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What's nonsensical about it? I feel like you are pretty much agreeing with them. Nobody really wants a complex tax code, either. If politics wasn't a game of co

What's nonsensical about it? I feel like you are pretty much agreeing with them. Nobody really wants a complex tax code, either. If politics wasn't a game of compromise and design by committee, people would find something else to invest their time in other than hacking the tax code. Why do people love Steve Jobs, the mercurial guy he was? It's because he truly cared about user experience and there was that part of him that was obsessed with making things intuitive, which he mostly succeeded at. Nobody is like, I want this shit to be so complex, but they do want to have more and more functionality and want to be empowered. The problem is that people without a software background (and a lot that do without taste/experience/or a real concern for the user) have a hard time imagining how all of these little features add up into a big ball of mud. Rails became wildly popular because DHH understood the importance of good defaults with the ability to dig deeper if the user wanted. I can't get over the fact that I've discovered simple but powerful and obvious things like Bob Nystrom's Pratt parsing, and with a lot of time and care been able to pare more programs than I cant count from 1,000 to 300 lines, and so on. When you get down to it, apis can be as simple as a function and as complicated as a program, and we are bad, not as users, but as programmers at crafting monstrous interfaces at the low levels which echo throughout the codebase, because nobody (maybe business requirements) says ENOUGH like a Jobs. I bet you we've got dozens, hundreds of programs that are 10x, 100x bigger in raw size that they need to be. The user a lot of times doesn't know what they want or need until they see it, so it comes down to us, the designers to empathize and guide the user. You can have fast, cheap, robust, and flexible, and therefore "good", but you have to really care.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Jobs famously ignored what customers asked for though. Customers did not get direct input into what he built. > “Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Many devs don't even get input into the feature, yet alone the ability to ignore customer input when they believe it to be wrong.
- aaron-lebo 6y ago
  Exactly! I worship at the altar of Steve. I've got a shrine in my house. That quote is kind of at the heart of what I wrote. It's why I said: > The user a lot of times doesn't know what they want or need until they see it, so it comes down to us, the designers to empathize and guide the user. Users do not want complexity, they want to be empowered. There is a subtle but important difference there and it's easy to disguise the latter as the former. Is that a quibble over semantics? It might be. But to call the post "nonsense" is just as much of a quibble, because there's real truth there, the success and adoption of the Mac etc is proof of it.
  - abernard1 6y ago
    Apple is pretty unsuccessful at most _software_ that isn't a commodity. They're a hardware and marketing company at their core. All the actual value from software on their platform comes from 3rd party providers, whether that's apps or SaaS. The easiest point to make on this is that Apple has botched all of their SaaS offerings not related to content. And their office applications are borderline unusable for anything aside from education or the content industry. Everyone adopts either Google Suite or Microsoft Office (or a combo) depending on their use case. It's highly arguable that Apple "empowers" people with software given that everybody uses software on top of their platform not provided by Apple.
    - aaron-lebo 6y ago
      You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though. To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating. If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.
- clairity 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago

Jobs famously ignored what customers asked for though. Customers did not get direct input into what he built. > “Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Many devs don't even get input into the feature, yet alone the ability to ignore customer input when they believe it to be wrong.

aaron-lebo 6y ago
Exactly! I worship at the altar of Steve. I've got a shrine in my house. That quote is kind of at the heart of what I wrote. It's why I said: > The user a lot of times doesn't know what they want or need until they see it, so it comes down to us, the designers to empathize and guide the user. Users do not want complexity, they want to be empowered. There is a subtle but important difference there and it's easy to disguise the latter as the former. Is that a quibble over semantics? It might be. But to call the post "nonsense" is just as much of a quibble, because there's real truth there, the success and adoption of the Mac etc is proof of it.
- abernard1 6y ago
  Apple is pretty unsuccessful at most _software_ that isn't a commodity. They're a hardware and marketing company at their core. All the actual value from software on their platform comes from 3rd party providers, whether that's apps or SaaS. The easiest point to make on this is that Apple has botched all of their SaaS offerings not related to content. And their office applications are borderline unusable for anything aside from education or the content industry. Everyone adopts either Google Suite or Microsoft Office (or a combo) depending on their use case. It's highly arguable that Apple "empowers" people with software given that everybody uses software on top of their platform not provided by Apple.
  - aaron-lebo 6y ago
    You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though. To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating. If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.
clairity 6y ago