11 ms·

Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX

114 points by werg 7y ago

quelltext 7y ago
> Tests are a usability dead end -- I know this may be contentious, but I believe test suites are another realm of excessive moralizing en lieu of better tools and better processes. Too often they function as a security blanket that simply encases the parts of the code that are unit testable, while leaving the vulnerable, untestable bits fluttering in the wind. Approaches such as generative testing seem more promising. I'm not quite sure what the author is arguing for here in particular. Anything that makes writing tests a bit easier, e.g. suggestions for additional test cases, would be cool, but ultimately tests are about writing down your assumptions/expectations about the code. No, they are not formal proofs and sometimes they are not perfect but they still provide a lot of value. So far I haven't found a good reason not to write tests (since I outgrew my newcomer attitude) and yeah integration tests are usually what I focus on most. For any case where testing whole systems today is hard, there are some fundamental challenges (e.g. end to end web UI test). I don't quite see how tooling will get rid of the need for tests.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  > So far I haven't found a good reason not to write tests...I don't quite see how tooling will get rid of the need for tests. I write device control software. It’s very difficult to have true automated testing of things like drivers. You can write unit tests for subsystems, like packet parsers, but integration testing generally requires good ol’ “monkey testing.” “Just write a mock!” Is what I hear all the time. Mocking a device is a massive project; potentially larger than designing the device, itself. Remember that the mock needs to be of unimpeachable quality, and also needs to do things like simulate adverse signal environments. DX for that kind of thing can be awful. As far as basic DX goes... Most developer tools are wrappers for command-line OS tools, and it shows. They can also be quite buggy, and we accept this bugginess. I use Xcode, which is quite “crashy.” I am constantly fixing issues by deleting the build folder. Back to testing... I prefer test harnesses over unit tests. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs-unit-498766c499aa https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs-unit-4...
  - quelltext 7y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to imply everything can be well tested, but where it can tests make sense even if they don't cover everything (vs. the attitude that testing is pointless unless you can cover all relevant code paths). Also, I don't think there's as much value in unit tests than other more holistic types of testing, i.e. functional/integration tests. TBH I read your linked article and still don't quite know what a test harness (in that context) is and in what way it's better and differs exactly in the concrete. Guess I'll have to read up on it elsewhere.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      I appreciate the feedback. I suppose that I should probably add a paragraph that describes what a test harness is. Something along these lines: "A test harness is a [usually] simple standalone application that uses the CuT, and presents a user interface. Since it is for testing, it may expose internal metrics and allow the user to access parts of the code that are usually hidden."
  - pjc50 7y ago
    This is very true. Not coincidentally, driver flakiness is an ongoing problem, as is the tendency of OEMs to bundle the actual drivers with a huge ball of mud (NVIDIA, HP are major offenders). Perhaps some sort of formal spec for the hardware communication API would help, and would also help on the ASIC side, but I can't see how such a thing would be built and popularised. It's a very small balkanised world of driver writing.
  - henrikeh 7y ago
    Just a question. Do you imply that the mock of a device should simulate/emulate the entire behavior of the device? Because you definitely don't need to do that and it would, of course, be a vast and hard-to-justify endeavor. You only need to _mock_ the object, that is emulate behavior on a small scale.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      Yes and no. It depends on what we are testing. It can actually be worse than useless to rely on the "perfect world" of unit testing. I have had a nasty shock, when switching from mocked behavior to real-world behavior. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/concrete-galoshes-a5798a55af2a https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/concrete-galoshes-a5798a5...
pjc50 7y ago
> How do I run this thing? Where does the code start? Is my system configured correctly? This is why there are occasional spasms of "back to basics" or plaintive remembering of the BBC Micro. You power it on, it beeps, and within a second you're in the interactive development environment. Typing code runs it directly. Typing code with a line number adds it to the program. No configuration, containers, downloads, updates, dependencies or uninformed choices to make. > Why do we treat this as a moral failing instead of a usability issue? Yes. This applies in so many places. Learn from "Poka-yoke". The system should make it easier to do safe things and harder to do unsafe things. > Tests are a usability dead end Depends what you mean by "tests". A strong type system does away with certain categories of test (and conversely a lot of the heavy unit testing usage comes from communities with weakly typechecked languages). But both types and tests are capturing a human-level requirement of "if X then Y", a constraining of the problem space. This is why many successful code archaeology maintenance projects start by building a test suite to capture the current functionality of the program. An executable requirements document.
kurnikas 7y ago
> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that we should make a developer tool with the same level of "immediate familliarity" that we try to build into a website where customers will bounce easily, for an audience who is willing to spend time learning a tool if it provides value to them.
- Gehinnn 7y ago
  I think even complex products should have a linear progression from newcomers, curiously exploring the product for the first time, to experts, who want to do certain tasks as fast as possible. It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi. Also, the author emphasizes that just dumbening a product is not the solution.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    > It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi. I did. I learnt vi when I was told go fix this file on that computer, you have ssh, x forwarding won't work because you have 3 hops (embedded devices that won't allow forwarding of any kind), there is only vi on the box. So I figured out how to use vi. It is not rocket science, there is not that much to learn, vi muscle memory takes time but also not even that long I think.
    - Gehinnn 7y ago
      Did you read about vi before? How do you know all the shortcuts?
      - ailideex 7y ago
        I googled it. I did not know vi before that, and now I use vim as my main editor for code.
Gehinnn 7y ago
I think that improving DX might be the most important thing of the future software industry. If a single developer devotes his live to a better DX, hundred of thousands of developers might be significantly more productive. I really like to explore new DX approaches (just recently, I published an extension for VS Code enabling visual debugging [1]). But I find it hard to make a living out of it, as so many companies find it granted that everything is free. They would rather hire another developer than paying for licenses that might effectively increase the effiencency of the developers they already have. [1] https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer/blob/master/extension/README.md https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer/blob/maste...
- yoshyosh 7y ago
  Just a little bit of feedback, while the visuals are quite nice I think this page could be helpful if treated like a landing page, what's the problem/why is this helpful compared to what I currently/normally do. I might not be the target audience though, since I don't understand what it does/why it helps quite quickly through scanning
