Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This comment reflects a general philosophy of making things as simple as possible in consumer UX for the past 10-20 years. That principle is generally sound and arises from a problem where UI was being created by developers for developers, and as a result was often needlessly complicated and obtuse. Businesses realized that simpler UI geared toward less technical users could expand their markets as well as increase user engagement.

Taking this philosophy to the extreme, however, has led to problems. At its most draconian, the implementation of "simpler is always better" results in features being removed or never implemented, walled gardens being created, and the gradual erosion of the general purpose computer.

No it's probably not the right mass market UX, but I am TOTALLY down for a browser which asks me, "This site wants to access (insert some data about me like my browsing habits, Facebook account ID, or stuff that contributes to a unique browser footprint). Allow or disallow?" and then lets me say NO.

So I don't want to dismiss the idea that simpler is better: for mass market UX designed to reach as many users as possible, this is a key principle. But at the same time I believe we need to start considering the fact that in UX one size might not fit all, even when it may not maximize corporate profits.

Maybe shipping your software with a 'developer mode' toggle is the right way to do it!

Regarding the philosophy, I am of opinion that the "default" UX guidelines are way too far into the extreme already. As you noted, at some point making things easier to use means dumbing them down and cutting out features until only the trivial stuff remains. It makes for an easy sale, which is why businesses are doing it, but it also makes close-to-useless products. The key here is that businesses in general care only about whether the UX is good enough to make you pay them (directly or indirectly, through "user engagement") - they absolutely do not give a damn about whether the product actually helps you in any way.

In my perfect world, developers wouldn't prioritize the amoral business needs so much and would take into account whether or not the product actually does something worthwhile. In our imperfect world, I could settle for the "advanced/developer mode" toggle. But those too are going away, since pro users aren't usually a large part of the group of paying customers...

> Maybe shipping your software with a 'developer mode' toggle is the right way to do it!

Well, Firefox's incognito mode goes in the right direction. It's nice to be able to put the browser in a mode where it does the right thing without prompting (where right = respects the user's privacy by default). It would be even better if incognito mode was the default and instead users had to go out of their way to put their browser into "unsafe mode" in order to expose all these nasty bits to web sites.

Yeah, I think locking down the private browsing/incognito modes is a good compromise. Things like the battery level, WebGL render string etc. (anything that can be used to improve tracking) could return fake data in incognito mode, but real data in normal mode. IMO that's the best compromise between "keep my information private" and "things work usefully by default". I don't know if browsers already do that though?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com