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How to make sense of any mess

howtomakesenseofanymess.com

462 pointssurprisetalk140 comments

All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there. (I've moved these complaints to a stubthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 - if anyone has an urge to reply, it would be fine to do so there)

(p.s. what look like chapter headings in the OP are in fact hyperlinks)

In almost 20 years of working in FinTech at various banks, hedge funds startup etc, a lot of this rings true.

e.g.

- Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used and 90% of the time they are used it's b/c I made one

- SO many important processes are not documented so people can't even opine about how to fix them. I once documented a process and everyone agreed step 4 was wrong. What was amazing is no one agreed on what step 4 actually was.

- Most of the big arguments I've seen about projects are less "what should we do" but more "when do we want it" e.g. one party want's it next week but another one wants to have more features so it will take longer. [1] I've often dealt with this by using the following metaphor:

"Oh, so you want to move house every two weeks?

If you give me six months I'll build you the world's most amazing Winnebago/RV with a hot tub, satellite TV, queen size bed and A/C.

If you want it tomorrow I'm going to give you a wheelbarrow, pillow and an iPad."

0 - https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/67/2-flow-d... and https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/71/6-swim-l...

1- https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/51/reality-...

Thanks. This single comment provided more value than a page itself.

> Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used...

Making technically good decisions is one of a distressing number of domains where making any attempt at all will put someone a long way ahead of the game vs most people who wield power. Several advanced techniques that nearly nobody seems to do:

"Do we have evidence that this is a good idea?"

"What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]

"Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?"

[0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.

99% of all leadership is making a decision and then asking for data to support that decision unfortunately.

I’ve literally never seen that happen. It’s always problem, initial hypothesis, request for data (then data is either unavailable or typically supports the hypothesis, occasionally the data doesn't and you go back to the drawing board.

Have you worked on a data team? I've seen that bs a number of times, it's how I mentally grade different managers and PM/POs.

Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big change, get told what devs are missing and need to instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too hard or impossible to check.

I’m sure it does happen but a number of times does not come close to all (99%)

Like when my company's bosses decided:

- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.

- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

And always supported with "data".

Those are not contradictory.

Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.

I think the point was that they are contradictory, yet "data" was shown to indicate they were each sound decisions, implying an inherent dishonesty and willingness to bend data to support an already drawn conclusion.

No, I'm stating that those aren't contradictory. Perhaps they were inaccurate paraphrases of statements that were contradictory, I have no idea. But taking what's written at face value, they are not hard to reconcile. E.g., being productive doesn't necessarily imply innovating.

Not hard to reconcile _if you try in good faith to do so, with the necessary faculties, interest, time, and access_.

This caveat pretty much defines reality.

I... don't really follow.

COVID wfh was a weird time. The company I worked for was remote before COVID. Oddly, COVID was a boost to basically every metric, including the ones not tracked for productivity like even number of Slack messages sent or raw number of PRs. I think everyone was just closed off from their out of house obligations, especially families with kids who went to a lot of activities that got cancelled. So they worked instead or were just more rested and less exhausted from everything else in their lives.

The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of remote candidates with not so great intent: The overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack once a day or other people who generally just weren’t interested in actually doing work while remote. It started to add up over time. There were also the people who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason everything changed when everyone started WFH.

not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure from anything they had ever known.

I’ll settle for making decisions. Most leaders can’t even do that

This is also - disturbingly - how the human brain operates.

1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about what course of action is most beneficial for you.

2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally right thing to do.

3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing, and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!

I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you have to accept that well functioning human organizations don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they work.

This is not entirely true. Daniel Kahneman wrote about it if you want a source. Humans generally have two ways of thinking: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is fast, heuristic-based, and not always accurate. Arguably, that's why things like racism and bigotry take hold. Type 2 is slow, analytical, and what lets us do things like send men to the Moon or write large software applications.

The trouble is that you have to consciously shift to Type 2 thinking, it takes longer, and it's tiring. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has a great bit (paraphrasing here) about the purely Type 2 thinker in ancient days on the African savannah getting eaten by a lion. Because he or she sits there doing a complex analysis of "OK, felid, yellow fur, moving towards me, etc. etc." while the Type 1 thinker goes "Oh shit! Lion!" and runs away.

Type 1 thinking has a role. You just have to be mindful about when you're misusing it.

What I describe is a summary of the book "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life".

My take is that it's worse than you think, and Type 2 thinking is often used to justify or rationalize actions driven by Type 1 motives.

