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179 points joelkesler | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.193s | source
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jhhh ◴[] No.46258932[source]
I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

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PunchyHamster ◴[] No.46260143[source]
> He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs

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stephenlf ◴[] No.46260684[source]
Convention over configuration is a powerful idea. Most people don’t want to twiddle with configs. The power user approach is the way to go.
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1. hulitu ◴[] No.46263784[source]
> Most people don’t want to twiddle with configs.

Most people also don't care about the mothers of programmers. Until, you know, they have to send an SMS using exactly (particular) one of the 2 SIMs present in the phone and the 20 years old app will not let them.