[HN Gopher] Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
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Want a killer product? Become more opinionated
Author : adilaijaz
Score : 249 points
Date : 2021-06-02 20:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (adilaijaz.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adilaijaz.medium.com)
| some1else wrote:
| 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].
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...
| hexa22 wrote:
| 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.
| some1else wrote:
| > Word actually offers a solution with the "paste without
| formatting" but it's lost behind the million features of
| word.
|
| Yes. The Tweet was advocating for making that the default
| paste logic.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| As an anecdote, Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev was created for
| a very specific kind of person and has been cracking along well
| because of it.
| adilaijaz wrote:
| Product conventions create an opinionated product; opinionated
| product creates user delight; user delight creates business
| success.
| jhunter1016 wrote:
| 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.
| a4isms wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming
| games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing
| third party providers of it and making their own. Not to
| fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
| CharlesW wrote:
| How you feel about this completely legitimate, but it
| simply means that you are not the customer they're serving.
| JohnStrangeII wrote:
| Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even
| manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones.
| It's mostly a matter of marketing.
|
| If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas,
| and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective
| because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the
| end, no matter how much they buy.
| arbuge wrote:
| This goes some way to explaining why municipal and government
| software is such an unusable pile of crap for the most part.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to
| serve other municipalities.
|
| That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can
| just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons
| (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one
| particular button on the right instead of the left), get to
| use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application
| (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts,
| want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
|
| They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they
| spec out leads to a messy pile.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > as you can just bill them more
|
| I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite
| experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and
| while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had
| authority to authorize a single dollar more for the
| project.
|
| It probably depends on the project and more likely the
| people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given
| in all situations.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot
| of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of
| wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back
| some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors,
| etc.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'll be honest, because most people who work for
| municipalities and other governments are not the best and
| brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because
| that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons,
| without much critical thinking.
| js8 wrote:
| My company is somehow big on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking, and I feel like
| the lack of product/engineering people being opinionated is one
| of its main flaws.
| bullen wrote:
| I still prefer Ant to Maven because with Ant it does what I tell
| it to do and nothing more.
|
| Maven is too slow and I cannot change it.
| anon_christian wrote:
| "Opinionativeness is the lust of conquering" Augustine
| hermannj314 wrote:
| 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.
| pranau wrote:
| 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?
| newbie578 wrote:
| Easy, Apple has a cult following, Amazon doesn't.
| teekert wrote:
| I wouldn't like if I would specifically keep my Samsung Smart
| TV offline because Samsung themselves advice not to talk
| about sensitive things in front of the telly [0], and then
| finding out that it did go online, via my neighbor's helpful
| Alexa... No thank you.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31296188
| pranau wrote:
| Are there any indications that the Sidewalk network can be
| used to relay other than device control information?
| teekert wrote:
| Maybe not, but as always it comes down to trust. And I
| trust Apple to be more diligent with my iPhone's AirTag
| locating capabilities than Amazon is with their ability
| to help any device get online.
|
| Amazon makes things cheap and easy but not always in ways
| agree with.
|
| As a counter Example, Canonical got some critique with
| their "telemetry in the installer", but if you ask me,
| they did it in the nicest way possible: They told
| everyone that they want some data to focus developers'
| efforts where it counts and they let me inspect the json
| object I was about to send them, so I trust them and sent
| it to them with a smile.
| pranau wrote:
| Thanks, that makes sense. Eventually, it does come down
| to trust then. I was under the impression that there was
| a technical reason as to why Amazon Sidewalk is worse
| than Find My.
| smoldesu wrote:
| In all fairness, there are several ways to transmit
| arbitrary information on the AirTag protocol. The overall
| reason why people trust Apple with Airtags/Find My is
| because they're too big to fail. Everyone has already
| come to terms with the fact that iCloud owns their
| photos, iTunes owns their music... what's the difference
| if they also have your location data?
| giobox wrote:
| I agree with this, but I'd add that if you have already
| trusted Amazon enough to purchase and run 24/7 with full
| access to your home network their remotely controlled and
| configured internet microphone, drawing the line at this
| feature seems a little odd to me.
|
| If you own an Echo device and used it prior to this
| feature you had already granted a large degree (relative
| to this feature) of trust to Amazon anyway. It reminds me
| a little of people who swear they will never use an Echo
| device due to concerns about eavesdropping but happily
| carry an internet microphone equiped smartphone
| everywhere.