Link: https://amzn.to/3KqLzF7

"If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess to anything"

> [0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.

Speaking as someone with 20 years in uniform and as a War College grad (if only by correspondence) . . . the military ironically has this wired more than any other institution in the Federal government. The reason the military gets drawn into so much of US foreign policy is not because of a fetish for blowing things up. It's because it's the only institution where formalized planning is a thing, the only one where feats of large-scale logistics are par for the course, and the only one where "I'm not going there because I might get hurt" isn't a valid excuse.

As an example, one of the best ways for distributing aid after a natural disaster is an amphibious task force, because you can send the same Marines in to distribute aid that you would to take territory. And going into relatively unprepared areas and setting up infrastructure for follow-on forces is basically their bit either way.

The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like what's currently happening in Ukraine. And when you involve all the other agencies plus scads of glory-seeking politicians, it's hard to keep things from becoming a shitshow.

> outside of something like what's currently happening in Ukraine.

Typical slippery slope. "The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like <insert any use of army>"

Even just the military won't solve the Ukraine. Like lets say superman comes down and lasers all the Russians.

Who gets what land? What happens to the people whose houses are destroyed? What happens to those whose farms are litered with landmines?

This is the posters point. The military can execute on a lot of things effectively but in order to go from 80% to 100% you need more than just them.

We have answers to all these questions, or can find them, but they can't be implemented in an active warzone.

Right, the military quells the warzone, and you still need a plan for after that. That's the 80-100% part, coming from people outside the military.

Seems pretty simple unless you are secretly stanning for the orcs. Ownership of the land should revert to the status quo ante before Putin's initial incursion into Crimea. Those whose property has been destroyed or mined should be compensated with seized Russian assets. Kidnapped Ukrainian children should be returned to what's left of their families.

What alternatives would be more fair, from your perspective?

I read this as a logistical question rather than a moral one. What happens when two farmers can't agree on where their property boundaries sat prior to the war, the fences got ripped out after one side used the area as a staging ground, and any records have been blown up by glide bombs? What happens to the real, physical land that's covered in mines and needs to be either cleared or fenced? Where can Maria and her family stay tonight, next week, and where will they end up? These aren't (necessarily) problems for the military to solve.

Good points all. Like the other poster said, though, first the war must end. It's to our shame (meaning the West's) that Ukraine isn't well into the suing-Russia-for-reparations phase.

> Those whose property has been destroyed or mined should be compensated with seized Russian assets.

Unless you think the resources of the clearly guilty are limitless, this sounds like Versailles-type collective punishment that may be satisfying, and maybe even moral, but is counter-productive long-term.

Putin is no Hitler, though. I suspect that turning Russia into a failed state that the rest of the world will have to support is exactly his plan. He looks at Kim Jong Un with envy, not contempt.

Orcs? How polite.

What do you call African Americans and Asians? Just curious.

Depends. What country did they illegally and unjustly invade, and what war crimes did they commit in the process?

By that logic you need to take a good hard look at your own history.

Damn straight. Orc-nature is a consequence of one's actions, and we have no shortage of it ourselves.

That being said, we're not the orcs this time, so your point is tangential at best.

You’re masking your racism and Russophobia with evasion.

Da, tovarisch

What no vatnik? Or is that reserved for Reddit?

I do love the smell of racism and hypocrisy in the morning.

> What alternatives would be more fair, from your perspective?

It would be more fair for the Americans to first return to Europe and only then voice their valuable opinions about fairness.

Whatabout

What about taking arguments of this quality back to Reddit, where they belong?

Point of order . . . "the Ukraine" is what Putin and his ilk call it. Ukraine is the name of the country. Its etymology does come from the Slavic word for "march" or "borderland," but that's the point. Ukraine is its own sovereign nation since 1991. Calling it "the Ukraine" or "the borderlands" subtly legitimizes the Russian claim that it's nothing more than "Novorossiya" or "New Russia."

The Ukraine literally means The Borderlands and refers to the areas fought over repeatedly by all various European countries from Sweden to Poland to Austria to Hungary.

Novorossiya is the name for the southern mainland of The Ukraine. The name dates back to the late 18th century, there’s nothing really “new” about it. Do you consider the name America to be old? Novorossiya is as old.

I suggest you find out how these lands were merged into The Ukraine during the Soviet era.

You're being downvoted because that's not a slippery slope argument familiar to the mostly US-based readership and it's hard to tell if you're crazy or not.

