Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy

Re:Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy by phkahler on Sunday September 13, 2020 @02:35PM (#24462907)

>> Users aren't thinking about your app when they use it.

Yep. It's probably over used as an example, but I always come back to pinch-zoom. People don't care about your UI, the best you can let them do is directly manipulate their data. Anything else is a compromise. That compromise is always going to be there, but we need to minimize it.

MS Office has turned into a sort of industrial machine with a control panel. You can do anything to your data if you know what sequence of buttons to push to tell the machine what to do. Actually that peaked several years ago and they have been getting better about more direct access to features. OTOH they also have so much functionality that such UI will never go away completely.

On a related tangent, I feel like tools for programmers suffer even more from this. Because we're used to editing text files to get things done, the notion of editing a config file or writing a script to get something to do what you want doesn't seem that unreasonable to software developers. Maybe it should.

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Re:Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy by jchw on Sunday September 13, 2020 @02:42PM (#24462955)

Programming tools should work this way because we write code; config files are effectively code that doesn't execute (or sometimes does.) A lot of the config files we use (think stuff like: gitignore, eslint/babel configuration, Dockerfiles, package.toml, etc.) we version into source control so that we can track changes over time. I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better; VSCode probably has done the best by providing autocompletion in YAML and JSON files using JSONSchema.

Text files aren't perfect, but they're hard to beat. It's not like the hardest part of programming is actually syntax, anyways. You can always improve on this by providing better assisted editing.

If there's anything I'd actually want it would be for software to have pluggable configuration so I can instruct it to pull its configuration from a database or something along those lines.

edit: and on that note, it’s probably the command line interface that actually would strongly benefit from some consideration. CLI arguments are currently a flat unstructured list... but almost everything at least has key value pairs.

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Re:Disrespectful Design – Users aren’t stupid or lazy by hansvm on Sunday September 13, 2020 @03:51PM (#24463435)

> I can't think of a good UI that would make editing these files better

Alternative views into those same text files would be nice. You could color-code the type of a snippet (yaml string/float issues) or nested blocks. You could offer a graph view of dependencies (context-dependent -- could be services, function calls, modules, docker base images, etc...).

Text files are nice (and I've yet to see anything that would be a good replacement for most uses), but that doesn't mean we can't offer extra tooling/views into that data when it would be more convenient.

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