- werg 7y ago
  What a cool extension! I'll give it a whirl! On impact: I've been running the numbers for a tool I'm working on and the projected savings for the industry look insane! Just by shaving off 10 minutes here or there you can contribute a lot.
hinkley 7y ago
I told my UX buddy half a dozen years ago that I was optimistic that there seemed to be a glut of UX people coming because we were going to steal a bunch of them to look at DevEx issues. I spent some time nerding out over woodworking hand tools a few years back and it pretty well cemented for me something that I’ve suspected for most of my career: people down in the muck have very limited vision. That your output is only better than your input by degrees. I’m not sure there would be much fine woodworking at all if the best woodworking tools were only as good as the best software tools. There is no Lee Valley of developer tools. You can’t make me stop using JetBrains (individual licenses were their best idea every), but it still doesn’t rate above a Woodriver, and if I’m honest some of their stuff is Stanley level, and not even the antique stuff. And their stuff is better than just about any other tool I use all day. I suspect Harbor Freight could make better software than Atlassian, and I don’t even mean that as a metaphor. I think I could take harbor freight employees and get better requirements out of them because they wouldn’t be up to their ears in cognitive dissonance.
- werg 7y ago
  Atlassian truly is the Harbor Freight of developer tools! I'm a bit hopeful that DX might finally start getting the love it deserves. -- For better or worse, Microsoft seems to understand the potential that lies in building better tools and seducing programmers to join their fold.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Disclosure: I used to work for a competitor. Some of my coworkers were afraid of Atlassian and it rubbed off on me. Later when I used their stuff and could be (more) objective, I was sort of confused by that previous experience. They're... okay. If that was intimidating maybe that said more about us than about them. I am probably experiencing a little backlash when I react to their shenanigans because they are not 'all that'. At all. Trac (no affiliation) is ugly but like your favorite hammer. It is probably the least painful project management suite I ever recall using. And I used it before they decoupled their parsing and rendering logic, so writing plugins that involved anchor tags was a warren of duplicated code. My last musing-while-brushing-my-teeth was to wonder what would happen if someone drop-kicked the Trac CSS files and wrote a new one from scratch using modern conventions.
grahamlee 7y ago
I don't think that DX is harder than UX because developers somehow have a more complex task than everybody else, and that there's therefore a richer "experience" to navigate than in other domains. I think it's because developers tend to be developers, so are more aware of and willing to accept the nuances and complexities that go into development. In other words, we've got a more detailed understanding of the developer experience because, as developers, it's what we experience. We accept the heritage of developer tools - the keyboard-driven interface that displays to a teletype emulator, the edit-compile-debug workflow - and build tools that improve the processes that have built around those legacies. This is why when something comes out of left field like Adele Goldberg and colleagues describing Smalltalk, we find it easy to adopt the approach to code organisation on offer and hard to adopt the image model, browser-based workflow, debugger-driven iteration, and other changes. Meanwhile, when we go out into other domains, we use a little bit of understanding of that domain, a lot of reasoning by analogy, and an intention to "disrupt" what already exists and "eat the world", and create something that works very well for the spherical user in a vacuum without all of the detailed understanding that comes from having grown up in the system and learnt from people who grew up in it even longer ago.
- wruza 7y ago
  Isn’t that a circular feedback that leads nowhere? Developer like to be developers but being one doesn’t mean to make solutions and profits. Like a bureaucrat likes bureaucracy and then everything is bureaucracy under the hood sprayed with marketing sauce. Best stories of best products sound “we hacked, broke, short-cutted, ignored, made a fucking lots of money, and then rewrote fundamental instruments to match our needs”. Isn’t there a controversy with a nice cool environment that developers praise?
- scroot 7y ago
  A healthy exercise, I think, is to replace "developer" with "scribe" whenever we have these conversations. It becomes clear that in large part it is the overall culture that is missing the point -- which should be a kind of mass literacy. Smalltalk is a different universe indeed, but its goals were also completely different from today's. Its creators assumed that "using" a personal computer would be, in part, "programming" it, and they sought to define what that interaction would be like.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I wish we could scrap the term experience again and just go back to interface. I connect experience with hyped concepts that are already forgotten today. That said, tendency to decrease choice seems to only serve certain users. Other feel just as restricted as developers, which are also users, so the dichotomy should be questioned.
z3t4 7y ago
The problem with developer tools is not technical, it's all about the selling part. If you make a new superior developer experience, you think developers will instantly see the benefits? haha! You first have to teach them, then after a few month if you are lucky you will get a "aha, now I understand". So first you need to manually educate each user until you have a critical mass. Then you need to market and hype your product. So that developers will tell each other how cool your new technology is. Continue with that a few years until there are code in production that use your product, before even thinking about a business plan. So there are few options, either you have enough money so that you do not have to "work" again, and can spend your time making new tools. Or your current employer lets you work on the tools. For a startup working on developer experience (language and tools) I would suggest a 10 year runway (funding) and that 1/3 of the budget goes into educating users and 1/3 goes to marketing. Any software business that is profitable, already have code in production, and that code need to be maintained. So instead of creating a new better experience, you can make the current experience better. eg. putting rockets on a horse, rather then creating an automobile.
- clarry 7y ago
  > The problem with developer tools is not technical, it's all about the selling part. If you make a new superior developer experience... Selling is going to be hard but I feel like you underestimate the technical difficulty of replacing a large stack of complex tools that have decades of work and experience behind them. And that, in part, makes selling harder: I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who claims they've invented a superior way to work. It's more likely that they've invented a small improvement (and an arguable one at that) for a particular scenario, but developers would still have to rely on their old tools for a lot of stuff. In worst case, they're trying to sell a tool that doesn't extend but replaces the old tools without providing support for scenarios and workflows that existed with the old tools; step forward on one front, three steps back on others. Of course, small improvements to existing workflows can usually be implemented by developers for themselves (and others while at it) once they learn about the idea, and that's how the developer experience has slowly improved over the years. For example, you can make a new fancy code editor (let's call it sublime) and hype it on features like multiple cursors. And I can have that in emacs at the cost of about 3000 sloc of elisp, and I don't have to give up any of the old things that I've grown to rely on.
wruza 7y ago
