Avoid the Nightmare Bicycle | Hacker News Reader

Avoid the Nightmare Bicycle

geoffreylitt.com

> one of the worst misconceptions in product design is that a microwave needs to have a button for every thing you could possibly cook

"Worst" is a stretch. Not to mention these often actually do more than just power and time. For example detecting humidity and/or varying power over time.

> You can just have a time (and power) button. People will figure out how to cook stuff.

You could, but people don't always want to figure it out, especially when they are hungry.

This would have been a better article if the takeaway wasn't basically "people are smart, make them learn the underlying structure".

I think good design is recognizing when and how to either expose the structure or paper over it, all while making it pleasant to interact with for all users at either end of the spectrum of willingness to learn it.

For a bike, it pays off to learn. For other things maybe not so much. Combining these two very different cases and then making a blanket statement that "Good designs expose systematic structure" doesn't land well.

(post author here)

Yes, it's absolutely great to have a "low floor" -- common use cases should be easy to do, without needing to learn a ton up front. But, hiding the structure is not the only way to achieve that!

For example: a microwave could have presets like "we recommend cooking a potato with this power for this time. If it's undercooked, try higher power, but avoid max power because XYZ."

The simple use cases should guide the user while building up a coherent mental model. If there are fancier sensors being used, those could be explained and exposed to the user directly.

Otherwise you end up with no path to further learning. If I have no idea how potato mode works, then I don't know when it applies or doesn't apply, I don't know how to adjust when it doesn't work well, and I don't know how it relates to the other modes at all.

A much better analogy is the fact that bicycles are hugely popular at all. Douglas Englebart used to bring this up in his talks. If usability is the most important thing then we would all be riding tricycles. Most of us started out on trikes but the benefits of a bicycle compared to a trike are great enough that it is worth the one-time but significant investment in learning to ride it.

That said, I have little desire to ride a bicycle now that I have been riding a velomobile. ;-)

Tricycles are statically stable, as long as you're on level ground. They're unstable on canted ground, like driveways, cambered roads. Also dynamically unstable taking corners.

Bycicles are dynamically stable, since they can lean in corners or stay upright on tilted surfaces, as long as you're moving.

That's a reason old-fashioned tricycles aren't popular. Your velomobile might be an exception.

Not really a significant investment. It's common for toddlers these days to go from push-bike to pedal-bike (no training wheels) in an afternoon.

I haven't read "Changing Minds".

> As he points out: it would be terrible! We’d lose the intuitive understanding of how to use the gears to solve any situation we encounter. Which mode do you use for gravel + downhill?

I have no idea, actually, what gears I should use for gravel + downhill, which is surprising since about 6 years ago I biked from Pittsburgh to DC, which had a fairly long downhill section. I remember mostly coasting on that section. I might've stopped a few times to make sure my brakes could cool down. I don't think there is a wrong gear on a bicycle when coasting down on gravel?

Perhaps I am the user who does need a nightmare bicycle with a gravel + downhill button.

The same applies to air fryers with touchscreens and "smart" cooking programs. We only need 2 options like power and time like a microwave.

I think the microwave ones are useful even if they are just presets for time and power.

With a new bike, you can get a feel very quickly for what "5th gear" works well for and experiment with it and get immediate feedback and try other options pretty much no downside.

With a microwave, I don't necessarily want that level fine grain control. I probably just want to eat and not ruin my food and I certainly don't want to spend time running experiments. Having a preset at least gets you in the ballpark.

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