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Comment by jamn | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I agree with the premise of this article.

You can always make the case that, on the contrary, you may want to go to a hotel to experience something that you haven't experienced before.

If the design is somehow more functional or otherwise makes the room look very beautiful, I'd be more than happy to stay at a place like this.

If necessary, they can always put little notes explaining how some of the main tasks get done.

I agree that the fact that people stay in a hotel for only at most a couple of days puts more constraints on how accustomed people can get to another interface. My own programming "quirks" have developed for a reason. So why does the author then use this example to justify his point about teamwork when the metaphor breaks? Or is he implying that you will only work with a team for such short time that no one will reap any benefits from getting used to ideas that make things faster in the long run?

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> If the design is somehow more functional, ...

The problem is that the design barely functioned at all. The light switch was hard to discover, and used gestures even harder to discover. How different would it be if the "smooth panel" was a backlit LCD touchscreen with a softly-glowing "O -> |" on it? Especially if it were placed where it was visible the instant the door was opened? Alternatively, if it reacted to any motion instead of specific gestures.

I guess the lesson I take from it is that _visual_ design is only a single component of the overall design or interaction design, and focusing only on the visuals without thinking about anything else is not likely to generate a usable solution.

How do you know visuals were the only criteria? A flat panel is a hell of a lot easier to clean than a regular light switch.

I'll say this: I think some people want an interesting experience, regardless of whether it is intuitive or expected or within their comfort zone. But some others just want a nice, safe, clean, comfortable, quiet, home-like, relaxing experience. Those folks do not want surprises. Maybe they are visiting that city for work, they are away from family and the comforts of home and this hotel room may be the closet thing they'll have to a home base temporarily in lieu of that. They do not want excitement or exotica --- not from the hotel room anyway.

For most people, if they want to see something unusual or exotic they could visit a museum, visit a foriegn country and experience local culture, and heck, nowadays, there's lots of exotica just a click away on the web. In other words, I know I risk coming across a "2 girls 1 cup" experience when strolling randomly through the web (I'm looking at you 4chan), but I don't want that sort of surprise out of a hotel room, thank you very much.

Yeah, interesting article, weird conclusion.

The comparison of hotels to website design is pretty apt. A hotel is often just a place to sleep, and not the point of the trip (resorts are an exception), so even if it makes the room prettier, in the end it doesn't justify straying from standard expectations. Same with most websites, people generally aren't interacting with one given site continuously for 8 hours a day, so they don't have time nor inclination to get used to some quirks.

But for web development frameworks? Lots of people do work on web dev for 8 hours a day, so if some nonstandard framework trades a couple days of learning curve that results in productivity gains measured in months, it's totally worth it. E.g., Rails and Django fell out of such things, and they had to start somewhere.

He does mention that things that make you more productive in the long run really should be exempt.

I think the moral is that your quirks may not be welcome for other people, even if you think they are the best way to do things. Unless they add continuous and lasting value it's best to just leave them out when working with other people.

Yeah, but it seems like you rarely want to be radical when it comes to consumer focused web UX design, whereas when it comes to development itself, it could be justified a lot more often, because people are really dealing with tools for hours a day. So bringing up a dev example just seems weird.

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