This. Despite latest <libname>-cli trend, anything slightly more sophisticated requires to create a structure, then create structures in nodes, then a configuration structure, structures all the way down. One could object that everything we do is structures, but there is no ui to these, only a text file and a formal documentation (if you’re lucky). Text files and their disconnection from a documentation is a root of all our evils. Not only they diverge with new versions of everything, but there is a constant attention switch (stacks of them!) and unnecessary diving into things that may or may not be important to the development process. There is no way to omit these checks when you learn or return to an idle project. I have a long time idea that every config, format, api call, and so on should come with inseparable documentation ui (+rationale, examples of use, best practice links, pre-configuration, diff/merge views, etc). Yes texts are simple and easy to read, but we also write. You can make text from a structure in O(1), but you cannot make a knowledge from an empty file in O(sensible), for any sensible sensible. Not arguing on salaries though. Even pretenders who have no clue can take a great cut off this nonsense.
- chii 7y ago
  > but you cannot make a knowledge from an empty file in O(sensible), for any sensible sensible. why isn't a schema and then auto-complete a sensible way to do config? Both xml and json has a schema file that you can create generic text editors with auto-complete for.
- Edmond 7y ago
  Try this: https://codesolvent.com/config-node/ https://codesolvent.com/config-node/
koffiezet 7y ago
A site about UX that uses a fixed-sized font with horrible spacing? This I about the worst website UX I can imagine... Long live reader view...
- werg 7y ago
  Haha, I agree. Sorry.
alxlaz 7y ago
Far from me to defend every UI of every development tool out there but I think statements like these, and their illustration, could benefit from some explanation for those of us who are not designers: > We coders still put up with horrid UX/UI when programming. which is illustrated with a screenshot from Visual Studio... .NET 2002, I think, judging by the application icon? Setting aside the relevance of a 20-year old screenshot, what exactly is wrong with that interface and what makes it horrid? I mean it definitely had its quirks but: - It's spectacularly compact, certainly way better than anything I've seen in the last five years. We could display an UI builder and the associated code on single 1024x768 screen and work on it semi-comfortably. "Beautiful" UI/UX, as understood today, is so cluttered by whitespace (oh, the irony...) that it's barely usable on a 1920x1080 screen. A similarly compact interface on today's huge screens would be a dramatic productivity improvement that, twenty years ago, we could only dream of. - You could easily access any function through textual menus -- no hamburger menus, no obscure, monochrome icons. Granted, the toolbar icons were a pain, but the way I remember it, most of us either disabled it straight away, or just populated with a couple of items that were of real value and which we knew well. - The colors have great contrast, the whole thing is readable even on a very poor-quality screenshot that seems to have been actually downsized. - UI items have enough relief and/or distinction that it's clear what you can interact with and what you can't (maybe the item palette from the diagram editor is an exception, or at least the screenshot makes it look like one, but virtually every program in that era made it look like that so it wasn't so hard to use). So what's wrong with that thing?
- meddlepal 7y ago
  I think of most UX designers as children: they want everything to conform to the latest trends and are always in search of the new shiny thing to play with.
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    Having worked with designers since back when Visual Studio .NET 2002 was pretty fresh, I think this is a very over-simplified assessment and I don't think it's fair. There are definitely cargo cult designers, just like there are cargo cult programmers out there. But I don't think that's true of most designers, just like I don't think it's true of most programmers. Chasing the latest trend isn't always a decision you make by yourself, and isn't always a decision you can oppose on your own terms. Virtually every designer who was in the industry ten years ago or so can come up with a good design that's 100% against the latest trends -- contrasting, non-flat, compact, whatever. But it'll get shot down within minutes in any product design meeting. Sometimes by people who have zero design experience, so they can't judge a design except by how well it conforms to the latest trends. Sometimes by people who lack the "political" capital to argue for an original design with their bosses, too. There are a lot of factors here, and most of the time the people who do the designs have the least amount of influence.
edent 7y ago
I taught Scratch to kids. They love the visual element of the language. It's so hard to make basic mistakes - partly because you can't put an Int where the code expects a Bool. The interface shows you all the components you can use, and what data they require. I then move on to teaching Python, and watch kids get frustrated. Languages like DRAKON should be the future of our profession - not typing 80 char lines into a terminal.
- werg 7y ago
  The question is: how do you grow up from there, in terms of expressive power? I.e. is it possible to find more middle ground between Python and Scratch?
_pmf_ 7y ago
You think it is harder because you are not familiar with the depth of non-developer workflows. Developer hubris.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Indeed! Compare to CAD or Photoshop for deep, complex workflows.
  - werg 7y ago
    I was wondering about this -- but how would CAD or Photoshop be more than a Context Free language? In particular, consider Feature Structure Grammars which are equivalent to CFGs and can really capture a lot of inter-context agreement without needing to be Context-Sensitive. I certainly may be wrong though, all sorts of stuff ends up being Turing-Complete.
    - lallysingh 7y ago
      They can be, and afaict, are, typed context sensitive languages.
jussij 7y ago
> There has been tremendous growth in the field of UX/UI. Without a doubt, today's applications are much more user-friendly than those from 30 years ago. Back then, users were given features, interface be damned. That 30 year time frame takes us back to 1990 and back then the user experience was limited by the technology of the time. However a decade later we had Windows XP. I would say that 20 year old Windows XP might in fact be a much better user experience than the modern UX/UI we have to live with today. The much less powered CPUs of that time felt much more responsive than the modern day CPUs/OS that we have to today.
Glench 7y ago
To make some of the ideas in this article a little more concrete, here are some research demos I’ve made: * Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/ http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/ * FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/ http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/ * Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q * REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk * Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works: http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/ http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/
- werg 7y ago
  This looks fantastic! What a treasure trove.
- ripley12 7y ago
  I really love your Flowsheets prototype, I hope someone pursues that direction in the future. “Spreadsheets with more tools from traditional programming” seems like such a powerful idea.
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  These are very interesting! The Legible Mathematics one also made me think of APL, which is very hard to read - but specifically it's hard to read for the same reason that traditional linear programming math is hard to read, the lack of visual grouping[1]. I wonder how it might be possible to redesign something like APL to take advantage of rich text and more complex formatting? [1] The weird symbols might seem like an initial barrier to this, but they're only hard to read if you're unfamiliar with APL; they're actually very easy to learn and remember, as there's not that many of them and they all do very basic operations. However, APL loves operator overloading and likes to give operators different functions based on whether they're used in prefix ("monadic") or infix ("dyadic") forms, and there are also higher-order operators that consume the operators immediately adjacent to them and then operate on the expressions after that; all of this makes the nominally right-to-left parsing require a fair bit of mental effort instead of being able to rely on immediate visual recognition.
