Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
adilaijaz.medium.com
adilaijaz.medium.com
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to medium ones, who provide quality services and products and have earned the trust of their customers, workers and partners over the years without screwing them over left and right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in regards to environmental issues on top of all of this.
Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche.
Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts people into positions where they have overwhelming levels of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.
I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.
Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.
s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.
Sidewalk isn’t a wifi network that people can just connect to, it’s a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an endpoint in AWS.
Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN immediately traceable to their AWS account.
Amazon makes things cheap and easy but not always in ways agree with.
As a counter Example, Canonical got some critique with their "telemetry in the installer", but if you ask me, they did it in the nicest way possible: They told everyone that they want some data to focus developers' efforts where it counts and they let me inspect the json object I was about to send them, so I trust them and sent it to them with a smile.
If you own an Echo device and used it prior to this feature you had already granted a large degree (relative to this feature) of trust to Amazon anyway. It reminds me a little of people who swear they will never use an Echo device due to concerns about eavesdropping but happily carry an internet microphone equiped smartphone everywhere.
We need laws against this shit
- For a product that was already owned and did not need it until now
- Activated by default, as optional opt-out instead of opt-in
I think it comes down to trust and a track record of commitment to privacy.
Also IMO apple handled the PR for airtags very well.
Find My is also opt-out instead of opt-in
The sheer fact of asking the user to opt-in automatically decreases opt-in rate a lot (like a LOT), even if that tech is super good. It is way easier to dismiss a dialog than to think what it even does.
That wasn't my impression. I saw plenty of criticism on HN.
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
Opt-out is NOT consent, consent requires you do know about it, at least somewhat understand it and then "say yes". Opt-out it's more like forcing with a way to defend yourself.
Can you imagine how silly it would sound to talk about all the "forcing" that MacOS and Windows do that you can change by going in to settings and changing it? Indeed, Apple has famously made tons of decisions for their users about what the reasonable defaults might be, and is praised for this; no one calls it forcing.
I get it. I don't like the defaults either. That doesn't mean you can just slap on whatever word has negative connotations and say that's what is happening.
The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.
Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.
Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.
IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
The vast majority of people already have internet at home and phone plans.
Also, what's in it for Amazon? How does it profit from something like this?
Comcast does the same thing but with standard Wifi with their routers, with some hidden SSIDs you can't opt out of (Xfinity Home etc.)
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
in the age of consumerism, people want to consume MORE but live more minimally. This gives way to more cloud, connected services, more "renting". More.. processing by someone else, somewhere else.
And yes, people spend less time creating and doing and too much time just consuming as their main hobby. They need to spend more time outdoors, doing stuff with their hands, being creative and constructive.
And lastly - my more controversial, generalized but hyper-specific point - is up until COVID and tons of protests turned riots, people were moving into cities at a high rate. They moved into gentrified areas, down played the crime, downplayed the smog, downplayed the endless mismanagement of tax money by old corrupt city governments. They'll go as far as to call people who don't want to move into the city as being racist (for wanting to avoid the crime) or for destroying the environment b/c they don't want to live packed in like sardines in a smog filled urban center.
Well for all those hipsters who think crime isn't such a problem and only something "racists" point out - they all seem to have this incessant need for RING doorbells to keep people stealing the never ending array Amazon and other CongloMo Inc packages from their middle class porches.
They go out in the streets, pumping their fist in the air for BLM, then go home, waiting for their packages from amazon, hopefully protected by Amazon RING doorbells which are expanding the private/public partnership in an ever growing police and surveillance state. They get online and finger wag in one direction and allow their money to vote in another. They're an awful lot like rural republicans voting against their own economic interests, but at least on the Republican side there's a bit of a bait and switch going on. here, it's just direct hypocrisy.
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
The linked text format is usually Rich Text (RTF). This allows a lot of things, but the Desktop Publishing tools only interpret the tags for bold, italics, underline, and a few other things (strikeout, subscript, etc.) All other styling in the linked text, they throw away.
This is precisely because, as you say, those specific styles actually denote meaning. They're something the writer adds. No other styling is used from the linked text, because none of the other styling is the writer's job.
All other styling is instead applied to the block(s) within the layout where the text gets embedded into. It's the layout designer that gets to decide the font, size, spacing, etc. for the text. Those attributes aren't stored with the text; they're stored with the layout.
To me, this makes far more sense as a workflow, even if you're a single author. I constantly wish that "word processors" had restructured and absorbed ideas from Desktop Publishing software when it came about. Instead, we got the garbled hybrid: you can have "document styles" like Title, Heading, Body, List Item, etc.; but they are essentially markup, moving around with the text (rather than there being any concept of an "section of the document" that gets styled, that text can be moved into/out of, and where the styles of that section will apply to the text only while it remains inside that section, such that moving text out of that area doesn't copy the styles of the section, only the styles of the text.)
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion.
But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.
Main thing is structured documents tracking changes, macros to automate processes.
Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite. We're probably generally described as heavy users but not power users, i.e. we don't need the features that only a few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not complicated docs.
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project.
It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
Other than this, I agree with the premise.
I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts.
In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app.
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=1...
Anyway, my app lets you see what's in the clipboard and adjust how much you want it cleaned.
I checked MS Teams, Outlook, Mail.app, and Safari.
Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time.
Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.
If the author meant best product, I agree.
If the author meant best selling, I'm not sure I agree.
MS Word needs to have all those configuration options for IT to check their boxes AND write the enterprise sized check.
If you are making a consumer app, this all seems like good advice. But I'm not sure it is good general advice.
When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.
He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it.
I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
- Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting.
- Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting.
Other remarks:
- Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research.
- There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...
Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
Yes. The Tweet was advocating for making that the default paste logic.
Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated.
But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?
User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for.
Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
But the point of the article was a bit broader. Opinionated products can build a strong devoted userbase around them. The question is only how reasonable your opinions are.
An example from Apple's UI: the way multiple windows of the same app are cycled on the desktop with Cmd-` is absolutely beyond any logic. It tries to be smart but makes cycling so unpredictable that it becomes practically useless. It's probably even worse than MS Word's copy/paste one (actually I'm not sure which is worse).
This is someone's opinion and I can't imagine anyone on Earth except the creator of this logic being happy with it. It's an edge case that illustrates the point: your opinion should resonate with enough people to sustain your business, that's all.
Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
I mean any product manager has to make a lot of decisions. Having an opinion does help in making decisions
But, still a good read :)
Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.