There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work
37signals.com
37signals.com
What are we going to do next? Pillory literary, film and food critics because their insights are inconvenient to the sensitive feelings of creators in those realms? Come on.
Creating things for other people has a long, rich history of criticism. Some valid, some bullshit, but all essential to the advancement of whatever creative field is under scrutiny. The shovelware artists who RTFHIG pick on might find a genuine direction for improving their work. Meanwhile, we're all talking about what genuinely makes a good interface.
That these guys are provocative makes their insights more valuable, since they get more attention. If you don't have or can't grow a thick skin, you don't belong in a creative field. It's as simple as that.
It is not unreasonable to expect a critic to watch/read/eat/use the film/book/food/UI in question before calling its creator a "fucking hack".
If you're going to be the authority on the taste of cow shit (shit tastes like shit is, of course, a tautology), you better eat some cow shit.
http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/post/2651530636/when-you...
Half of using a visual interface is visual. You can tell a lot about the quality of a GUI-based application by the level of effort that went into making it look correct.
Likewise with UI, a large component of its quality is visual. There is plenty we can gather about an application design just by looking at it. That isn't unfair, it's just plain observation.
I also know a dog perfectly happy to eat his own shit, but that would refuse to eat a Big Mac or other fast-food. It's a 12 year old Rottweiler in perfect health with beautifully looking hair without special care.
So I'm not sure our nose is doing a good job :)
Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
For instance, there's nothing obviously wrong with the interface of the grammar app currently at the top of the blog, but he goes off on it like it shot his dog.
This does not apply to the desktop. On the desktop, you have a plastic puck you need to shove around a surface, which moves a pointer to a designated area. At the most advanced, you're massaging a glass tile, for the same effect. By merit of these facts, the interface must work differently.
It's a lazy design, by someone who couldn't be bothered to learn the correct UI paradigms for a desktop app. It doesn't make them a bad person, it doesn't mean they caused any grievous offense, it simply means they made a bad design. This isn't subjective.
But you seem to be saying that the aesthetics are then not important, which is completely false.
If it looks terrible, it's a bad design. Period. At best, top-notch effort in other areas can drag it up to the same approximate level as pristine-looking-but-utterly-unusable designs, which are still terrible. His position would only be contradictory if he somehow claimed that something was a good design based solely on a screenshot.
Looks terrible by whose standards? If you go by my standards, all Mac stuff has 'bad design' by this rule if only because of the font rendering.
There is/was something special about apps on a Mac versus their equivalent shareware versions on Windows. I think it's fair to assume the Mac App Store will bring with it the same kind of UI trash that is in the iPhone app store.
Nonsense.
Firstly, it's clearly a bit tongue in cheek: "The evil doctor cackled as the thunder struck his lightning rod, giving life and sentience to his unholy creation, spliced together from iphone, ipad and mac ui." And the vulgarity is right in line with other satirical, single purpose sites like http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/ and others I can't think of right now.
Secondly, he's got a "legitimate" complaint. You don't have to agree with his point, but I think a lot of people who are passionate about design (and about design in the context of their Mac) really, really do experience visceral rage at the way Apple flouts the HIG. A site like this is really just capturing that zeitgeist and reflecting how heated people actually feel about the topic.
Anyhow, I really am a big proponent for civility in discourse (that's why I'm always reading HN), but everything has its place.
It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.
It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.
This line from HN guidelines illustrate my point:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I know that showing "attitude" and being cool is all the rage these days, but I still thinking politeness works like a charm.
There's more than one way to show attitude, and politeness is one of them. It's an affectation, no different from RTFHIG's all-lowercase ironic outrage.
You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.
Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.
Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!
I think the bigger point here is that he's complaining about something which may not even be relevant any more. As John Gruber wrote recently, the HIG is dead and Apple is what killed it.
The point of the blog, from what I can tell, is to make people laugh. Let's lighten up.
Honestly, if I had an app in the store and it was featured here (with a handy backlink) I'd probably send him a thank you note for the free advertising and feedback.
I spent so much time on this web interface, 'Shopping my brains out. The result was, for the time, amazing. People, who didn't have to use the site on a day-to-day basis, gushed.
