Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

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Author here. I actually agree.

Cheesy (but true) anecdote: As I was writing my article this morning, there were two distractions. First, I tabbed to Facebook where I saw one of my "friends" had posted something political that was both factually incorrect and also very offensive. It reminded me of All the Bad Things, and made me doubt my argument, to the point of almost just scrapping the article. Not just because that FB post was an example of someone being stupid and lazy, but because I had mindlessly interrupted myself and tabbed to Facebook and was about to engage with that post.

My second distraction was my 2-year toddler, who had just woken up and was tugging at my sleeve. And I thought about the world I want him to grow up in and the view I want him to have of it.

I know I can come across as idealistic (hell, I've even gotten that as formal feedback in a performance review—but I've also gotten feedback that I'm cynical, so shrug). But honestly, one of the wonders of us as humans is that we can carry all these different capacities. We can be smart and motivated and social. We can be stupid and lazy and anti-social. All those capacities are worthy of admiration, not contempt. Technology is a great tool, we can decide where we focus it.

I agree completely. If we pander to the lowest common denominator we only serve in lowing that denominator even farther. A “race to the bottom” where the bottom is never ending.

We should instead approach issues in our lives with this “how the world should be” attitude, instead of “how do I make gains out of the world that is”. This means treating people with respect and courtesy even when we believe they are wrong. We work with them to achieve a better result, because lack of knowledge is not equal to stupidity and laziness in all cases. For instance I do not have a medical degree, but appreciate not having doctors talk down to me. Work with me, help fill in the gaps, don’t pander with hand wavy explanations. If it requires too much time in the moment then point me to were I can independently find the information and study on my own.

In other words, live by the “means” not by the “ends”.

Ah, a fellow idealist :)

I really respect this ideal.

All too often I've found people dealing with external users become calloused. We forget that questions with obvious answers (to us) may not be obvious others and that this doesn't imply that others are stupid.

I feel that it's our responsibility to design things to be as obvious to as many people as possible. I also think a default attitude of respecting the users of our products can go a long way to making this happen.

I have a bias toward designing user interfaces with simple composable mechanisms (that are easy to understand and compose), rather than single-purpose actions.

Yes, sometimes the action is really frequent or it's part of the main workflow, and having a shortcut for it is good, but I think one often ends up with a more resilient tool by allowing the user more control so they can recover from mistakes and exceptional cases you didn't think of.

A recent example is an app I'm working on that involves helping the user work through a list (they do a task for each item, then move to the next one, and so on). It's a high priority for the user to get through the whole list efficiently, so the PM wanted us to have only a "next" button because showing other buttons "might be confusing." The thinking was that it would streamline the workflow if the UI is minimal: do the task, click "next", do the task, click "next", etc.

This is the kind of situation where I really want to give the user more control — if we provide "next" and "previous" buttons, they can go back if they made a mistake, or check one of the earlier items and then return to what they were doing, look ahead to see what's coming up and plan for it, etc.

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