Comment by neilalexander
2 days ago
I have long believed that the biggest issue here is that engineers and power users generally have a much higher “pain threshold” when it comes to poor or complex UI/UX. They are not always the best people to judge how or if less experienced users will tolerate or adapt to those patterns. It’s fine to have opinions but they must be prepared for them to be challenged. Even better if they can invite others to challenge them, which is essentially what talking to your users achieves.
> engineers and power users generally have a much higher “pain threshold” when it comes to poor or complex UI/UX
I don't think that's entirely accurate. We tolerate steep learning curves if the result is an increase to our power. That's why we are power users.
Vim, for example. Some of us put effort into learning it because it's a powerful and efficient editing language that will enable us to easily accomplish hard things.
Caring about the system itself and being willing to put effort into it are what separates power users from normal users. We don't do this because of masochism, we do it because we want to increase our power.
Normal users want the system to just do what they want without any thinking or effort at all, as though it was a highly specialized tool for their exact task rather than a powerful programmable general purpose computer.
Personally I don't care at all about how "less experienced users will tolerate or adapt". This unceasing focus on the wants and needs of normal users frequently hinders us. Developers typically reduce the complexity and feature set of a piece of software in order to turn it into something a normal user can deal with. We want more power, not less.
Normal users don't really matter unless they are directly paying our salary. We should all favor ourselves unless we're getting paid to focus on someone else.
The two biggest causes of major UI problems I see are:
1) Exactly what you wrote: power users don’t even realize they clicked through five things in ten seconds any one of which would have derailed a weaker user, because they’re so used to bad UI that it’s almost invisible to them.
2) Zero care given to what’s most natural for the platform, for cost of development & maintenance, or what’s easiest for the user, when (bad) designers and (bad) “product folks” get involved and are way too into the wrong kinds of “consistency”, especially brand and cross-platform consistency (yo, I’m not sure it’s worth spending extra money fucking up contrast and platform norms on your inputs so your fucking radio buttons are “on brand” or whatever, like, I’m deeply skeptical of the actual business value of that kind of thing, though I can see the PowerPoint presentation value… and that’s why it happens)