Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

> I love how good UX crops up everywhere.

Me too. Empathetically. These deep dives feed my soul.

The Donald Norman books, obviously. I've read similar accounts about forks (the utensil), pencils, shipping containers, etc.

One organizational detail that pops out is the German government sponsored a design competition and then seriously reviewed everything.

Another data point in favor of broadly applying X-Prize like strategy to encourage innovation.

DARPA and a few others are (sometimes) smart this way. The book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity uses economic logic (based on net present value, aka NPV) to also make the argument in favor.

View on HN

Something that I took away was that "good design" can only go so far in terms of strategic advantage. The Germans invested considerable funding, research, and testing into their cans... only to have them copied. Sure, they enjoyed a few years of genuine advantage, but that probably stemmed just as much from the woefully underdesigned state of allied gas cans.

My takeaway here is that they should have iterated until they had a "great, but not perfect" design. That way, when the design inevitably gets aped... there's still room for the opposing side to introduce their own improvements which you can steal right back.

You make it sounds as if they wasted years gold-plating fuel can design when they should have - done what exactly? Not waste 21 years from losing one world war to starting another? Deliberately start with inferior logistics to keep the next iteration in reserve for when the first version gets copied? (not even that far off, considering that weird window/düppel stalemate where for a while both sides held back the same innovation for fear of the other side copying it)

I'm not attempting to back-seat drive the third reich here -- I make software, not war. I'm just interested in gleaning design insight from history.

In any case... I do think that, ultimately, the Jerrycan was more useful to the allied forces. The copycat designs were instrumental in the invasion of Europe, which pushed supply logistics far harder than the blitz ever did.

FWIW "The Blitz" is used exclusively to refer to German bombing of towns and cities after they'd lost the Battle of Britain (a battle for Air Superiority over England, which would have considerably improved prospects for German invasion if it came to that), and is never short for "Blitzkrieg" (the Germans never called it this) a fighting style of very rapid advances allowing German forces to overwhelm their European enemy before they were properly organised to defend.

So, the Blitz didn't rely on Jerrycans at all, planes leave from and, if they aren't destroyed, return to your airbases, which have plenty of fuel and refuelling apparatus in place.

My bad, that's what I get for firing off a response on my phone. I appreciate the correction!

Two problems with that thinking: a) even if you think you have a perfect design, you are still at "great, but not perfect", and b) there's no strategic advantage to doing less well than your opponent. In trying to avoid the later state where your enemy catches up to you, you're reducing or eliminating the initial advantage, which is probably not what you want.

I'm more thinking that there are diminishing returns which are hard to justify when the cost of stealing a design remains fairly flat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com