kaens 7y ago
> When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty? I mean, fairly often throughout the years. Particularly in communities for lisps, ruby, perl, python, C. More common 5-10 years back perhaps. Relevance is a fairly common topic across the board. Discoverability is maybe the least common topic here, and one that's a pretty interesting one for PL design imo. I haven't seen too many blog posts about these things lately, but they're frequent enough discussions in personal circles and in mailing lists/chats that this question seemed odd to me.
regularfry 7y ago
I disagree with the premise. The problems the author identifies largely have already been solved. The solutions just haven't become universal, generally for reasons completely unrelated to the actual problem, and more to do with PR.
- werg 7y ago
  Interesting, what example would come to mind?
  - regularfry 7y ago
    This line seems to sum up the core of the complaint: > When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty? The ruby-lang mailing list used to be full of these sorts of discussions. If the author hasn't come across these factors being spoken about, that says more about the social value systems around the dominant ecosystems than about any fundamental complexity. Ruby lost the PR war to JS. > Coding tools were around before UI/UX was a thing... ...yeah, no. At least, not in a way that makes the author's point. COBOL was an attempt to improve the developer experience. UI research predates JS by decades. This paragraph approaches the complexities in JS as though they were a natural consequence of when JS was written, as though it wasn't possible to have done any better so we've all got to live with the best that was available then, rather than what we know now. That's just not true. JS even when invented wasn't a good language. Brendan Eich wanted to write a Scheme, and we'd all have been better off if he'd got away with it, and also if he'd had more than 10 days to implement it. The things we complain about in JS were commonly known to be bad at the time, they just didn't end up fixed for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology.
karatestomp 7y ago
The other day I was using MusicBrainz Picard and it occurred to me just how absolutely pleasant it is. It uses standard desktop widgets, is fast, has some nice attention to detail and consistently accurately relates the state of things, is powerful, and stays out of your way. It—and this is #1-with-a-bullet more important than every other UX concern—behaves consistently. I don’t think it would survive a pass from most “UX” folks in such a nice state. It 1000% wouldn’t survive a designer or hybrid designer/UX person (it wouldn’t look pretty in screenshots on their portfolio). The main problems in software tools are lack of consistent behavior, lies, and tons of ways to use a bunch of tools that all do basically the same thing (and you’ll probably have to know more than one). The hardest part’s not using them, exactly, it’s knowing all the different, stupid reasons they break. It’s a general quality issue more than a broader UX thing, I think. That extends to libraries. And I don’t also mean tools and libs from big names—I mostly mean them.
azhenley 7y ago
"DX" is indeed important. Myself and a number of other academics have been researching the topic for years. See here for examples of publications in the area: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/publications.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/publications.html Also relevant, I wrote a blog post for students to get started in human factors in software engineering: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html
- werg 7y ago
  Thanks for posting this! So happy to see some real academic interest in these topics!
yoshyosh 7y ago
I think developers are missing the testing practices UX designers have grown accustomed to: 1. Usability tests where developers literally sit down and watch someone install and use your library from scratch (I find a lot of developers do not like to do this). Things like, seeing where they have to look up documentation (and how they do it), what bugs they hit, and how often they make common mistakes. I think a lot of this could be logged e.g. A developer signs up, you have their email + API key, you can connect the dots between what doc pages they view, how often, and what errors they commonly run into. 2. Doing whatever it takes to minimize the time to aha moment. This is absolutely critical for any product design effort, but not many companies measure this if any at all when it comes to DX. I think Twilio and maybe Stripe are the only ones that may have had this as a key onboarding KPI. Ultimately I think a majority of developers that are capable of implementing these things are quite technical and used to the general state of DX so they don't view bad DX as much of an issue unless its really terrible. Lastly, I really wish error messages would just be super informative. For example getting something like this "undefined method `my_method_name' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)" still feels a bit cryptic to someone newer to programming, if you can also tell me the human readable variable that I used that caused this issue, the one that was nil, and the exact line (the stack trace purely by itself can be confusing) that little touch would go a long way. For example compare that error message to something highlighted in a different color that says "The variable you used called "contact" on line 87 was found to be nil, this is likely causing this issue". This way when you run into the error and are scanning the stack trace, the computer is telling you as quickly as possible what may be wrong, again for a novice since the way the original error is written for someone more experienced is likely succinct enough.
- werg 7y ago
  I couldn't agree more! Why doesn't every error message have a link to a specific page with discussions, instructions, etc. Or maybe even a button you can click where the machine tries a best guess at an automatic fix?
dusted 7y ago
I can't be the only one who prefers the way applications looked 30 years ago? When they dumped whatever they had to offer right there for you to explore and pick from. These days everything is hidden below a million layers, trying so hard "not to be in your way" that you need a deep love of pixel-hunt-point-and-click adventures to get anything done.. Let's take an example: Specifying DNS servers in Windows. 95: 1. Rightclick "Network" on desktop -> Properties 2. Doubleclick on the TCP/IP protocol for the NIC. 3. Type new DNS server. 4. Press OK. 10: 1 Press start 2 Search for control panel 3 Open Network and Internet settings 4 Select Change Adapter Settings. 5 Rightclick NIC and select Properties 6 Select TCP/IP and then Properties. 7 Type new Server 8 Press OK Sure, some may think that Windows 10 looks better than Windows 3.11 or 95, but I don't and I can't believe everyone does.
boomlinde 7y ago
I wouldn't say it's fundamentally harder. It's fundamentally the same thing, because developers are users, and software development isn't the only domain where users have discerning tastes and needs that they want catered to. It's not the only domain where users will happily accept a steep learning curve for the years of use that will pay off that initial investment, or where shoving detailed information under the carpet can be a negative thing. I think it would be arrogant to think of software development as exceptional in this sense, but it's certainly reflected in a lot of software designs. The reality IMO is that if you aren't working off a set of insights and observations like the one listed in the article—regardless of your users' domain—you aren't making enough of an effort to design for your users.

