The Two Types of Quality | Hacker News Reader

The Two Types of Quality

zenorocha.com

82 pointsherbertl17 comments

The author misunderstands why Jira sucks. It’s not great at generating charts and graphs for upper management. It’s unopinionated, and attempts to be utterly customizable so that you can use it for anything you want to track.

Linear tells you right on their marketing site, the difference is Linear is opinionated. It’s better for software development because it’s designed for it, and worse at other things as a trade off.

this is not my experience. Jira is actually very opinionated about things in my experience. e.g. task hierarchies

Unfortunately JIRA is opinionated but misinformed.

Old jira was a kitchen sink. New jira seems to follow the Jobs philosophy or thinking they know what we want more than we do. They've never had a good middle ground. Old jira was impossible to configure because of all the knobs and new jira is impossible to configure because they took away all the knobs.

A bit off-topic but I don't like how the OP treats atarimae & miryokuteki hinshitsu (typically translated as must-be & attractive qualities) like proper nouns without a translation, while they are just how Dr. Noriaki Kano explained them back in 1984. Those conditions are collectively called the Kano model [1] and treating them as untranslatable proper nouns do not help anyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model

atarimae hinshitsu

A pen will write.

miryokuteki hinshitsu

A pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer AND leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader.

http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in...

Honestly, it feels a bit overplayed.

Some great examples:

Steam. Epic's UI looks pretty, but Steam is more functional.

Amazon. A cluttered and messy UX (don't even peek at their APIs and backend). Yet a dominant e-commerce platform.

Workday. Yuck.

Toyota. Mazda builds prettier cars, but Toyota dominates Mazda.

eBay. Craigslist. HN. Reddit.

Design is important, but utility is where value is created.

Thanks for your examples. Made me think.

I wonder if the audience is the key angle for looking at this.

For example:

- HN is beautiful and elegant to my eyes. So simple. So clean.

Adding some counter-examples:

- Most luxury brands' cars are beautiful for people who crave elegant things

- Airbnb looks amazing to people who care about great interiors

I don’t know about your other example except for amazon, which is definitely ugly as f. But then again, it’s “just” a retailer for standard stuff, and I know a lot of brands with nice-looking things that don’t want to be listed there. Also, on their purely digital product, I dig their competitors much more, e.g. Netflix over Prime.

I've heard this broken down into "needs" and "wants" before. Apenwarr broke this down in a long article I can't do justice by summarising, so here it is: https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=202110

re: Needs versus wants

I didn't quite get that. Obviously there are many partitions on "quality", Pirsig's is static versus dynamic, and what Zeno Rocha seems to be outlining is functional versus non-functional, an ancient distinction in engineering (SE).

But there's something deeper. The second type, "miryokuteki hinshitsu" seems more akin to "Je ne sais quoi", the perhaps surprising quality that is delightful, being neither something you needed or wanted but something you didn't even know you'd like.

Toward the end of the essay he nails something darker too - the misappropriation of that expectation that comes in the arrogance of some designs to presume to know the users' "experience". That is the sense in which I've sometimes found the concept of UX offensive. No designer gets to reach into the realm of subjective experience. It's something that Artists know, but where designers sometimes transgress.

So it’s just “form” and “function,” which are types of quality the English-speaking world has also been concerned with for quite some time.

Unfortunately, it's extremely rare to find software that exhibits "miryokuteki hinshitsu." The author's examples are not quite right. For example, linear is missing too many core features to be useful for many use cases.

There's a third type of quality. Quality on paper.

That is the kind of quality where you can check off all the boxes in your process, but still don't necessarily have a good product at the end.

In some types of Quality Control operations, the two types of quality are passing, failing, and marginal.

I wonder where the design of HN fits in. Of course it is atarimae hinshitsu. But is it not at the same time miryokuteki hinshitsu, because it is so elegantly atarimae hinshitsu?

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32343180

More a second try I would say. Lovely that I found this article via that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com