Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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I see something like this happening:

Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail.

And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail.

You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. Come end of year performance review all those highly paid, world class professionals will want to say "I did <x>, <y>, <z> and I deserve a raise". Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?". So, they go to town and re-design it every 6 months. Review comes and well they all can claim they have successfully re-designed, flattened, styles etc, added custom iframe, windows, etc.

This happens with software teams, that is why so much software is re-written, people don't get rewarded for maintaining as much as for creating. So they have to create, and when things get crowded, that means tearing down and then re-create.

> Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?"

Does this incessant desire for change/to be seen to be doing something have a name?

It came up in a political commentary I was reading (about how politicians have to be seen to do something, even if the status quo is better), and I've noticed it in the "curve of website disillusionment" for clients ("Our website is 3 years old ergo a new shiny one will be much better. No, we didn't do any research but it's obvious 'cause it's old")

Joel Spolsky called it 'Fire and Motion'.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html

I've referred to it in conversations as movement vs progress: things that progress you forward toward a goal, or simply movement which could be in circles, backwards, side to side, hand waving etc.

The "get rid of the duck" story comes to mind: http://pud.com/post/59851751577/the-duck-technique

That's my theory too. It seems a lot of software has peaked a few years ago and gone downhill from there:

- MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP

The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.

Interesting point on managers. Yeah I've seen that happen. They are highly paid, engineering team is smart, small and self reliant, So management doesn't have much to do. But that doesn't mean they won't do much. So they throw themselves full on into "process", "communication", "meetings", new agile workflow, reorganizing the team, implement new metrics etc, etc.

A lot of it makes sense from the point of view of end of year reviews. They have to say they did "something" to justify pay raises and bonuses. The sad part is that a lot of times that busy works makes everything worse.

My old workplace!

MS Office is much more usable now than it was in 2000. Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all. They're presented with either two rows of incomprehensible buttons, no logical order, and additional features hidden in the menu bar, compared to having features (reasonably) logically organised behind tabs and grouped into sections and frequently with labels.

Sure, for power users, some things take two or three clicks which required one previously and I understand that's frustrating, but Office's old interface was a complete mess which got by on inertia - and there are still keyboard shortcuts and the customisable hotbar.

I hate this trend. Do people design soldering irons or cars to cater for newbies who didn't spend even 5 minutes trying to learn how it works? Programs like MS Office or Google Maps are tools. By dumbing them down, companies are making them less and less useful. And apparently nobody cares about power users (i.e. people who will actually use your tools) because there's more money in throwaway users.

Google, could you please make Google Maps Pro, with consistent interface and advanced functions available all the time? I'll be a paying customer.

MS office post 2007 is an utter mess for novices and power users alike. I say that as a "power user" who used office apps 8 hours a day pre-ribbon and post-ribbon and has to help people who don't.

The ribbons manage to unify the drawbacks of both the button bar and the menu bar that you mentioned:

- it is composed of "rows of incomprehensible buttons" with no logical order (Where is the most-frequently-sought insert-column button in Excel? Hint: not in the "insert" ribbon tab, that would be too easy. Where is the function to create collapsible rows/columns? In the "Data" tab...)

- it has additional features hidden so well that nobody can find them without googling - Excel's most powerful features like creating named cell styles are now only reachable by clicking through several layers of unintuitive unlabeled mini-buttons tacked on as an afterthought. Yes, I have the muscle memory for remembering half a dozen triple-chord keyboard shortcuts like Alt-D-F-F, but nobody who didn't use Office 2002 will be able to use the new version at anything approaching full speed - that is exactly the opposite of UI discoverability.

The problem is, new users are "new" for a few weeks or months at most. After that, they join the massive groups of people that have to spend years using tools.

New users should be given tutorials, online help or other kinds of training that successfully bring them up to speed. Those kinds of materials are then cleanly separated, and they get out of the way forever once the user is acquainted with the system.

>Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all.

But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I'm hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who've never used an office suite (and can't use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.

In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn't apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.

I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren't familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of forgetting the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you're starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.

> Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP

Uh, Windows 2000 was good on supported hardware but had really poor support for typical consumer PCs. XP was a security nightmare, although XP SP2 did improve things. Hardly a "peak". Newer versions of Windows, with malware protection enabled by default, do a much better job of protecting customers.

The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually became more reliable over the years.

> The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually become more reliable over the years.

Pretty sure that happened in Vista, actually.

My brother actually managed to play through a good portion of Bioshock on Windows Vista with a broken graphics card that faulted every couple minutes. The screen would just flicker black for a fraction of a second as Windows restarted the driver. I was rather impressed.

Ah - thanks, that's the only version of Windows (apart from ME) I've not used.

No doubt that Windows 7 or 10 are much more stable. They could have achieved that without making massive changes to the UI. My point was more about the UI capabilities. the general capabilities visible to a user haven't changed much between Windows 2000 and Windows 10 but they have made massive UI changes at least 4 times requiring the user to re-learn how to do the same thing.

I agree. I think to a certain extent, this curve has always been the case. However, in the old days, you as a customer had an easy choice to keep your particular piece of software at the top part: Just don't use the newer version. Of course now, thanks to the "cloud everywhere" mentality and the agressive push for auto-updates that seems less and less possible.

Another example: Visual Studio

Version 2008 looked good, was really nice to use, easily customizable

From 2010 on it turned into a gray, depressing mess with less features (toolbar buttons almost indistinguishable from each other, no macros, toolbars can't be customized by just dragging things) .

I wish this observation would be confined to software - it's basically the most annoying - defining - aspect of capitalism. It's on one side the engineers and designers trying to do something for their own sake - and on the other side it's the constant encouragement to change something about a product to lure customers into purchasing the new "improved" version of ... the jeans, the car, the shoes - you name it.

There is an accompanying ideology that regards a proliferation of choices as an emerging consequence of greater multiculturalism/individuality. This is a very convenient analysis for market apologists, and more importantly, it puts off a kind of anxiety-filled absolute reckoning of reason and utility in our decision making. If we were more rational we would likely have to confront an essential emptiness...or maybe that's just how it seems to those of us embedded in the prevailing values.

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