Stop Being an Idiot | Hacker News Reader

Stop Being an Idiot

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79 pointssant0sk141 comments

I agree with the author's point, but I really wish there were some examples. It's one thing to say that you're against stupid, boring interface design. I think we could all agree on that. But I bet we'd have a slightly harder time agreeing on just which interface designs are stupid/boring and which are simple/elegant.

I'll throw out an example: The Drupal admin interface is an example of stupid/boring, while the Wordpress admin interface is an example of simple and elegant.

Anyone agree?

I'd agree. WordPress has gotten where it is by doing two things: making it easy to use, and keeps adding useful features that work, more or less, pretty well.

The quality of the code behind WP is very different discussion, but I'd say you're right.

I can't agree at all about the WordPress admin interface, which I use to run the website of my nonprofit (because that is what was set up by someone else). It's a very annoying interface and one I hope to replace as soon as possible--although I acknowledge I am still shopping for what to replace it with.

Edward Tufte's advice is to visualize your audience (i.e., "users") as "smart but busy".

Stop reinvinting the wheel. Don't be an asshole and replace the browser's scrollbar with one of your own.

Especially when the scrollbar you invent doesn't work in Chrome.

Stop Being an Idiot.

All using the same blog template is definitely not in the same ballpark as overriding default browser behavior with something that doesn't work.

It's not even the same sport..

Edit to respond to your revised comment that replaced its content with the title of your article (wow, way to be accepting of criticism, dude! When you do usability testing and a user finds a bug or complains about something, do you tell them they're an idiot, too?):

Even if it's a bug in Chrome's rendering engine, you have an IE7 specific stylesheet, assumedly to support the bugs in its CSS rendering engine. And considering IE7 usage is 11.7% while Chrome's is 10.8% [1], you've just alienated a fairly large portion of your potential readers.

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp (orderedlist's statistics may be different; being a usability-oriented blog, it probably has a higher portion of Chrome users than the general public)

So you suggested he not be an asshole and it offends you he proposes you cease being an idiot. It's the sort of discourse that promises further Great Insights.

Asshole behavior is markedly different than idiot behavior ;) I fully acquiesce that my comment was, itself, asshole behavior - I wrote it in an emotional state, as a usability/UI design blog that breaks a basic tenant of web usability (don't override basic browser behavior; if you have to, make sure it works everywhere because people expect it to be there - they get upset when things happen that they consider breakage) was a fairly intense mind-breaking experience.

Calling someone an asshole is asshole behavior. Knowingly forcing your users into a broken usability situation is asshole behavior.

I wouldn't think that calling someone out on it would be considered idiot behavior.

The term "idiot" was introduced in the submitted article title, so we know where that problem began.

I find "Don't reinvent the wheel" to be a terrible idiom. Think about the wheel for a moment. Is the wheel on your bike the same as the wheel on your car, or on a train, or an an airplane? Of course they're all different! The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

Yes, it can be worthwhile to borrow successful concepts from other disciplines. But in many cases, the concrete implementation NEEDS to be reinvented in order to apply the abstract concept to a new purpose.

OK. How about "Don't build hexagonal wheels, unless you have a very unusual use case."

> The wheel has been reinvented thousands of times, and we're better off for it!

We're better off only for the reinventions that were actually improvements. Most of the reinventions weren't improvements.

Different is a disadvantage, a cost, that is worthwhile only in specific cases when the difference produces some advantages that more than make up the difference.

I always yell at people who blame themselves for not being able to figure out a technology, whether it be the UI of a program or the physical interface of a device. People tend to assume stupidity on their own part; instead, I tell them to blame the designers. After all, most people would blame the manufacturer if confronted with a car that was hard to use. Interesting how simple interfaces (a wheel and two peddles) are expected in some areas and not in others.

FYI your site doesn't work too good in Safari or Chrome. Very slow scrolling. Something about the background image I suspect. Works fine in Firefox though.

Nobody likes the unfamiliar.

Then why is your blog dim white letters on a black background?

The first thing my reptilian brain thought was that this was some kind of left-brained new-age artistic fluff. But it's not. You have important points to make.

So do your readers (and back button pushers) a favor and practice what you preach. Combine your artistic tendencies with a more familiar, more functional white background and reach more of us. You can do both.

I'm teaching you that different interactions are ok. Unfamiliarity isn't wrong, it's just different. People get used to it, and often times prefer it. Consider my site your education on different contrast ratios. You did, after all, read the post.

