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Comment by websiteapi

3 days ago

which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary

Nothing is perfect, but here are a few things I enjoy using:

https://www.geogebra.org/calculator

https://regex101.com/

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

https://www.figma.com

https://www.affinity.studio

https://bluecinema.ch (To buy movie tickets for a certain movie chain in Switzerland. I haven't used this in many years, but at first glance it looks like I remember it. Back then, this was a very smooth experience both on desktop and mobile. Just perfectly done.)

Any spreadsheet program (it's the spreadsheet itself, which I like, not necessarily how the UI is aranged around it)

Apple's Spotlight, GNOME's similiar thing (don't know the name)

I also like Tantacrul's interface design work: https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul/videos

For the all the necessary complexity and race-to-the-bottom features, I am a fan of Jetbrains. I like using Uber, Twitch (wrote a plugin for it one weekend to integrate with chrome), Netflix, Discord. There are plenty of companies that manage to be enjoyable to end users and expose apis without the inscrutable abstractions and terminology I encounter using google products. It feels the same as working with Oracle.

  • > Netflix

    Netflix? The barely functional video player accessed via excessively bloated thumbnail gallery? About the only good thing to say about this is that all the other movie streaming platforms somehow are even worse.

Its not hating - just stating the facts. Most companies unfortunately dont have a nice UX these days, because common UX practices like not making user think (i.e. overcomplicating the UIs) and not blocking users (showing annoying popups in the middle of UI workflows) somehow became a lost art. Some products are inherently easy to use like draw.io for example. I really like the UX on Stripe, in particular their onboarding process. There is also a semi-famous e-commerce company, in the furniture space. I forgot their name (something with W?), but I ordered something once, and was really impressed by how smooth and uncomplicated the process from browsing the inventory to checkout and delivery itself was.

No one's. Everyone sucks. Find a product and you'll find a population collating complaints about it. Whining about interface design is like the cheapest form of shared currency in our subculture.

Fundamentally it's a bikeshed effect. Complaining about hard features like performance is likely to get you in trouble if you aren't actually doing the leg work to measure it and/or expert enough to shout down the people who show up to argue. But UI paradigms are inherently squishy and subjective, so you get to grouse without consequences.

None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware.

For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.

  • As somebody who already does this, I wouldn't say the Thunderbird's UX is the real motivation.

    I do it for autonomy and avoiding lock-in, but Thunderbird has some frustrating inconsistencies particularly in its mishmash of searching and filtering.

  • why would a great UX be tied to the source being open or not?

    • Because if you don’t like the UX you just edit the source code yourself and make it better /s

      /s but I wish it wasn’t because a lot of FOSS evangelists have this mindset (here on HN too)

      2 replies →

  • Wow.. you are the one loving thunderbird. The ridiculous idea of removing menubar and if you enable that - it wastes valuable screenspace.

Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.

  • I mean something that has a clear Google analog/equivalent that way can compare on. I personally think Wolfram Alpha (assuming that's what you're talking about) isn't any better than Google.

    • Never really used Alpha, was talking about Mathematica.

      I don’t the the web is compatible with good UX, but that doesn’t mean good UX isn’t possible — it just means that the companies that are successful at UX build native applications, or physical objects, or both.

I would say basically everything that has won a an Apple Design Award before 2020.

Things for macOS for example.