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Comment by unstyledcontent | Hacker News Reader

Funny to read because Musk famously said "Any product that needs a manual to work is broken." It's a mantra that has guided my work in UX and my design thinking overall. It was even a quote I had on my personal website many years ago, back when Musk had credibility.

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He also said to remove things until it breaks. That doesn’t work for ux imho since “well it technically still works” isn’t going to lead to a great experience.

“…and then add back the last piece.” Is the rest of the quote. This points to a lack of QA or dogfooding in Tesla, not an issue with that strategy.

The problem is the line to breakage. “Technically still works” doesn’t lead to adding back. It hasn’t broken yet.

In ux technically still works is a very low bar.

> This points to a lack of QA or dogfooding in Tesla

Like when they get new third party firmware that takes 36 hours to run the test suite, so they just flash a car with it, and "take it out for a quick spin", much to the third parties consternation.

Yeah, fairly sure that came from Jobs or someone well before Musk.

> The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel – one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

> They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

(It didn’t last; since MacOS X or possibly before macOS has supported a decent set of emacs-y keystrokes as part of the UI)

I did a quick search and couldn't find any evidence that confirms the quote came from Musk. Its just one of those quotes that, whether or not he really said it, has been attributed to him. Seems like this sort of thing happens to quotes by famous people quite a bit.

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