Comment by fifticon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fifticon | Hacker News Reader

It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.

I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)

() I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").

We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.

The thing I find the most hilarious about all these companies jamming llms in all over the place is that they don't ever put it where it makes the most sense to me - to manage the settings.

They could do away with all these mazes of settings and configurations and just have a little chat thing. You pop open and then tell the AI hey I want to change the background and then it just does it. You could have a huge and complex array of settings that would be a headache to navigate in a typical form format, but a breeze with an llm that has an API into them.

As an aside, another one that I just find hilarious is the LLM implementation into Google sheets. I'll ask it. "Hey how do I do this?" and then it goes "I don't know" and I'm like WTF why is this here

It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).

When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.

Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.

The article presents the fruit as a way to make the milkshake more "interesting", addressing the fact that existing customers were purchasing milkshakes in part to make their commute less boring.

Weirdly, there's no followup on whether the changes improved sales, margins, or other goals.

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