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Comment by draw_down | Hacker News Reader

Would it be unkind to suggest that they could look into hiring a designer or two?

"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not."

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Ah yes, I do recall reading that. And now they're proudly launching products with shit like this: https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2017/AWS%20CodeStar...

I get that the graphics aren't the important part, but jeez.

UX is more than graphics. But yes, if AWS had any kind of sense of UX, DigitalOcean wouldn't exist.

> UX is more than graphics

I'd say they are orthogonal. Craigslist's graphics are bad/nonexistent but I like its UX a lot.

The team saw your complaint and supplied an updated graphic, which is now in the post...

What's wrong with that graphic?

I would like to know as well. I agree it's not "sexy" or "wow" but it communicates what it's meant to. This is like any graph my college professors made - they did their job.

Does it? What's with the arrow going through the crowd of people there?

The fonts are all off. Looks as though antialiasing is turned off, and the kerning is all wonky. It's also inconsistent -- look at the spacing between the top of the boxes and the headers.

Depends on how you look at it!

Amazon is doing ok though.

> Amazon is doing ok though.

This is despite their terrible UX, not a result of good UX.

Amazon AWS has to have the worst UX out of all the devops UI's I've ever seen.

CPanel looks nicer than their UI.

CPanel has a terrible UX. TBH, I don't understand the point of the product. I see that it makes it easy to "edit" files without having to SSH but seriously server administration goes away beyond editing files without understanding syntax. I can only take comfort that most of CPanel deploys are in intranets (or so I hope).

Don't forget that installing CPanel also basically hijacks your system. Want to remove CPanel and manage everything properly? Just reimage and build from scratch, otherwise you'll end up going bald from scratching your head, and blind from hatred.

I understand the urge for some people to use a control panel, but CPanel and it's like seem specifically designed for people that want to be webhosts without knowing anything required to be an actual webhost. I think that's reflected in the UI/UX.

> CPanel looks nicer than their UI.

And yet, while reasonably pretty, cPanel sucks. It's actively harmful to effectively administering a webserver.

Maybe how it works matters more than how it looks?

Not only actively harmful, but I honestly believe it's designed to be unnecessarily complex to make nonadmins feel like they're tackling admin challenges. I'll stop short of saying it's a dark pattern, but the case could probably be easily made.

We got so many unsolvable cPanel questions on ServerFault it's mere presence on a server is now a reason to close a question.

And yet, I like the current look. It's clean and functional, and doesn't have the modern/flat/whatever style that makes one lose context easily. Do you prefer something like the S3 redesign? I'm scared they will do that to the whole site.

(Not to mention, most tasks you should script/do from the CLI, once you got the hang of things.)

Can you script 'reading the docs' for me, because that's the part where their design most grates ;) ? Por ejemplo, for tables of methods/functions on objects, the cell sizes are ridiculously huge, so I have to zoom out to like 25% on the page to see more than 2 funcs at a time.

I couldn't agree more.

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