Then I happened across an absolutely brutal, brutal review by some random on the net. At first I was crushed, but soon I realised that, though coarse, they had made good points and I became a better designer because of it.
1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.
2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.
3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.
But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.
And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.
And I tend to agree with the article's argument that a criticism of the design without using the design is pointless nerdrage.
Vulgarity is immature and childish but it's a tonality the Internet has adopted. You can participate or choose not to, sermonize about decency or not, but this insistence--beyond the scope of this article and RTFHIG--that everyone does things on your pace, your schedule, your needs, your preferences, on you... is just so whiny.
Care less, it'll make you happier.
We're talking about the "Everything that differs from the HIG is a fucking abomination" crowd here, right? </sarcasm>
I value civility, pragmatics, and constructivity, and you evidently don't. I think we've reached the point where it's clear we have two fundamentally different opinions and continuing to talk past one another is pointless.
This is why writing software for the mac is harder than the PC. On the PC (or especially Linux) you can just do whatever you like, whatever makes sense to you.
But here's the thing, the reason that the Mac feels so 'intuitive' is because - if you're doing it right - you have to implement six different ways to do anything. That means that the second or third way someone tries to do something will work, so it feels instant. On the PC if you try 20 ways to do something, and it doesn't work, you feel frustrated.
This is a lot more work. It is much easier on the PC because if you can't be arsed supporting say... drag and drop, no one is going to call you on it. On the Mac, you will be pilloried. Saying it's not fair on people because of their hard work is to commit two errors:
(1) to not understand Mac culture, where developers are expected to put in the extra effort
(2) to falsely label something as hard work when they clearly haven't done their homework, and have taken shortcuts to avoid putting in the real hard work
If I ask someone to cut my lawn, and they go over it with a roller in order to flatten it because they can't be arsed and it's just the same... I will not praise them for their ingenuity or hard work.
They haven't finished the task.
Also, there is a third point
(3) to commit the error of thinking that the software is finished and set in stone forever
Software is change. But how will they know to change if no one points out to them the error of their ways?
I don't see any of the rage at http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/ being directed at Apple. Somehow I suspect it would be hard for one who holds the guidelines in such reverence to do so.
I can see where he's coming from, and I can agree that it's a little childish and or obscene, but looking through his examples, there are some really terrible apps in the store, and a lot of them are unnecessary (insofar as they duplicate functionality from existing OS X applications that ship with the os).
The people were free to publish applications anyway. The good ones will rise to the top, the bad ones will fail.
Mac developers for the longest time engaged in 'artisanal software production' (for lack of a better term) with high production values - and while a few did well, many of them were just scraping by, doing it largely out of love for the platform. Then iOS came out, everybody learned Objective-C, money began to flow freely, and like homeowners in a town that's suddenly become touristy, they found themselves economically better off but a little ill-at-ease with the new character of their neighborhood.
Because of this, I'm more inclined to give this guy a bit of slack. The criticism isn't personal - it's just one person's way of mourning a world that no longer exists.
However, while he's criticising UI design flaws, he doesn't actually provide any real ideas/examples on how they should fix this. This might just be because he can't afford the time to do so. Ironically, this is probably also the main reason why all these bad designs exist.
Critique is important, not immature. Despite the fact that the blogger in question comes off as a real asshole, he makes real observations about specific details which wouldn't have been so ugly if the designer had just read the human interface guidelines.
If something sucks, I think it's better for someone to say it sucks anonymously than for nobody to say anything - especially if they're citing details that can be fixed!
Always such a bogus argument. This is what people say when they don't like your opinion but have no argument to counter, so they resort to a rhetorical that implies you have no authority on the issue. But the fact is you do not need to be a creator to criticize a creation legitimately. Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.
I can't speak to the blog in question but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of a blog just for the sake of criticism. How it goes about that criticism and any unnecessary hostility is another issue.
No, that's the issue. Dismissing that invalidates your entire comment.
This sounds suspiciously like saying that you're an "ideas man". The reality is that the barrier to creation is so low in the digital world that if you are criticizing without bothering to learn how to create, I have a hard time telling you apart from the guys who would generously let me do all the work on their idea for 5% of the profit.
