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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

> whether the user is an idiot giving you 100% of their mental capacity, or a genius giving you 1%, you have to make the same decisions when you're designing a product

No.

An idiot giving you 100% will never learn your product.

A genius giving you 1% will eventually develop a highly optimized way to use your product.

If we assume all users are the former, we never design for the latter. That pretty much sums up the last 20 years of de facto UX.

And if you disagree, I'd recommend you go find a call center still using mainframe apps, and watch a random sample of 100 users.

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Completely agree and your call center example is dead on. I work in telephony and our feedback from clients is always to simplify displays and reports so that they can manage the call flows better.

It was hilarious watching some of the reactions in our team when a client gave us a screenshot that was just boxes with numbers in them arranged neatly with no more than red/yellow/green for colors. Some saw ugly... I saw enhanced productivity.

Personally I think more UI/UX designers need to spend time doing data entry with time constraints so they learn the pains of repeated useless actions and time wasting features.

>eventually

perhaps, if the user is a continual user. but most users of most products are infrequent, and if your UI relies on being learned over time, it's probably not going to work for most people.

"Not going to work for most people" in this context feels more like "going to impact my growth metrics."

Which, yes, probably. But there are more goals in software development than hyper growth.

Particularly if your growth metric is number of registered users, silently ignoring those who didn't delete their account (almost nobody ever does). Following such metric prioritizes first-use experience (i.e. baiting registrations with UI glitter) over actual utility. Which is what I suspect happens a lot today (along with its related problem, optimizing for sale over continued use).

That only applies to... niche stores and food ordering, maybe.

If you're working on SaaS that is meant to help someone make money or work faster, there's a good chance you'll have people using your software as a part of their dayjob - i.e. 2-8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. If you treat your users as idiots and don't implement space for them to grow (i.e. power user features), you'll be wasting a lot of life for a lot of people (and a lot of money of their bosses).

That's a heuristic I'd like to see being used in UX design: assume your software becomes a tool in some company, and you have full-time users spending their workday on it. Design to that group.

What you are talking about is consumer entertainment. Even utility apps like Google Maps are something you have to learn and yes I'm tired of all the "What's new! Don't do anything until you click me!" garbage. I need the app to open, do what I want, and then close. Thank-you.

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