Why has HN in the last three years or so gotten this collective irresistible urge to insert “junior developer” into every conceivable ill and malaise?
The thesis sounds straightforward. Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better.
I see it all over social media where before it would've been "10 pitfalls of X", it's "10 mistakes Junior devs make when learning X". Or if somebody disagrees with someone else about technological discussion, the goto insult is that the other person is a junior dev, instead of maybe thinking that other people have different perspectives.
But, yes: Senior designers can also make mistakes. I’d argue they make less glaringly obvious mistakes, but humans will human.
That sounds like every single sad tale where a change of management/executives forces some new process or tool on their underlings without any input. (Perhaps those are junior developer CTOs?)
So the thesis of the OP was straightforward and clear because of all the facts in the history. Replacing that with some generic tale about mismanagement and the accursed junior-run-amok is comparatively less interesting.
> Power users need the app to be efficient. Naive outsiders fret too much over æsthetics and the potential usability for newbies. In turn change does not work out for the better.
This is exactly the sort of naive guess the designer made in the first place. It was not known what power users wanted, clearly, and users of different products will have different needs. It assumes power users are the users the company wants to appeal to: Maybe they’re trying to make life easier for new users. There’s no “lesson about power users” here. There’s a “lesson to understand your users and your business needs.” I am a power user of all sorts of software that I sorely wish had a less cluttered and “more white space” or “more aesthetic” experience. This designer may not have been wrong in their choices in that situation despite designing for software with “power users.”
Design is a set of tools. You have to know what you’re trying to do before you start saying stuff like “screwdrivers are for newbs — when making things for power users only user chainsaws!”
The story reported: a new design was tried (for whatever reason) which didn’t work better (it worked worse) for the concrete users of that app: productivity-focused (or -forced) support staff.
It is anyone’s guess why you want to argue over a retelling of the article which we are commenting on. Since that (following your own example) could be motivated by a thousand different reasons I guess it’s best to not speculate.
I would add to this with the observation that the existence of "power users" is very likely a sign that the system is poorly designed.
Obviously some things are just really complex and there is no way around that. But most things are not. A good system will easily and intuitively solve the user's problems without them needing a degree from NASA to understand how to use it.
Can we dispense with this "power user" bs? The reason anyone uses software is efficiency. The end goal is to deliver value (measured by productivity/$ spent) with a specific toolset you are tasked with building and maintaining. Stratifying your customer base by ephemeral computer literacy ideas will just distract from delivering a product that addresses everyone's needs.
Well, why bother making this distinction to begin with? The whole concept of a power user just reeks of lazy product design.
> Compromising the workflow of your full time SCM expert in your ERP system for the sake of somebody who spends an hour or two a month filling out purchase orders is just stupid.
Yes, this is lazy product design in the other direction. It's not clear why you can't just satisfy both groups.
And that's the problem of a lot of enterprise apps. The UI design is one that makes sense and is efficient for power users, but a large number of regular users use the app too, and the UI design absolutely stinks for them.