If you have opinions on good design, put them into practice; don't just stand on the sidelines cursing at everyone who is trying.
Oh, I'm sorry, trying to engage in a urinal measurement comparison.
There seems to be a thing amongst blogs and indeed writers. They reach a certian level in which they comment on things that affect them, then they comment on things that don't affect them, then they seem to adopt a particular stance that seems controversial to us, but not to them, because thus far we have celebrated them - they have become celebrities. I've seen this with Guber, I've seen this with 37 signals. Perhaps one day this will happen to me (hopefully I'll never become important enough). From that point on the shark is never far away from jumping.
I don't think 37 signals jumped the shark here, but I do think they went too far. They're right, there is no place for just shitting all over other people's work. Shame they forgot their perspective on who was doing the shitting.
And if they're violating Apple's HIG... Seriously, why? That should be the easiest thing to get right. They've outlined it for you.
It's a guideline. Not hard and fast rules that must be followed in all cases.
When you're just copying an iOS interface to the Mac, to use an example from that site, that isn't intelligently deciding that you can do one better than the HIG. That's just pointlessly making the app less intuitive.
this is not a site for criticism, it's failblog for iOS apps; somewhere for people to gather, point and laugh and some poor sod.
But we weren't making games, we were making corporate Intranets. So my advice is, ignore your designer and try using something he's designed. If it's easy and intuitive, he's a good designer. If it's not, put him on the silly little scooter he'll invariably have and push him gently out of the door... Especially if he tries to tell you "you don't understand design, maaan"!
Problem is that it's easy to complain, but hard to provide constructive criticism that helps push things forward. So the "shitters" resort to complaining.
--Mark Twain
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1351-1-who-the-fuck-designs-t...
But now I wonder, do individual blog posts in SvN reflect the overall opinion of 37signals or just the person who wrote the post? Keep in mind that the author of this post and the submitted one we're discussing now are different.
1) don't critisize, create instead 2) Criticism is good, even if is kind of mean.
But I think this a false dichotomy. Words and tone do matter. If you put the object of your criticism in a defensive position, you are unlikely to effect any change at all. This is not some new insight; it's been well understood at the very least since Dale Carnegie. You might acheive the goal of making yourself feel good, but then that certainly isn't worthy of any external respect.
What's the difference between: 1) You app is ugly and it fucking sucks. If you used abc to do xyz, at least I wouldn't be vomitting.
and
2)Nice effort on your app. You might consider using abc to do xyz. It might improve the aesthetics and usability some.
Some might say it says effectively the same thing, but the there is a world of difference in the way the reader reacts to those statements.
2.) I find 37s posting something like this humorous. DHH "shits all over" other people's work all the time.
In summary, lighten up.
It's all in the balance...
There's also a difference between "I'm working on critique to improve my craft" and "I make a blog specifically designed to talk shit on people." You can critique in a few ways, some more abrasive than others.
Contrasting, this blog 37signals is going on about just smacks of the zeitgeist that is modern "criticism":
Nowadays, criticism is rarely substantiated. Instead, folk spout out inflammatory nonsense like "it's a flaming load of dog crap" rather than the much more helpful "a combo box was a bad choice here."
To the critics: make it constructively funny. If you're just going to badmouth me then put up or shut up you non-contributing zero.
Writing software is unquestionably difficult, there is a great deal to learn and most developers have a long adolescence before they start writing really good software. It's also true however that the proliferation of bad software has serious negative externalities on the developer community. It feels absolutely terrible to submit a lovingly-crafted piece of software to an app store only to see it swamped by thoughtless, careless crapware. We would be foolish to ignore the importance of signal-to-noise and the ability of noise to render a communications channel useless. For people who make their living through the app store, this is absolutely a matter of survival.
One thing I really enjoy is when designers take a look at some established interface and try and design a better one and put it out there for comments and ideas. That is constructive criticism in my book.
Also, in many cases, the developer may not know what's wrong with their interface or why it doesn't comply with HIG.
Non-constructive criticism like this (while funny on some level) isn't exactly pushing humanity forward, it's just bitching.
