Comment by godelski
4 hours ago
For ages people have been saying "it's obvious" or "it's intuitive", without learning anything about design principles. Obvious to who?
People have been saying "we don't need docs", "nobody reads docs", "they'll figure it out". They experience the pain of a new employee onboarding but never treat this as a signal for the user experience. The user can't just walk over to the developer's desk. But luckily we got stack overflow, blogs, and Google. Somewhere someone explains it! The problem became finding it!
But hey, why do things the "hard" way when you can just throw money at the problem? Or better yet, dismiss the problem by calling the user an idiot.
You're right. What a time to be alive. We've created a world where this product is useful. And not even to because dark patterns exist, but simply because we've always wanted to avoid taking a step back and thinking or getting an outside view. Because it isn't obvious if a robot has to teach you what button to press. If it does, you probably should be ashamed (there are, as always, exceptions)
That said, I do think there's still a lot of utility you this. Those exceptions aren't uncommon. This'll help people learn programs like FreeCAD or Blender, or whatever. Where the complexity is naturally high. But also I do think we should recognize the silliness of many problems that this does solve that shouldn't be problems in the first place.
> Obvious to who?
Garage sale signs are a good example of this. The person making the sign knows what it says, so they can "read" it from farther away than someone who doesn't already know what it says.