114 points by werg 7y ago

> Tests are a usability dead end -- I know this may be contentious, but I believe test suites are another realm of excessive moralizing en lieu of better tools and better processes. Too often they function as a security blanket that simply encases the parts of the code that are unit testable, while leaving the vulnerable, untestable bits fluttering in the wind. Approaches such as generative testing seem more promising. I'm not quite sure what the author is arguing for here in particular. Anything that makes writing tests a bit easier, e.g. suggestions for additional test cases, would be cool, but ultimately tests are about writing down your assumptions/expectations about the code. No, they are not formal proofs and sometimes they are not perfect but they still provide a lot of value. So far I haven't found a good reason not to write tests (since I outgrew my newcomer attitude) and yeah integration tests are usually what I focus on most. For any case where testing whole systems today is hard, there are some fundamental challenges (e.g. end to end web UI test). I don't quite see how tooling will get rid of the need for tests.

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
> So far I haven't found a good reason not to write tests...I don't quite see how tooling will get rid of the need for tests. I write device control software. It’s very difficult to have true automated testing of things like drivers. You can write unit tests for subsystems, like packet parsers, but integration testing generally requires good ol’ “monkey testing.” “Just write a mock!” Is what I hear all the time. Mocking a device is a massive project; potentially larger than designing the device, itself. Remember that the mock needs to be of unimpeachable quality, and also needs to do things like simulate adverse signal environments. DX for that kind of thing can be awful. As far as basic DX goes... Most developer tools are wrappers for command-line OS tools, and it shows. They can also be quite buggy, and we accept this bugginess. I use Xcode, which is quite “crashy.” I am constantly fixing issues by deleting the build folder. Back to testing... I prefer test harnesses over unit tests. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs-unit-498766c499aa https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/testing-harness-vs-unit-4...
- quelltext 7y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to imply everything can be well tested, but where it can tests make sense even if they don't cover everything (vs. the attitude that testing is pointless unless you can cover all relevant code paths). Also, I don't think there's as much value in unit tests than other more holistic types of testing, i.e. functional/integration tests. TBH I read your linked article and still don't quite know what a test harness (in that context) is and in what way it's better and differs exactly in the concrete. Guess I'll have to read up on it elsewhere.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    I appreciate the feedback. I suppose that I should probably add a paragraph that describes what a test harness is. Something along these lines: "A test harness is a [usually] simple standalone application that uses the CuT, and presents a user interface. Since it is for testing, it may expose internal metrics and allow the user to access parts of the code that are usually hidden."
- pjc50 7y ago
  This is very true. Not coincidentally, driver flakiness is an ongoing problem, as is the tendency of OEMs to bundle the actual drivers with a huge ball of mud (NVIDIA, HP are major offenders). Perhaps some sort of formal spec for the hardware communication API would help, and would also help on the ASIC side, but I can't see how such a thing would be built and popularised. It's a very small balkanised world of driver writing.
- henrikeh 7y ago
  Just a question. Do you imply that the mock of a device should simulate/emulate the entire behavior of the device? Because you definitely don't need to do that and it would, of course, be a vast and hard-to-justify endeavor. You only need to _mock_ the object, that is emulate behavior on a small scale.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    Yes and no. It depends on what we are testing. It can actually be worse than useless to rely on the "perfect world" of unit testing. I have had a nasty shock, when switching from mocked behavior to real-world behavior. I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/concrete-galoshes-a5798a55af2a https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/concrete-galoshes-a5798a5...

pjc50 7y ago

> How do I run this thing? Where does the code start? Is my system configured correctly? This is why there are occasional spasms of "back to basics" or plaintive remembering of the BBC Micro. You power it on, it beeps, and within a second you're in the interactive development environment. Typing code runs it directly. Typing code with a line number adds it to the program. No configuration, containers, downloads, updates, dependencies or uninformed choices to make. > Why do we treat this as a moral failing instead of a usability issue? Yes. This applies in so many places. Learn from "Poka-yoke". The system should make it easier to do safe things and harder to do unsafe things. > Tests are a usability dead end Depends what you mean by "tests". A strong type system does away with certain categories of test (and conversely a lot of the heavy unit testing usage comes from communities with weakly typechecked languages). But both types and tests are capturing a human-level requirement of "if X then Y", a constraining of the problem space. This is why many successful code archaeology maintenance projects start by building a test suite to capture the current functionality of the program. An executable requirements document.

kurnikas 7y ago

> We've simply gotten used to them: Dealing with the idiosyncracies of bash, vi, or the JavaScript type system This stuck out to me, there seems to be a trend in UX/UI where any move away from the "simplest path" is seen as a huge negative. Could it be the case that we use these tools (especially UI patterns like vi) because after the learning curve the give a huge amount of value? It seems like we are assuming that we should make a developer tool with the same level of "immediate familliarity" that we try to build into a website where customers will bounce easily, for an audience who is willing to spend time learning a tool if it provides value to them.

Gehinnn 7y ago
I think even complex products should have a linear progression from newcomers, curiously exploring the product for the first time, to experts, who want to do certain tasks as fast as possible. It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi. Also, the author emphasizes that just dumbening a product is not the solution.
- ailideex 7y ago
  > It's simply not possible to learn vi by just using vi. I did. I learnt vi when I was told go fix this file on that computer, you have ssh, x forwarding won't work because you have 3 hops (embedded devices that won't allow forwarding of any kind), there is only vi on the box. So I figured out how to use vi. It is not rocket science, there is not that much to learn, vi muscle memory takes time but also not even that long I think.
  - Gehinnn 7y ago
    Did you read about vi before? How do you know all the shortcuts?
    - ailideex 7y ago
      I googled it. I did not know vi before that, and now I use vim as my main editor for code.

