Comment by Folcon
3 months ago
I'm 100% with Tonsky on this one, it's something that's frustrated me for years and I think it fundamentally boils down to a lack of respect for your user.
I'm going to be careful here, this doesn't mean that there aren't times when we can't avoid bothering our users, but I think we resort to doing so far too often, we don't apply the axiom of "if this person was someone who I deeply respected and would feel real bad if the contacted me and asked me to justify bothering them, would I still do this" as our actual test.
I'm not saying this is uniquely our decision, this entire process might be out of our hands, but in my opinion it bares thinking about and weighing up appropriately.
It's very easy to say it's only 5 seconds, if your software serves millions, that's a lot of people and even if you don't, a couple of 5 seconds here or there adds up very quickly.
I'm not here to berate or point fingers, but we also are users of each others software, so I hope that at least on that level we'll try to do better :)
I know I will.
I agree with the sentiment of the post, but sometimes it would be too ‘expensive’ to implement a solution to some of these problems.
E.g. on user accounts: nobody likes them, but when Uncle Fizz asks customer support for his data because he lost his phone again, a synced user account would be the simplest way to help him.
Updates should either be automatic and transparent, or it's indeed on you to keep track and decide whether to update. I do agree that NPM packages are freaking annoying, every package now needs to tell you something when you install or update.
Same with What's New modals, some people will benefit from learning these things (notably power users?), but they'll annoy others.
Notification dots are idiotic.
So… striking a balance where we can? Otherwise most users would be left behind, as if we'd given them a terminal and said APK installs and updates things.
I'm not sure what the solution to all this is, but I like Tonsky a lot, and it's a great blog post.
> Same with What's New modals, some people will benefit from learning these things (notably power users?), but they'll annoy others.
I think power users are most annoyed by those modals. It prevents them from doing the exact thing they were planning to do. Instead, they'll have to reinterpret what the application is telling them, consider it to be irrelevant (most of the times), and then pick up whatever they were planning to do. This creates friction.
I don't need the application to tell me a sidebar was introduced. I see that immediately because it differs from the layout I'm already used to. And then I'm annoyed they added the sidebar, because it takes up space without offering relevant new functionality.
Okay, you're actually right and I was dumb to think power users wouldn't find the features anyway.