Ie, the US identifies very strongly with three wars (revolutionary, civil, and ww2) where military force was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Ie, the US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having a far more favorable balance of military forces because they could never find a political solution. If you were taught that wars are won by force alone, you were miseducated.

Military force, as demonstrated by the US and its allies, worked out really well in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan (Taliban 2.0 after 20 years), Syria.

Declaring victory and running way is the common theme of US foreign policy.

> What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]

I’ve tried exactly this and it was shocking to me that even when faced with examples of themselves failing to do something, people would just willingly go on the record with this:

Lindsay: Well, did it work for [us last time]? Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work [this time].

"Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?"

I find this one interesting, a business youtuber I follow said he finally realized that his teams all got ~5% better every year if he just left them alone and changed nothing. He said he used to have all these ideas he wanted to implement, but that if they didn’t have a lot of potential upside, they weren’t worth the short term drops associated with reimplementing, retraining and the teams having to relearn and explore their new problem space.

The degree to which people can disagree on what things are is very impressive. It once took me weeks to get a company to go from 12 definitions of user retention to 4...

I have had people have vicious arguments what a user even was. I just setup a system where custom definitions are allowed because if you want to argue do it with someone who gives a damn.

Flow diagrams are criminally underused

Yeah, but hammers are overused.

I’ve seen this a lot, too, but only in specific company cultures. The common problem among all of them was that people in middle upper management thrived in chaos. They didn’t want the important things to be well documented or stable because that took away their opportunities to be the important person who held the secret knowledge to make things work. When something broke they wanted it to remain impenetrable for other teams so they could come in as the heroes.

Oddly enough, these same people would be the ones pushing for documentation and trying to stonewall other teams’ work for not being documented enough. It was like they knew the game they were playing but wanted to project an image of being the people against the issue, not the ones causing the problem. Also, forcing other teams to document their work makes it easy for you to heroically come in and save the day.

I mean, asking for other people to document their work takes zero effort.

Asking doesn't always mean it will happen. It also depends on how many times you ask, and which method you're asking.

I've had countless conversations about this with examples. Still, tickets remain some variation of "called, did some troubleshooting, fixed it".

In the couple of instances I experienced this, the problem is that the system is like the proverbial elephant that a bunch of blind people are familiar with through touching the parts they are next to; but the complexity is in the relationships in-between.

There needs to be a person who will take charge and learn/document the whole system, except people who work on it are overloaded and too exhausted to take this on. And management doesn't necessarily have the insight or incentive to make this happen. It's an interesting phenomenon.

What software can be used to make Critical path/flow diagrams?

You can embed mermaid uml markup in github and gitlab issues

On a similar note, you can embed Draw.io markup when exporting Draw.io diagrams, meaning the image contains the metadata required to open, modify, and generate a new image (which itself can also contain the new metadata).

Mermaid has its place, but Draw.io is so much more flexible.

I was merged onto a team because we decided to put more wood behind fewer arrows. So I was the Outsider but with seniority and pull (people loved my project and thought we did great, we just couldn’t sell it.)

One of the first big problems I solved was almost by accident. We had a backend and a frontend team and we kept missing deadlines because they would work separately on features and the two wouldn’t mate up so we’d have to do another couple iterations to make everything work and “work” belonged in air quotes because things were hammered to fit.

The biggest of the problems encountered here was data dependencies in the inputs resulting in loops in the APIs where you couldn’t get one piece of data without another, and vice versa. So we started drawing data dependency diagrams during the planning meetings as an experiment, instead of diagramming the data structures, and the problem went away basically overnight.

> projects are less "what should we do" but more "when do we want it"

And this usually ends bad. Yet it keeps repeating because there are no lessons learned (but learnings /s).

The powers that be keep calling everything a success until the next reshuffle.

Then it all repeats all over again (I'm clearly jaded by my recent experiences).

Reminds me of pilots' decision making process:

- Situation: The pilot is required to recognize the current situation and identify the possible dangers. This is the most important step of the decision-making process since detecting the situation accurately gives the critical information to start the process correctly and produce a feasible resolution to the impending situation.

- Options: Generate any possible option regardless of the feasibility of success. It is most important to create as many options as possible since there will be a larger pool of options to choose the most appropriate solution to the situation.

- Choose: From the options generated, the pilot is required to choose a course of action assessing the risks and viability. Act: Act upon the plan while flying in accordance with safety and time availability. The most important step of this process is time, as the pilot is challenged against time to fix the problem before the situation further deteriorates.

- Evaluate: Ask the question, "Has the selected action been successful?" and evaluate your plan to prepare for future occurrences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_decision_making#Decision...

There are so many good concepts to borrow from in pilot training, it's almost ridiculous. I'm not even a pilot but have studied risk management, crew resource management, decision making, etc. Anecdata of course but I feel it made a pretty big difference in dealing with projects and problems.

Atul Gawande made a book out of the idea (well, sort of!), https://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/. The original article is at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

I’ve been increasingly addicted to Mentour Pilot videos in the past month, and I couldn’t agree more with you. Modern (and by this I mean really 1990s+) pilot training, with its decision frameworks and CRM ideas, is a model for how most professionals ought to organize their work and deal with challenges. Of course it’s easy to see why aviation developed such rigorous systems, but we’d do well to steal as many of their ideas as we can. If anyone isn’t already really familiar with those two concepts especially, I bet it would be worth your time to look into them a bit.

Mentour Pilot is quite good, especially their older videos, tho recently they are moving to stronger engagement farming since they sold to private equity (https://www.electrify.video/post/electrify-video-partners-ex...)

Good to know. I do hope Petter will continue to maintain the seriousness of the channel, and the mission to teach the lessons learned by air incidents.

If you don't already, check out Admiral Cloudberg's write-ups. She started doing research for MentourPilot last year, but has a few years of previous articles that'll wiki-hole you real good.

Reminds me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist... and OODA loops

At the time of the FAA making up this framework, I would venture more than half of commercial pilots had some military aviation background. It is so close to Boyd's model, I would think that a research might find that it was highly inspired if not a direct descendant of Boyd's work.

However, Body was real time combat, and I think the FAA is supposed to be beyond a cockpit crisis, and maybe another framework is Demings PDCA framework, which looks like you could roughly match the pieces.

One trick that I always fall back on is to make a dependency graph. In meetings I used to pull up yuml.com but now I use mermaid. You can just start typing text and arrows and it renders in real time what depends on what. It's great in a live meeting to help focus people on where the problem really is, or in documentation to show why a change here will affect something there.

Both yuml and mermaid don't get you control over layout. I think that's a feature. If the layout engine can make a pretty picture that means your dependencies aren't too complex, but if the graph looks terrible and complicated, that means you're system is also probably terrible and complicated.

Totally agree on the lack of layout control being a hidden strength. When the graph looks like spaghetti, that's not a tool issue - it's a systems issue

To save others confusion, it's not yuml.com but yuml.me, a UML diagramming tool

Sorry, you're right. It's been so long since I used it, I forgot that it wasn't a .com domain.

mermaid layout doesn't scale for me so I keep using yEd/yFiles and their tgf (trivial graph format -- tab-delimited relations) input with orthogonal layout. It's a bit of a hassle in a meeting but updates take about 15 seconds to refresh if you have everything set up. Automating it fully would require an expensive license.

I wish we could use that. I can’t use them because mermaid doesn’t have a way to assure no data is stored on mermaid servers so I can’t use it for anything proprietary or even work related at all. LucidChart has a way to tie into Corporate though

I just use VSCode with a markdown file and the mermaid preview extension. It’s all local.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vstirbu....

I can’t even get that approved.

Does corporate IT need to whitelist every VSCode extension that's being used? I can see the logic -it's running arbitrary code on your system as your user on their network- but damn! How does that even work? A self-hosted VSCode marketplace or something?

Basically. VSCode supports airgap install or offline install of plugins. Store them in Artifactory like an arbitrary location like vs-code-plugins and then ask an admin to install them on your VM.

Ouch. We are headed that direction. The problem is, if a vulnerability is found in a plugin, then you have to get everyone to manually upgrade. Doing it this way means everyone’s software is always out of date, which has its own drawbacks too.

I've observed that messes and complexity often but not always tends to just be noisy information streams. If you try to make a decision based on large volumes of low quality data, the world feels incredibly complex and constantly shifting and self-contradictory.

If you manage to improve the signal to noise ratio it feels a lot more manageable and understandable.

Worked with an enterprise architect once who couldn't say anything that didn't start with "in this complex and ever changing information landscape". You built this complex and ever changing information landscape, sir. It consists of your hexagonal architecture, your microservices, your kubernetes cluster.

OODA loops are everywhere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Interesting to see it crop up here. I met Ms. Covert when she released the book and have a signed copy around here somewhere. It remains relevant as ever, and has value well beyond UX practices. It’s a short read too, I recommend it.

Abby is awesome and an old friend from NYC ux & information architecture scene in early 2010s. Her book is great, and like others mention, the homepage is just the TOC. Go buy it! Ultimately, the mess is yours to make it helpful for stakeholders.

Could you post the names of some influential books or articles from the Information Architecture scene?

I've never heard of it, but I'm impressed by OP's website and I'm interested in learning more.

edit: There's a whole list in the website.

edit (pt. 2): How would you compare the Information Architecture scene to the Effective Altruism scene? Are these scenes linked/overlapping in any particular way?

No link. IA only concerned with organizing info for various mediums and its UX to meet org and individual goals

Can you gently suggest that she consult her information architect community to help her make her website human readable?

My experience is that one mess is pretty straightforward, what is debilitating is interconnected messes.

System A is the highest priority fix and we want to incorporate parts of system B into system A (they never should have been in B) but if we move them to system A, the other parts of system B will break (so we need to fix those) and then additionally system C will no longer work so we need to fix that, and on and on…

---

Working on a legacy codebase last year I kept repeating to myself: They made it work, they didn't make it sensible.

I was a bit confused by this until I realized that this is just a table of contents and the sentences in each chapter are links. They are not obviously styled like hyperlinks.

Oh! Thank you, I was totally lost and thought it was some weird stream of consciousness or something.

Ohhh I did think this was some interesting poetry...

I did the same thing. Very Zen...

You can't talk about messes without talking about Garbage. When a mess is inevitable, maybe even on purpose. Landfills, toxic waste dumps; every organization has them, needs them.

I once worked in a department that was a dumping ground for failed projects. A 10 year long mess; it was both constant garbage and an essential scapegoat. A mess that everyone can blame, from the C-suite, to peer organizations, to even the people who worked inside the org.

Wikipedia has a great primer on the topic, which I think is more incisive than the OP's holistic framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model

totally agree with what dang posted here; obvious nitpicks aren’t worth discussing. it’s refreshing to see that principle on HN.

I also want to add another thought to that: I’m so glad howtomakesenseofanymess.com exists, warts and all. I’d much rather it exist in some imperfect form than not exist at all.

We ought to be more accepting of good and imperfect creations, because that encourages creativity. We need more of this!

This is giving big TimeCube vibes

Messes can be eliminated - just understood, shaped, and navigated

Did you mean "can't"?

This reminds me of https://basecamp.com/shapeup

Frequeently submitted, rarely engaged: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Not quite the same as this submission, but a better place to start for most people.

[stub for offtopicness]

All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The random word highlighting makes it hard to read for me.

Yeah the 3 word lines one after another is god awful.

This is a table of contents. Those are the names of sections. You can click on them to go to pages of more normally formatted paragraphs.

The paragraphs on all pages are formatted quite narrowly, displaying only 3 - 6 words per line.

If this bothers people, it can also be changed with Stylebot or the like, using a rule like this to change the max-width, which is set to 400px, to a larger value:

p, ul, li { max-width: 800px; }

Thanks - my mistake. I thought this was some really bad LinkedIn style content.

I suspect that’s how they help you make sense of a mess. If you can get through the styling you can survive anything.

This should definitely be an option you can turn on or off.

So far I'm not finding it that bothersome but I'm thinking of vibe coding a chrome extension to remove the highlighting.

The solution is literally one line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386340

From the start of the book:

"Each time you see a word that is highlighted, [...] it means that this term is a lexicon enabled term. By clicking on that term, you will see a page listing all other uses of that term within the book."

Very helpful for people who need to be constantly reminded to have top-of-mind instant access to the definition of words like "thing" and "what", at all times.

If you have Stylebot or the like installed, you can get rid of the highlighting with:

a { background-color: transparent; }

Here's a bookmarklet:

  javascript:document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(el => el.style.backgroundColor = 'transparent')

I am highly impressed by the lexicon feature, but I think it would be nice if you could disable the highlighting

This is such a difficult to read site. I can’t quite put my finger on it… maybe it’s the vertical spacing that requires a ton of scrolling and lets you see only limited context. The word highlighting doesn’t help.

I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.

> I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.

If you’re reading a book preview and have an awful time of it, why would that encourage you to buy the book? You’re more likely to close the site and move away.

It is also a lot of work (and intuitive) to publish all the content on a website and then intentionally make it unpleasant to read just to encourage book sales.

When the presentation of the website has the appearance of being deliberately terrible, then I (for one) am lead to presume that the corresponding book will be just as disdainful.

I actually quite appreciate the use of hypertext.