Gehinnn 7y ago

I think that improving DX might be the most important thing of the future software industry. If a single developer devotes his live to a better DX, hundred of thousands of developers might be significantly more productive. I really like to explore new DX approaches (just recently, I published an extension for VS Code enabling visual debugging [1]). But I find it hard to make a living out of it, as so many companies find it granted that everything is free. They would rather hire another developer than paying for licenses that might effectively increase the effiencency of the developers they already have. [1] https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer/blob/master/extension/README.md https://github.com/hediet/vscode-debug-visualizer/blob/maste...

yoshyosh 7y ago
Just a little bit of feedback, while the visuals are quite nice I think this page could be helpful if treated like a landing page, what's the problem/why is this helpful compared to what I currently/normally do. I might not be the target audience though, since I don't understand what it does/why it helps quite quickly through scanning
werg 7y ago
What a cool extension! I'll give it a whirl! On impact: I've been running the numbers for a tool I'm working on and the projected savings for the industry look insane! Just by shaving off 10 minutes here or there you can contribute a lot.

hinkley 7y ago

I told my UX buddy half a dozen years ago that I was optimistic that there seemed to be a glut of UX people coming because we were going to steal a bunch of them to look at DevEx issues. I spent some time nerding out over woodworking hand tools a few years back and it pretty well cemented for me something that I’ve suspected for most of my career: people down in the muck have very limited vision. That your output is only better than your input by degrees. I’m not sure there would be much fine woodworking at all if the best woodworking tools were only as good as the best software tools. There is no Lee Valley of developer tools. You can’t make me stop using JetBrains (individual licenses were their best idea every), but it still doesn’t rate above a Woodriver, and if I’m honest some of their stuff is Stanley level, and not even the antique stuff. And their stuff is better than just about any other tool I use all day. I suspect Harbor Freight could make better software than Atlassian, and I don’t even mean that as a metaphor. I think I could take harbor freight employees and get better requirements out of them because they wouldn’t be up to their ears in cognitive dissonance.

werg 7y ago
Atlassian truly is the Harbor Freight of developer tools! I'm a bit hopeful that DX might finally start getting the love it deserves. -- For better or worse, Microsoft seems to understand the potential that lies in building better tools and seducing programmers to join their fold.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Disclosure: I used to work for a competitor. Some of my coworkers were afraid of Atlassian and it rubbed off on me. Later when I used their stuff and could be (more) objective, I was sort of confused by that previous experience. They're... okay. If that was intimidating maybe that said more about us than about them. I am probably experiencing a little backlash when I react to their shenanigans because they are not 'all that'. At all. Trac (no affiliation) is ugly but like your favorite hammer. It is probably the least painful project management suite I ever recall using. And I used it before they decoupled their parsing and rendering logic, so writing plugins that involved anchor tags was a warren of duplicated code. My last musing-while-brushing-my-teeth was to wonder what would happen if someone drop-kicked the Trac CSS files and wrote a new one from scratch using modern conventions.

grahamlee 7y ago

I don't think that DX is harder than UX because developers somehow have a more complex task than everybody else, and that there's therefore a richer "experience" to navigate than in other domains. I think it's because developers tend to be developers, so are more aware of and willing to accept the nuances and complexities that go into development. In other words, we've got a more detailed understanding of the developer experience because, as developers, it's what we experience. We accept the heritage of developer tools - the keyboard-driven interface that displays to a teletype emulator, the edit-compile-debug workflow - and build tools that improve the processes that have built around those legacies. This is why when something comes out of left field like Adele Goldberg and colleagues describing Smalltalk, we find it easy to adopt the approach to code organisation on offer and hard to adopt the image model, browser-based workflow, debugger-driven iteration, and other changes. Meanwhile, when we go out into other domains, we use a little bit of understanding of that domain, a lot of reasoning by analogy, and an intention to "disrupt" what already exists and "eat the world", and create something that works very well for the spherical user in a vacuum without all of the detailed understanding that comes from having grown up in the system and learnt from people who grew up in it even longer ago.

wruza 7y ago
Isn’t that a circular feedback that leads nowhere? Developer like to be developers but being one doesn’t mean to make solutions and profits. Like a bureaucrat likes bureaucracy and then everything is bureaucracy under the hood sprayed with marketing sauce. Best stories of best products sound “we hacked, broke, short-cutted, ignored, made a fucking lots of money, and then rewrote fundamental instruments to match our needs”. Isn’t there a controversy with a nice cool environment that developers praise?
scroot 7y ago
A healthy exercise, I think, is to replace "developer" with "scribe" whenever we have these conversations. It becomes clear that in large part it is the overall culture that is missing the point -- which should be a kind of mass literacy. Smalltalk is a different universe indeed, but its goals were also completely different from today's. Its creators assumed that "using" a personal computer would be, in part, "programming" it, and they sought to define what that interaction would be like.

raxxorrax 7y ago

I wish we could scrap the term experience again and just go back to interface. I connect experience with hyped concepts that are already forgotten today. That said, tendency to decrease choice seems to only serve certain users. Other feel just as restricted as developers, which are also users, so the dichotomy should be questioned.

z3t4 7y ago

The problem with developer tools is not technical, it's all about the selling part. If you make a new superior developer experience, you think developers will instantly see the benefits? haha! You first have to teach them, then after a few month if you are lucky you will get a "aha, now I understand". So first you need to manually educate each user until you have a critical mass. Then you need to market and hype your product. So that developers will tell each other how cool your new technology is. Continue with that a few years until there are code in production that use your product, before even thinking about a business plan. So there are few options, either you have enough money so that you do not have to "work" again, and can spend your time making new tools. Or your current employer lets you work on the tools. For a startup working on developer experience (language and tools) I would suggest a 10 year runway (funding) and that 1/3 of the budget goes into educating users and 1/3 goes to marketing. Any software business that is profitable, already have code in production, and that code need to be maintained. So instead of creating a new better experience, you can make the current experience better. eg. putting rockets on a horse, rather then creating an automobile.

clarry 7y ago
> The problem with developer tools is not technical, it's all about the selling part. If you make a new superior developer experience... Selling is going to be hard but I feel like you underestimate the technical difficulty of replacing a large stack of complex tools that have decades of work and experience behind them. And that, in part, makes selling harder: I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who claims they've invented a superior way to work. It's more likely that they've invented a small improvement (and an arguable one at that) for a particular scenario, but developers would still have to rely on their old tools for a lot of stuff. In worst case, they're trying to sell a tool that doesn't extend but replaces the old tools without providing support for scenarios and workflows that existed with the old tools; step forward on one front, three steps back on others. Of course, small improvements to existing workflows can usually be implemented by developers for themselves (and others while at it) once they learn about the idea, and that's how the developer experience has slowly improved over the years. For example, you can make a new fancy code editor (let's call it sublime) and hype it on features like multiple cursors. And I can have that in emacs at the cost of about 3000 sloc of elisp, and I don't have to give up any of the old things that I've grown to rely on.

