undefined | Better HN

0 pointssavolai3mo ago0 comments

These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question.

Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint.

An equally weird trope us UX practitioners dumbing down UIs. It simply depends on who we are designing for.

As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.

Disclaimer: did my master’s thesis on OSS UX.

0 comments

johnnyanmac3mo ago

>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.

Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.

savolaiOP3mo ago

Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users

https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source...

Product & framework thinkers: Case studies.

https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...

phatskat3mo ago

I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this?

The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse