
Good design for Humans - uzzabid
https://uxplanet.org/design-for-humans-e8fc7924286d
======
kinsomo
> Good Design is simple.

> A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can
> understand it within ten seconds.

I think this has principle been taken _way_ too far, and it certainly
shouldn't be regarded as a commandment. I, the user, am _not_ always going to
be _a beginner in an emergency_ , so why restrict me like that forever? Good
design shouldn't be _unnecessarily_ complex, but sometimes you need a complex
good design to have a _powerful_ good design.

This podcast has a good discussion of this:
[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-
men/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/)

~~~
bluGill
That depends: will your users actually advance beyond the beginner level. If
your complex design turns them off they won't learn and never advance unless
forced to.

However it is important to remember that if your product is successful the
vast majority of your users will not be beginners and so you need to make sure
their experience is good.

~~~
theoh
Alan Kay said it: "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be
possible."

For example, something like Twitter fails massively here. It's easy to use as
a novice, but there's no progression (I know that sounds like a concept from
games, but it seems applicable). I want to be able to see who, of all the
users I've seen, listed, followed, is active these days. I want to be able to
draw on other people's list of follows to extract suggestions of who might be
good to follow & is actively tweeting (not dumb automatic suggestions,
please).

It would be so amazing to be able to "bin" Twitter users (across all of my
lists, follows etc.) by how active they are. So the excessively chatty ones
can be browsed when I have time, and the ones that post almost never—well,
when they do, I see it.

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sarreph
If anyone wants a nice (8 min) video to watch — in the same vein — this one[0]
is a great intro by Dieter Rams and the man he influenced at Apple: Jony Ive.

[0] -
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2oa1m1](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2oa1m1)

(Used to be on YT but I can't find it anymore)

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shatnersbassoon
How is "good design is timeless" helpful advice?

Jones, make me something timeless, or your ass is fired

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bmpafa
I've never understood the 'for humans' bit, though I see it all the time.

Is it a backhanded insult? Ie is the tacit point that design which doesn't
follow whatever guidelines is therefore not built 'for humans'?'

~~~
bluGill
My cat door is badly designed for humans: I can't even figure out how to get
my head through it. My cat can figure it out just fine.

My day job collects data from some sensors and uploads it to another computer.
This computer-computer interface is not for humans, even engineers have
trouble understanding it, but the computer does fine.

Both of the above cases are a design that is not for humans, and the engineers
behind either have no need to consider design for humans.

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Scarbutt
About that factorial code in Clojure, I wish in reality one could write
beautiful recursive code like that without blowing the stack for large inputs,
one of my main grips with Clojure.

~~~
cr__
Sure you can, you just have to make the recursive call explicit:

[https://clojurebridge.github.io/community-
docs/docs/clojure/...](https://clojurebridge.github.io/community-
docs/docs/clojure/recur/)

This has the nice side effect of preventing you from writing a function that
you _think_ will be tail call optimized but really isn’t—the compiler will
yell if your call to `recur` isn’t in tail position.

The code in the article doesn’t have the recursive call in tail position
anyway, so it’s not like other languages would be able to optimize it away.

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mandioca
This article is extremely vague.

~~~
jgh
good design is _smokebomb_

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metalliqaz
Ironic that the page layout of this article is absolute shite... and slow to
boot.

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bauerd
Im eager to read about good design for extraterrestrials