wruza 7y ago

This. Despite latest <libname>-cli trend, anything slightly more sophisticated requires to create a structure, then create structures in nodes, then a configuration structure, structures all the way down. One could object that everything we do is structures, but there is no ui to these, only a text file and a formal documentation (if you’re lucky). Text files and their disconnection from a documentation is a root of all our evils. Not only they diverge with new versions of everything, but there is a constant attention switch (stacks of them!) and unnecessary diving into things that may or may not be important to the development process. There is no way to omit these checks when you learn or return to an idle project. I have a long time idea that every config, format, api call, and so on should come with inseparable documentation ui (+rationale, examples of use, best practice links, pre-configuration, diff/merge views, etc). Yes texts are simple and easy to read, but we also write. You can make text from a structure in O(1), but you cannot make a knowledge from an empty file in O(sensible), for any sensible sensible. Not arguing on salaries though. Even pretenders who have no clue can take a great cut off this nonsense.

chii 7y ago
> but you cannot make a knowledge from an empty file in O(sensible), for any sensible sensible. why isn't a schema and then auto-complete a sensible way to do config? Both xml and json has a schema file that you can create generic text editors with auto-complete for.
Edmond 7y ago
Try this: https://codesolvent.com/config-node/ https://codesolvent.com/config-node/

koffiezet 7y ago

A site about UX that uses a fixed-sized font with horrible spacing? This I about the worst website UX I can imagine... Long live reader view...

werg 7y ago
Haha, I agree. Sorry.

alxlaz 7y ago

Far from me to defend every UI of every development tool out there but I think statements like these, and their illustration, could benefit from some explanation for those of us who are not designers: > We coders still put up with horrid UX/UI when programming. which is illustrated with a screenshot from Visual Studio... .NET 2002, I think, judging by the application icon? Setting aside the relevance of a 20-year old screenshot, what exactly is wrong with that interface and what makes it horrid? I mean it definitely had its quirks but: - It's spectacularly compact, certainly way better than anything I've seen in the last five years. We could display an UI builder and the associated code on single 1024x768 screen and work on it semi-comfortably. "Beautiful" UI/UX, as understood today, is so cluttered by whitespace (oh, the irony...) that it's barely usable on a 1920x1080 screen. A similarly compact interface on today's huge screens would be a dramatic productivity improvement that, twenty years ago, we could only dream of. - You could easily access any function through textual menus -- no hamburger menus, no obscure, monochrome icons. Granted, the toolbar icons were a pain, but the way I remember it, most of us either disabled it straight away, or just populated with a couple of items that were of real value and which we knew well. - The colors have great contrast, the whole thing is readable even on a very poor-quality screenshot that seems to have been actually downsized. - UI items have enough relief and/or distinction that it's clear what you can interact with and what you can't (maybe the item palette from the diagram editor is an exception, or at least the screenshot makes it look like one, but virtually every program in that era made it look like that so it wasn't so hard to use). So what's wrong with that thing?

meddlepal 7y ago
I think of most UX designers as children: they want everything to conform to the latest trends and are always in search of the new shiny thing to play with.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  Having worked with designers since back when Visual Studio .NET 2002 was pretty fresh, I think this is a very over-simplified assessment and I don't think it's fair. There are definitely cargo cult designers, just like there are cargo cult programmers out there. But I don't think that's true of most designers, just like I don't think it's true of most programmers. Chasing the latest trend isn't always a decision you make by yourself, and isn't always a decision you can oppose on your own terms. Virtually every designer who was in the industry ten years ago or so can come up with a good design that's 100% against the latest trends -- contrasting, non-flat, compact, whatever. But it'll get shot down within minutes in any product design meeting. Sometimes by people who have zero design experience, so they can't judge a design except by how well it conforms to the latest trends. Sometimes by people who lack the "political" capital to argue for an original design with their bosses, too. There are a lot of factors here, and most of the time the people who do the designs have the least amount of influence.

edent 7y ago

I taught Scratch to kids. They love the visual element of the language. It's so hard to make basic mistakes - partly because you can't put an Int where the code expects a Bool. The interface shows you all the components you can use, and what data they require. I then move on to teaching Python, and watch kids get frustrated. Languages like DRAKON should be the future of our profession - not typing 80 char lines into a terminal.

werg 7y ago
The question is: how do you grow up from there, in terms of expressive power? I.e. is it possible to find more middle ground between Python and Scratch?

_pmf_ 7y ago

You think it is harder because you are not familiar with the depth of non-developer workflows. Developer hubris.

lallysingh 7y ago
Indeed! Compare to CAD or Photoshop for deep, complex workflows.
- werg 7y ago
  I was wondering about this -- but how would CAD or Photoshop be more than a Context Free language? In particular, consider Feature Structure Grammars which are equivalent to CFGs and can really capture a lot of inter-context agreement without needing to be Context-Sensitive. I certainly may be wrong though, all sorts of stuff ends up being Turing-Complete.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    They can be, and afaict, are, typed context sensitive languages.

jussij 7y ago

> There has been tremendous growth in the field of UX/UI. Without a doubt, today's applications are much more user-friendly than those from 30 years ago. Back then, users were given features, interface be damned. That 30 year time frame takes us back to 1990 and back then the user experience was limited by the technology of the time. However a decade later we had Windows XP. I would say that 20 year old Windows XP might in fact be a much better user experience than the modern UX/UI we have to live with today. The much less powered CPUs of that time felt much more responsive than the modern day CPUs/OS that we have to today.

Glench 7y ago

To make some of the ideas in this article a little more concrete, here are some research demos I’ve made: * Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/ http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/ * FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs: http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/ http://glench.github.io/fuzzyset.js/ui/ * Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q * REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk * Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works: http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/ http://glench.com/MarilynMaloney/

werg 7y ago
This looks fantastic! What a treasure trove.
ripley12 7y ago
I really love your Flowsheets prototype, I hope someone pursues that direction in the future. “Spreadsheets with more tools from traditional programming” seems like such a powerful idea.
MrEldritch 7y ago
These are very interesting! The Legible Mathematics one also made me think of APL, which is very hard to read - but specifically it's hard to read for the same reason that traditional linear programming math is hard to read, the lack of visual grouping[1]. I wonder how it might be possible to redesign something like APL to take advantage of rich text and more complex formatting? [1] The weird symbols might seem like an initial barrier to this, but they're only hard to read if you're unfamiliar with APL; they're actually very easy to learn and remember, as there's not that many of them and they all do very basic operations. However, APL loves operator overloading and likes to give operators different functions based on whether they're used in prefix ("monadic") or infix ("dyadic") forms, and there are also higher-order operators that consume the operators immediately adjacent to them and then operate on the expressions after that; all of this makes the nominally right-to-left parsing require a fair bit of mental effort instead of being able to rely on immediate visual recognition.

