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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

> 90% of everything is shit

in regulated/safety-critical industries such as automotive, aerospace & defense, medical, etc. where people's lives are at stake, 99% of end-user facing products are fantastic and you generally get what you pay for, with some minimum level of quality and manufacturer warranty

in high fashion, the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. and it has stirred emotions here because nobody likes to feel left out, and that's basically the point of high fashion, to appoint a select group of people as "cool" because they "get it" and can afford hot labels

I wouldn't say that this extends all through the art world - good design is key to a lot of functional and utility aspects of engineering or creating anything new. but nobody is going to be playing pick up basketball in their $800 balenciaga, or expecting any level of functionality/comfort from them besides fitting on their feet

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> in regulated/safety-critical industries such as automotive, aerospace & defense, medical, etc...

I don't know that I agree. I'm not familiar with with aerospace software, but I see a lot of the user-facing bits of both automotive and medical devices/software. While the bits that are safety-critical may be rock solid (I've yet to see it fail in person), the UI design, maintenance, and UX in general leaves a lot to be desired.

For example, in my car, if the audio system is being driven from the bluetooth connection, you can't load the navigation screen. It will just spin forever. Switch to AM or FM radio, switch back to navigation, everything loads fine. How is that fantastic?

As another example, one of my doctors' office recently switched to using this big heavy cart thing for taking vitals measurements. The device is expensive, so they don't have nearly as many as they might have patients at one time, so I had to wait until one was free. The UI was slow and clunky (at best). To beat it all, the last time I was there all of the machines were shut down at the same time for scheduled updates (which was required to be done at a certain time, while the office was open), so it was back to the thermometer and blood pressure cuffs for me.

UIs in highly reliable machinery feels old because they're in development for so long (plus the manufacturers are typically blind to software UX). Hopefully old car makers are currently considering easily updatable software (what an invention), so that we can have it in 3 years.

I think InitialLastName's point was (and it's my recent experience as well), that why the UI, in vehicles at least, may often be "modern" now to a relatively reasonable degree, the whole experience is often just shoddily put together. With obvious bugs that shouldn't have made it into a firmware version in the first place, and behind very strange user interaction concepts to begin with.

I concur. Last night I spent 30min trying to change the setting of my house heater. It's a Bosch heater, and one of the better quality brands. My! It bemuses how they could have gotten the UX so bad. It has only a handful of simple functions -- it reminded me of PG once mentioned he got an error message from trying to adjust settings on an oven. I have had similar experiences with my car. Did these designers even bother to use their own products.

> in regulated/safety-critical industries such as automotive, aerospace & defense, medical, etc. where people's lives are at stake, 99% of end-user facing products are fantastic and you generally get what you pay for, with some minimum level of quality and manufacturer warranty

As someone who used to work on the United States' most widely-used electronic health record, let me tell you that a lot of our end users would not be so rosy in their assessment.

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