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Comment by lostcolony | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")

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> ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!")

That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected, or drawing areas where they shouldn't be, etc.

It's almost like if some people wanted to screw over their customers on purpose. But, I guess, it's more of people who don't know what they're doing selling things to people who don't know how to use them.

It's a bimodal distribution, where a group of people cares deeply about the meaning a graph presents, and another group of people cares deeply about how wowing the graph is when presented.

The intersection of those too groups is too small to make any difference, thus tools will be heavily optimized for one of those.

Best presentation of your point I've seen:

http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...

Casey Neistat on his studio "functionality breeds its own aesthetic". I try to operate with that mental model as much as possible

Also a good experience tells developers you value their time and attention.

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