Secondly this post by 37 signals is inspired by RTFH but the headline is "There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work" - and that's a true statement.
This is something that is particularly rife in amongst programmers: they point at each other and say "what? you don't use X and do X? then you are a shit programmer". Life is about getting things done and getting things done necessitates compromise.
You should see how shit the videos I just made for my product are. They're totally shit, but it's the best I could do and I wanted to put something up there. I didn't have the money to pay a professional or the time to learn to do it better - there you go. Whilst I was doing it my own internal monologue kept saying "This looks like the investor pitch video for Prestige Worldwide" (if you don't get that reference, it's from the film "Step Brothers").
If someone posted my videos on a website called "makeyourfuckingvideosgood.tumblr.com" I wouldn't necessarily be offended because it would generate traffic to my site and I know my limitations and have no sense of pride in what I've created, but that doesn't make it right for someone to wantonly create zero value assertions about the quality of others' work (let me say, though, that I would say that humour adds value so Maddox's "I am better than your kids" is exempt).
Now lastly, I find it somewhat ironic that 37signals have posted all this shitting on the person's work who writes RTFH. Perhaps they could have included some constructive criticism on how to improve their writing, or posted alternative examples of satire they enjoy more.
Perhaps the most appropriate response would have been to create readsomefuckingsatire.tumblr.com and put that site on it.
As professionals we should all be continually learning and improving, and we should never disparage someone who has not learned or improved as much as us in a given field because, as the OP points out:
they're making something and that's awesome.
That's the key point I took out of this post, and it's an attitude I'm going to work harder to cultivate in my own life.
Also, is that an Ad Hominem? If the quoted line is incorrect, it should be possible to refute it directly without discussing the speaker's credentials or other sayings.
The speaker's statement hinges on not being the kind of person that uses those other sayings. I suppose he could take the position that he himself is a professional "Jackass Whisperer" and that you should not aspire to become the same, though that puts the listener in the awkward position of being the aforementioned jackass.
If anything, this is a sign of the mainstreaming of apple. No longer is it an exclusive refuge of self styled artists... the barbarians are at the gates. This probably wasn't how things were supposed to turn out.
There are so many negative people out there, and it's a good way to sort the wheat from the chaff. People who have been there themselves tend to only complain if there's a valid reason for doing so.
I would really like it if designers would be more open with their constraints. If the customers understand the constraints, then we can give better feedback about how to make a better product.
Amusing how you're calling for respect of other's work when you've shown to not give a shit yourselves and put an end to the work of a competing service that many seemed to enjoy temporarily -- HuddleChat.
Sure, the app store will expose a bunch of crappy apps from people who don't read the guide - but the market should weed them out in a hurry - those who develop according to what the market expects will succeed over those who write junk.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...
Are they seriously calling them out for not offering more constructive criticism? Um...that's not why that site exists...
On a side note, there is nothing stopping 37signals from creating a webspace dedicated to constructively critiquing Mac App design for the benefit of the community in a more thorough and serious manner. But somehow, like the creators of the site, I doubt 37signals is interested in doing so. :|
Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism -
'Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well; Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not Critics to their judgment too?'
(Did have an art-school teacher who used mean similes to teach, but that was the rare exception. And he had a consistent flair for mean, so it was sort of an odd joy to behold.)
All criticism is not constructive criticism. If someone's trying, they ought to be encouraged to keep trying. That may sound naive and pollyanna, but ask yourself: when was the latest time a hater changed the world for the better?
That's quite different from the style of "oh my god what a bunch of fucking idiots these guys are, ha ha ha". It's a cheap, easy way to get some laughs (see: Ted Dziuba) but I'm not really a fan.
It seems to be popular at the moment to laugh at Justin Beiber online and say how much you hate him. But he's the one making millions out of teenage girls...
HN is pretty good in this respect. Reddit is still decent, though it can definitely lean towards mean. YouTube / app store reviews... forget any chance of respect.
With this in mind, it would be wise to direct critical feedback privately to the creator. I believe feedback delivered directly and privately is more likely to see the desired change.
Praise in public, criticise in private.