Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

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> There is value in providing good defaults, but users will and should be encouraged to go beyond them. That's what the documentation is for.

While the original article does not state this directly, it is implied that he's talking about programs where you have to read the manual to be able to use even its most basic functionality. Right now, I want to get a job done. Exploring can come later when I've got time for it.

> Being frustrated is also normal. It's a natural part of the learning process.

It's part of the learning process when you're breaking ground. It's not appropriate when you're trodding the well-worn path. If your users have to resort to SO questions just to do common case things, you've failed them.

> I don't think it justifies turning everything into unconfigurable featureless appliances or not writing documentation.

He is recommending neither.

The author explicitly states:

    If you think that your application really requires documentation, it’s too
    complicated, and it’s going to make your users frustrated.

Additionally, the author says:

    If you compare the experience of using both coffee machines, even if the
    [simpler] doesn’t give you the exact kind of coffee you want, you are still far
    better off.

The author is explicitly saying that tools should not require documentation, and that ease of making a choice is preferable to the potentially better outcomes of a more complex choice.

I believe that neither are absolutely true.

There is no mystery as to why these open source applications do what they do. They don't because either they can't know what you want them to do, or we programmers haven't made the appropriate changes so they handle the cases where the program can infer what the user wants.

Side note: If this post does anything, I hope it's to get someone to submit a pull request to NVM so it prints better help messages during first use (like suggesting setting up a default alias).

I think the author is deeply wrong if they think there is "One KIND" of users.

Depends on the product category, target users, what your product actually does and how it differentiates with the rest, etc, there's a bunch of different variables to consider before sending a blanket statement that's so obviously false in many situations.

* she

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