Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration).
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
I would argue there is a difference between "being opinionated about how to implement a use-case" + "being opinionated about focusing on a small set of use-cases" and "forcing new use-cases on the user".
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
> I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
I feel like, supporting them or not with their store, it was always a no-brainer to not purchase smart, cloud connected doorbells and wire-tape speakers and litter my house with them.
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
"Why this HN comment is correct on design", "Why said revered HN comment is incorrect on design", "HN comment creates cult"
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
>This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
Right, in a way I think this opening tweet just undercuts the entire argument. It's a simplistic description of a problem, which the body of the article returns with a simplistic sort of solution.
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
In every functional department, there is some amount of this - UX folks want to update the design language, advertising needs a fresh campaign for the new version, devs want to move to some new framework, and/or rewrite etc. Everyone thinks their actions are well justified - except for the user who rarely benefits :)
I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, the formatting is completely wrong.
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
I almost never want paste to preserve any formatting, because I've almost never seen it work perfectly. If I need to reformat it anyway, I'd rather not have to clean up its messes first.
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
I suspect that a more nuanced approach could suit general users the best. Retain boldness, italics and underlining, change to fit target colour and font.
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
In my case, I almost always want paste to override most formatting — if I copy something from a website, I want it to match my formatting.
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
Not only that, but I think the "average user" probably has lesser taste than the tweeter. They see a blue font on the text they are copying from some random web page, they expect a blue font when they paste it. This would be especially important to the average user if they are copying a lot of text with bullets and headers.
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
So if you make paste match the formatting of the destination not the source, both you and the tweeter are happy. Make a funky shortcut to override this if you want but this should be the default.
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
Is there an option in Word to change the default paste? I think that's what many of these opinions boil down to, and while I imagine there's hundreds of opinions on even the smallest thing I suspect many of these large pain points could be solved relatively easily if those in charge had a vision like the article is suggesting.
I agree, I often copy and paste to a basic no-formatting text editor and back just to clear formatting, eg before pasting to an email or whatever. I rarely want formatting retained when pasting to/from emails. Same when copying from a website, as someone else here mentioned.
>I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting.
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
I use copy/paste in powerpoint explicitly with the intent to copy over the formatting of the original to the destination deck. Easiest way to add a theme to an existing deck.
> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
In the context of this article, "average user" and "power user" does not have much meaning. Take the copy-paste example. One group of users is going to find paste-with-formatting more practical while another group of users is going to find paste-without-formatting more useful. The distinction has more to do with the task at hand than the ability of the user. Consider someone working withing a document or within a set of documents for a project. Losing formatting means they will have to go back to recreate it. Now consider someone pulling information from various sources. Maintaining formatting means a loss of consistency in the destination, so it is less desirable.
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.
If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus).
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion.
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
It probably matters how this opinion is formed. Often it’s formed first by your own pain, and if you start talk to people and do user research you might discover that you’re on to something.
>> Opinionated products are better than flexible products.
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
This is there the Proctor & Gamble branding approach to products begins to make sense. In development, there is one code base, but multiple configurations of build. In the market the company has a "product line" of software, each opinionated towards a different work flow. Similar to being multi-lingual, this is multi-opinionazation to address different process styles.
Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.)
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
> Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”.
I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.)
In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts.
In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app.
The place for opinion in your product is in its configuration. Applications need to be flexible, otherwise they are useless to anyone who doesn't share your opinion.
Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time.
Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.
It has been a long time since programs were written in a sane way: with lots of functionality so that experienced users can figure out a routine speed and become blazingly fast. Modern computing has decided to make people dumb. They like them like that, mindless drones who can only scroll and press YES. In life you get what you pay for, and right now we get users who don't care because they don't know, and big tech keeps feeding them more of the same.
When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.
It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
The two are not exclusive; in fact, "convention" means that out of all the possibilities a certain set is chosen and used by default. It is not possible to have a "convention" if there is no "configuration", otherwise it's just a limited set of features.
What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
AKA support doing the entire work, and pay attention to what defaults you choose. Don't stop at the first part.
He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it.
I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
I understand where the author is coming from, and that it tends to work sometimes, blablabla, but if I saved a dollar every time an "opinionated" application, framework, library, or programming language appeared on Github, I would have likely saved for a slightly used Toyota by now.
Regarding the "paste without formatting by default" opinion:
- Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting.
- Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting.
Other remarks:
- Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research.
- There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1].
There are certainly two use cases here. One is pasting complex blocks where you want the whole thing to copy over. And the other is copying text out of an email or website where you want it treated as dumb text.
Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
This article mix a bit of everything. There are no rules to create a killer product. That's the whole purpose of the product management domain.
Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated.
But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?
Maybe Microsoft did the user research and knows that most users want to preserve formatting when they paste in text. You prefer it to match style when pasting, but how do you know most users don't prefer it the way it is now?
User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.
All of my favorite products are completely unopinionated. Of course, aligning yourself with a specific audience will move units, but it won't make your product any better or worse. The only way you can actually improve your product is by becoming less opinionated and listening to the community who uses your product. Oftentimes their insight will be much more valuable than just "being opinionated".
This is the actual key to building MVPs. A good MVP provides exactly 1 way to do something impactful for a certain target customer base. If you have alternative paths/options/configurations, you built too much before testing in the market.
> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
It's usually how corporate programming languages are designed: they have corporate environments in mind which is the exact opposite of hacking. Strict standards, predictability and low bars to entry. Hence opinionated approach even to source code formatting and pretty much everything else. Java, C# and Go are all examples of this. Swift is kind of there too, though it's probably the least opinionated language of them all, the corporate ones. (Some would say C# is also kind of okay. Probably)
But the point of the article was a bit broader. Opinionated products can build a strong devoted userbase around them. The question is only how reasonable your opinions are.
An example from Apple's UI: the way multiple windows of the same app are cycled on the desktop with Cmd-` is absolutely beyond any logic. It tries to be smart but makes cycling so unpredictable that it becomes practically useless. It's probably even worse than MS Word's copy/paste one (actually I'm not sure which is worse).
This is someone's opinion and I can't imagine anyone on Earth except the creator of this logic being happy with it. It's an edge case that illustrates the point: your opinion should resonate with enough people to sustain your business, that's all.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions.
Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
Being opinionated is okay if your product is interoperable with others. Then people have the choice between your product and its potential replacements so having choices within your product is not as important. I guess Go is okay because we can afford multiple library ecosystems and programs written in different languages can interoperate.
Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
In order to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgement. Value judgements take courage. Value judgements require saying this is more important, these types of users will not be included.
> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives
It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
I don't really understand the objection. The article is only meaningful as a response to those who try to make a product that is everything to everyone, thus producing a product for nobody. Besides, unless you only buy bespoke, made-to-order products design in consultation with you, anything with a design has already been decided potentially in a way that you dislike but others don't.
hermannj314|4 years ago
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
dathinab|4 years ago
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
dgb23|4 years ago
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
loudtieblahblah|4 years ago
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
pranau|4 years ago
Torwald|4 years ago
pier25|4 years ago
The vast majority of people already have internet at home and phone plans.
Also, what's in it for Amazon? How does it profit from something like this?
SubiculumCode|4 years ago
SergeAx|4 years ago
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
cma|4 years ago
risyachka|4 years ago
ccity88|4 years ago
giancarlostoro|4 years ago
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
Jenk|4 years ago
philosopher1234|4 years ago
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
whatgoodisaroad|4 years ago
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
passivate|4 years ago
fnord77|4 years ago
mistercow|4 years ago
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
throwawayboise|4 years ago
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
permo-w|4 years ago
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
akarma|4 years ago
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
MetaWhirledPeas|4 years ago
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
joe_fishfish|4 years ago
cuddlybacon|4 years ago
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
castlecrasher2|4 years ago
dkersten|4 years ago
swiley|4 years ago
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
ako|4 years ago
MattGaiser|4 years ago
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
II2II|4 years ago
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
Jenk|4 years ago
Mauricebranagh|4 years ago
Google cloud is ok for "formatting your Christmas card list in Norwegian" to use a literary allusion.
But when you come to writing specs and reports used by multiple teams word /excel is still by far the best solution.
jhunter1016|4 years ago
a4isms|4 years ago
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
arbuge|4 years ago
jfengel|4 years ago
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
config_yml|4 years ago
phkahler|4 years ago
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
bsenftner|4 years ago
teekert|4 years ago
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
Other than this, I agree with the premise.
resoluteteeth|4 years ago
I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
gwbas1c|4 years ago
In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts.
In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app.
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-cleaner/id1521489777?mt=1...
thejosh|4 years ago
terminalserver|4 years ago
tremoloqui|4 years ago
Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time.
Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.
xrd|4 years ago
If the author meant best product, I agree.
If the author meant best selling, I'm not sure I agree.
MS Word needs to have all those configuration options for IT to check their boxes AND write the enterprise sized check.
If you are making a consumer app, this all seems like good advice. But I'm not sure it is good general advice.
cblconfederate|4 years ago
When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.
adilaijaz|4 years ago
scriptstar|4 years ago
rakoo|4 years ago
What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
marcosdumay|4 years ago
He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it.
I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
WesolyKubeczek|4 years ago
js8|4 years ago
some1else|4 years ago
- Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting.
- Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting.
Other remarks:
- Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research.
- There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...
hexa22|4 years ago
Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
HermanMartinus|4 years ago
polote|4 years ago
Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated.
But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?
jhaile|4 years ago
User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.
smoldesu|4 years ago
dchuk|4 years ago
rob74|4 years ago
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
mojuba|4 years ago
But the point of the article was a bit broader. Opinionated products can build a strong devoted userbase around them. The question is only how reasonable your opinions are.
An example from Apple's UI: the way multiple windows of the same app are cycled on the desktop with Cmd-` is absolutely beyond any logic. It tries to be smart but makes cycling so unpredictable that it becomes practically useless. It's probably even worse than MS Word's copy/paste one (actually I'm not sure which is worse).
This is someone's opinion and I can't imagine anyone on Earth except the creator of this logic being happy with it. It's an edge case that illustrates the point: your opinion should resonate with enough people to sustain your business, that's all.
weird-eye-issue|4 years ago
Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
onion2k|4 years ago
Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
digitalbase|4 years ago
I mean any product manager has to make a lot of decisions. Having an opinion does help in making decisions
anoncake|4 years ago
Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
aantix|4 years ago
bwb|4 years ago
But, still a good read :)
mattacular|4 years ago
bullen|4 years ago
Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.
unknown|4 years ago
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ryanmcbride|4 years ago
anon_christian|4 years ago
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anti-nazi|4 years ago
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amelius|4 years ago
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RyEgswuCsn|4 years ago
It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
bobthechef|4 years ago
Torwald|4 years ago