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Comment by fileeditview | Hacker News Reader

"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

I love that quote. Shows a common problem: devs, architects and managers designing platforms but never asking users how they want to use it. At least the end results indicate that.

Edit: a link with actual text of the email, not screenshots divided in Tweets..

https://web.archive.org/web/20210616012008/https://blog.seat...

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Not much has changed since then. I just checked if MS has a download page. They do and it's https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/default.aspx

It's 1/3 surface ad, 1/3 category selection, 1/3 office 365 ad. The categories have a :hover effect, but you can't click the icon - only the text.

What are the top downloads offered?

    01 Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.7.7 Update
    02 Office Deployment Tool
    03 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002138) 64-Bit Edition
    04 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB4484211) 64-Bit Edition
    05 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002160) 64-Bit Edition

Given that the updates are close to enforced in the new versions, WTF is that page? The downloading part of that email applies just as well today as it did then.

And "Top download categories > Browsers" redirects you to IE download page which informs it is retired and you should go to Edge download page (which does not have anything to download, just a slideshow about Edge) :)

Then, when someone dares to talk about "personas" or designing UIs to have actual users in mind, developers will rage that it's just bullshit, people playing with crayons instead of doing real work etc etc

I really doubt the issue is devs. If they don't want to tank their velocity they have to open an issue to fix such problems, which will stay open and never looked at.

I'm a dev. I have asked my product and design colleagues to use personas at my last two roles... and they don't. If I had more traction, I'd get the ads and marketing teams involved too so the models in the ads matched the personas we were designing around.

hashtag not all devs

hashtag n=1

Obviously it's not all devs, but there is a kind of dev that is exactly like that. Look at the comments on the KDE article [1] that was on the frontpage yesterday. Yes, Linux power-users are for sure a skewed and biased subset of devs BUT they do exist.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34390655

His tone, and that line, were very inspirational to me when I wrote this comment 6 years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160809

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