kaens 7y ago

> When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty? I mean, fairly often throughout the years. Particularly in communities for lisps, ruby, perl, python, C. More common 5-10 years back perhaps. Relevance is a fairly common topic across the board. Discoverability is maybe the least common topic here, and one that's a pretty interesting one for PL design imo. I haven't seen too many blog posts about these things lately, but they're frequent enough discussions in personal circles and in mailing lists/chats that this question seemed odd to me.

regularfry 7y ago

I disagree with the premise. The problems the author identifies largely have already been solved. The solutions just haven't become universal, generally for reasons completely unrelated to the actual problem, and more to do with PR.

werg 7y ago
Interesting, what example would come to mind?
- regularfry 7y ago
  This line seems to sum up the core of the complaint: > When was the last time you heard of a programming language discussed in terms of discoverability, succinctness, relevance, let alone beauty? The ruby-lang mailing list used to be full of these sorts of discussions. If the author hasn't come across these factors being spoken about, that says more about the social value systems around the dominant ecosystems than about any fundamental complexity. Ruby lost the PR war to JS. > Coding tools were around before UI/UX was a thing... ...yeah, no. At least, not in a way that makes the author's point. COBOL was an attempt to improve the developer experience. UI research predates JS by decades. This paragraph approaches the complexities in JS as though they were a natural consequence of when JS was written, as though it wasn't possible to have done any better so we've all got to live with the best that was available then, rather than what we know now. That's just not true. JS even when invented wasn't a good language. Brendan Eich wanted to write a Scheme, and we'd all have been better off if he'd got away with it, and also if he'd had more than 10 days to implement it. The things we complain about in JS were commonly known to be bad at the time, they just didn't end up fixed for reasons entirely unrelated to the technology.

karatestomp 7y ago

The other day I was using MusicBrainz Picard and it occurred to me just how absolutely pleasant it is. It uses standard desktop widgets, is fast, has some nice attention to detail and consistently accurately relates the state of things, is powerful, and stays out of your way. It—and this is #1-with-a-bullet more important than every other UX concern—behaves consistently. I don’t think it would survive a pass from most “UX” folks in such a nice state. It 1000% wouldn’t survive a designer or hybrid designer/UX person (it wouldn’t look pretty in screenshots on their portfolio). The main problems in software tools are lack of consistent behavior, lies, and tons of ways to use a bunch of tools that all do basically the same thing (and you’ll probably have to know more than one). The hardest part’s not using them, exactly, it’s knowing all the different, stupid reasons they break. It’s a general quality issue more than a broader UX thing, I think. That extends to libraries. And I don’t also mean tools and libs from big names—I mostly mean them.

azhenley 7y ago

"DX" is indeed important. Myself and a number of other academics have been researching the topic for years. See here for examples of publications in the area: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/publications.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/publications.html Also relevant, I wrote a blog post for students to get started in human factors in software engineering: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/guidehciseresearch.html

werg 7y ago
Thanks for posting this! So happy to see some real academic interest in these topics!

yoshyosh 7y ago

I think developers are missing the testing practices UX designers have grown accustomed to: 1. Usability tests where developers literally sit down and watch someone install and use your library from scratch (I find a lot of developers do not like to do this). Things like, seeing where they have to look up documentation (and how they do it), what bugs they hit, and how often they make common mistakes. I think a lot of this could be logged e.g. A developer signs up, you have their email + API key, you can connect the dots between what doc pages they view, how often, and what errors they commonly run into. 2. Doing whatever it takes to minimize the time to aha moment. This is absolutely critical for any product design effort, but not many companies measure this if any at all when it comes to DX. I think Twilio and maybe Stripe are the only ones that may have had this as a key onboarding KPI. Ultimately I think a majority of developers that are capable of implementing these things are quite technical and used to the general state of DX so they don't view bad DX as much of an issue unless its really terrible. Lastly, I really wish error messages would just be super informative. For example getting something like this "undefined method `my_method_name' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)" still feels a bit cryptic to someone newer to programming, if you can also tell me the human readable variable that I used that caused this issue, the one that was nil, and the exact line (the stack trace purely by itself can be confusing) that little touch would go a long way. For example compare that error message to something highlighted in a different color that says "The variable you used called "contact" on line 87 was found to be nil, this is likely causing this issue". This way when you run into the error and are scanning the stack trace, the computer is telling you as quickly as possible what may be wrong, again for a novice since the way the original error is written for someone more experienced is likely succinct enough.

werg 7y ago
I couldn't agree more! Why doesn't every error message have a link to a specific page with discussions, instructions, etc. Or maybe even a button you can click where the machine tries a best guess at an automatic fix?

dusted 7y ago

I can't be the only one who prefers the way applications looked 30 years ago? When they dumped whatever they had to offer right there for you to explore and pick from. These days everything is hidden below a million layers, trying so hard "not to be in your way" that you need a deep love of pixel-hunt-point-and-click adventures to get anything done.. Let's take an example: Specifying DNS servers in Windows. 95: 1. Rightclick "Network" on desktop -> Properties 2. Doubleclick on the TCP/IP protocol for the NIC. 3. Type new DNS server. 4. Press OK. 10: 1 Press start 2 Search for control panel 3 Open Network and Internet settings 4 Select Change Adapter Settings. 5 Rightclick NIC and select Properties 6 Select TCP/IP and then Properties. 7 Type new Server 8 Press OK Sure, some may think that Windows 10 looks better than Windows 3.11 or 95, but I don't and I can't believe everyone does.

boomlinde 7y ago

I wouldn't say it's fundamentally harder. It's fundamentally the same thing, because developers are users, and software development isn't the only domain where users have discerning tastes and needs that they want catered to. It's not the only domain where users will happily accept a steep learning curve for the years of use that will pay off that initial investment, or where shoving detailed information under the carpet can be a negative thing. I think it would be arrogant to think of software development as exceptional in this sense, but it's certainly reflected in a lot of software designs. The reality IMO is that if you aren't working off a set of insights and observations like the one listed in the article—regardless of your users' domain—you aren't making enough of an effort to design for your users.