Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maire | Hacker News Reader

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Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer.

GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.

When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.

> Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The real issue, unfortunately, is worse: It's a lack of empathy for the user.

Usability need no explaining to an engineer. You have your 500$ mechanical keyboard. You your carefully crafted .vscode and you lust for that e-ink monitor.

Unfortunately, you don't understand that you are different to the average user of the thing you are working on and in that thing you are working on, your job is to serve the user.

To be fair, this is not a struggle unique to engineers, far from it. Professions, that is very adamant about conveying this during training are teachers, therapists (and I explicitly don't include physicians, although they can be) and, to a wildly varying degree because of what the job means nowadays, designers.

People working in most other professions default suck at this.

This is also true. I get into arguments all the time with people who start by saying "Oh it's easy" and then after I prove that it's hard, say "I don't care that it's hard for other people". It's just a sort of blindness for your internal shortcutting of "I don't care that it's hard for others, it's easy for me" to "It's easy to everyone that matters" to "It's easy for everyone".

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