manner was written by me. While my wife Georgia has written extensively about this problem, I have tended to sit back, certain that anything I do would just be the tiniest drop in a very large bucket. But about a month ago, I was seized by the idea to try an experiment.”

An interesting exchange between a composer and a user of a sheet music trading website. I don’t really like his analogies at the end though, because they don’t underscore his stance very well at all. Too tired to articulate my thoughts at the moment, but I’m assembling them into a blog post forthcoming.