Sure, but you could also have a more useful visual design while maintaining that. The problem with the site, on mobile at least, is the lack of visual hierarchy through spacing, text weight, and implied lines because you might only see one or two red chapter titles on screen at any given time. I get that they were trying to stick with a visual motif and the red text does make the chapter titles stick out— it would work great in print or maybe on a big monitor when you could see it all at once. But if you have to scroll through it, I found it pretty irritating to have no way to visually orient yourself.

Yeah the typography is pretty poor. When everything is bold, nothing is. Poor visual hierarchy and as you noted the vertical spacing is bad too. It also doesn't fully fit in horizontally on mobile.

>I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.

Probably a mix of a style choice that didn't hit, and how pages were split up so it isn't as convenient as reading the book.

> I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.

If it works, they'd be dumb not to. (For the record, I don't think it works, and I don't think that was their intent.)

Agreed. Having such a tiny amount of text per page is an antipattern -- scrolling is more ergonomic than finding and clicking a link to go to the next page.

And the columns are painfully narrow which impedes readability. Overly wide body text is often a problem people recognize, but overly narrow is equally problematic.

It's a very strange experience to have to scroll to read all the text, even when there's barely any text to begin with.

It's frustrating because the content here looks like it could be good. It feels like it was thrown together quickly. If you click the "Chapter 1" it just takes you a page with just the chapter title on it. Seems like they split the book into sections and fed each section into a template and said good enough.

The highlighted links are incredibly off-putting, like buying a second-hand book that someone has already highlighted. The readable text is so narrow and small, but the sections are so short that you immediately hit the massive "Buy a Book" upsell banner at the bottom, which distracts you. All of this makes it hard to focus on the text itself.

I'll never understand sites that have way too many links in their articles. Am I mean to click away as I'm reading a paragraph? Do you want me to stay on the article or do you want me to be distracted and go somewhere else?

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In what ways did 37signals innovate in any of those 3 areas?

They didn't. 37signals books are basically "how to make self-help books that look like slideshows." And this site looks like their uglier cousin:

https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter1/19/every-th...

I think most people can't write nothingness like this even if they try very hard. And if they achieve that they can't make the emphasis this ugly.

You could take a page out of "The Timeless Way of Building" and make the same comment. True, a page of writing that goes all the way down to the axiomatic and obvious comes off as low-effort. But as part of a much larger project, it can also indicate someone who has thought deeply about a topic and is willing to spend time constructing it from first principles.

The website is a hot mess, mostly bc its layout is strangely "off"; its text requires just a little horizontal scrolling to reach the end of many lines. I'll never understand the lengths people go to to break the standard default rendering of text on the web. There might be good ideas here but the mobile presentation is ~unusable.

Seriously. Just using plain HTML would have resulted in readable text lines. All the web designer had to do was: “not do whatever he deliberately did that made it worse.”

I want to provide a counter perspective, which is that I am very happy with way in which the website deconstructs the book into short "articles".

What I mean is that I think this website (at least from my perspective) has a successful, novel approach to representing books on the web.

I don't mean to discount your point. UX issues are very serious and can ruin an otherwise carefully presented work. My point is that despite these issues, I am impressed by the creator's approach to the website.

It renders as individual pages for me. An article (as in one html page) per chapter would probably be easier to read. Now they've forced constraints onto it that makes sense for paper but not a website

Is this website a satirical art piece?

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I just miss the days when Hyperlinks were underlined to show that they were clickable. I thought this was, like, a poem or something at first until I realized they were chapter links to other pages.

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And you start with the mess that this website is...

Seriously, a paginated interface for longtext? Hyperlinks not styled as hyperlinks? Text with random highlights? And most of the short blurbs really just more words without any additional clarification?

You make sense of a mess by having the ability to organize thought & data, and I am 100% convinced that the author does not have that ability.

Sorry dang, but I have to disagree. Nothing about this site design is "too common to be interesting." The whole thing is highly irregular. In an extreme case like this, the weirdness of the layout has to be considered a *principle feature* of the website, not a side distraction. Another commenter mentioned Time Cube, and that's not far off.

Commenters are correct that the whole thing reads like a meta joke, where the site itself is a mess. We have to at least consider the possibility that the author is in on the joke.

Petition to eliminate this stub, and merge this discussion of *the website's primary distinguishing feature* into the main conversation.

Just wanna express my thanks to all the complaining comments here, they helped me set expectations so that I wasn't too disappointed when the site actually did turn out to be an unreadable hot mess.

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