I didn't read more than a few lines. White on black gives me a full-blown migraine. Many other people also seem to find it literally painful to read, not merely unfamiliar or jarring.

Consider me your education on different contrast ratios. ;-)

Dark text on a light background (on screen) gives some people migraines too. This scheme is my preference, has always been, therefore it's what I make for my own site. Feel free to use your preference for your own.

He's teaching you that reading white text on a dark background is actually harder to do and strains the eye more. Consider his comment your education on the usability/readability of different contrast ratios (a pretty well-reasoned post on the topic here: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_d... ). And consider my comment your education on how your tone can be annoyingly preachy and smug.

He's talking about web apps and you point out that he's not practicing what he preaches b/c his blog isn't on a white background?

I really wish comments a/b people's personal blog design preferences and the unreadability of said blog post wouldn't get voted up so often. Use Readability and talk a/b more important, less personal tastes/monitor resolution & brightness-related things instead.

a/b? Are you entering your sentences through a twitter client? 'Readability' looks like a handy tool but so is plain English.

There is a difference between unfamiliar and unconventional. Text rendered in a white font, in a language I can recognize is familiar. Text written in Klingon, rendered in dingbats is unfamiliar. In my mind the designer _should_ be unconventional, while remaining familiar. Ever see a condo development? How boring are all the houses, lined up and all the same? I would hate the web to be the same way.

> I would hate the web to be the same way.

Welcome to Netscape Navigator 2 :)

I would hate the web to be the same way.

I would like that. Then I could use the extra gigabyte of RAM that the code to handle these cases uses for something else.

I found the scrollbar to be a poor example of usability in that website. It was hard for me to figure out where I was in the page. Probably with other browsers works differently, but still!

I think the author makes a great point. I pursue this concept in what I call "elegant design". What this means to me is taking as much functionality as possible and putting it into a simple to understand package. There is a huge difference between "intuitive" and "Dumbed down". Want some exapmles? Think Apple products or, online, facebook. Both have a lot of features available, but you aren't overburdened by them. You take what you need and you leave the rest. On top of that, both offer an intuitive GUI that is easy to comprehend. A lot of times this comes down to interconnecting all of the aspects of your system to be accessible where your users need them to be.

I feel this is an area Microsoft has struggled with in the past and they are finally catching up with their more recent Office program. A good case study here? Compare Microsoft Outlook to Gmail. Gmail is an elegant solution, Outlook is incomprehensible to the point that there are companies whose business is making it easy to understand (ie. Xobni).

There are many other examples, but I'm interested in what everyone else thinks too...

And this goes double for language designers!

I suppose so (hey, Lisp is The One True Way), but also don't expect your users to be super-human (i.e. garbage collection is best for many of not most problem domains).

Isn't "Dumbing it down" exactly what apple is doing with the iPad, which will almost certainly be a runaway success?

There's a fine line, and I suspect the iPad is on the right side of it.

What you probably want to shoot for is offering features that will leave 90% of your customers 99% satisfied. If you only offer the stuff that the bottom 50% needs, too many people will feel crippled (and that's what a dumbed down product will look like), whereas if you try to please that top 10%, you're going to have to make the UI far too complex. If you please 90% of the target audience, you'll likely end up with a clean interface without pissing off too many people.

I'm all but certain the iPad will fully satisfy 90% of the people that buy it, especially since it's not being positioned as a desktop replacement.

Interesting. Thanks for your thoughts

I agree with Tracy's comment on this post. What specifically are we talking about, other than generalities?

Tufte rehashed

Why would this be flagged/downvoted? Tufte says it better, says more about it, and gives awesome examples.

Probably because your comment lacks information. "Tufte rehashed" tells me nothing. Who is Tufte? Is that a company? A person? A blog? What's their link? Is it just an inside joke I don't get?

Just adding context and links to your comments would make them more useful.

Just in case you actually haven't run across him before -

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Good call. Thanks for the feedback -- will keep that in mind next time I'm tempted to post a one-liner.

Tufte writes meticulously and in detail about specific topics. This post is a bunch of vague generalities on a indeterminate topic. Saying it's a rehash of Tufte is like saying 'I'm feeling ambitious and stabby' is a rehash of Macbeth.

The simplest way that you can measure & tweak usability to your site is to do some basic field testing.

Nielsen has an excellent outline for actually testing and applying basic user interface design here

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/anybody-usability.html

If you have a budget, do it up right.

If you don't, rely on family and friends that fit your demographic.

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