| robotshmobot wrote:
| Sometimes people just need a final straw.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Ofcouras not, they will just add it next week and you
| will have 2 hours to opt out
|
| We need laws against this shit
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean is this any different than a rogue appliance
| connecting to your neighbors open Wi-Fi or just partnering
| with a cellular network?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Thank you fpr letting me know. This is incredulous - 1984
| where tv watches you, has come, without communism, and
| noone has noticed.
| [deleted]
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I'll grant that the outrage against Sidewalk does seem to be
| worse, but there are at least some of us who dislike both. I
| have Find My turned off on my iPhone.
| wyager wrote:
| The airtags model is completely different. Much more
| restricted, secure, and private.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Apple's Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal
| praise
|
| That wasn't my impression. I saw plenty of criticism on HN.
| np- wrote:
| 1) A big thing is trust - people trust Apple to keep their
| data secure much more than they trust Amazon, especially when
| you contrast both company's main business model.
|
| 2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a
| feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition
| was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost
| phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags
| you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story
| where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it
| in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better
| PR.
|
| 3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of
| users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point
| of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with
| like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our
| wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile
| functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_
| as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the
| move and could be anywhere.
|
| Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's
| "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that
| there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a
| lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work
| is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous
| beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
|
| In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to
| personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In
| Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon
| that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be
| your house.
| kuu wrote:
| I guess some of the reasons are that Sidewalk is:
|
| - For a product that was already owned and did not need it
| until now
|
| - Activated by default, as optional opt-out instead of opt-in
| geoah wrote:
| Isn't it the same with airtags? Your iphone will forward
| data about other people's airtags as long as you have
| upgraded to the latest ios. You can opt-out, but you need
| to know about it first. Same deal I think with sidewalk.
| [deleted]
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| You're right, it is.
|
| I think it comes down to trust and a track record of
| commitment to privacy.
|
| Also IMO apple handled the PR for airtags very well.
| pranau wrote:
| I don't own an Amazon smart device and I don't think I ever
| will so I cannot comment on whether there is actually a
| need for a feature like Sidewalk.
|
| Find My is also opt-out instead of opt-in
| risyachka wrote:
| The funny thing is - if Apple made Find My opt-in - most
| users would chose not to use their device for Find My,
| though it benefits them all and hardly has a downside.
|
| The sheer fact of asking the user to opt-in automatically
| decreases opt-in rate a lot (like a LOT), even if that
| tech is super good. It is way easier to dismiss a dialog
| than to think what it even does.
| risyachka wrote:
| Just curious - has there been an opt-in rate more than at least
| 30% in anything at all? Literally any tech or feature.
| dathinab wrote:
| 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.
| cbsmith wrote:
| "forcing" isn't the right word though. They do have an opt-
| out. Making it an opt-out vs. an opt-in is very much "the
| former".
| dathinab wrote:
| Given that most people won't even know what is happening
| without their consent it's not that different from forcing.
|
| Opt-out is NOT consent, consent requires you do know about
| it, at least somewhat understand it and then "say yes".
| Opt-out it's more like forcing with a way to defend
| yourself.
| cbsmith wrote:
| I didn't say that opt-out is consent... and no opt-out is
| opt-out, and forcing is forcing.
|
| Can you imagine how silly it would sound to talk about
| all the "forcing" that MacOS and Windows do that you can
| change by going in to settings and changing it? Indeed,
| Apple has famously made tons of decisions for their users
| about what the reasonable defaults might be, and is
| _praised_ for this; no one calls it _forcing_.
|
| I get it. I don't like the defaults either. That doesn't
| mean you can just slap on whatever word has negative
| connotations and say that's what is happening.
| j45 wrote:
| Default opt in to all changes could be Amazon's self
| interested and opinionated position.
|
| The comment above can also be an opinionated response as
| well.
|
| Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a
| mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow
| customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less
| likely to leave, especially influential power users.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but
| people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless)
| data and feedback without a vision for what the product is.
| They become so obsessed about whether they could _[implement
| this feature /expand to more markets/get more big
| clients/earn more revenue]_ according to X data ( _" because
| SCIENCE!"_) that they never stop to think whether they
| should.
|
| IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products:
| by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate
| measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That
| doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be
| working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down
| attempts from other departments that would degrade the
| product, even if that means passing up short term gains that
| look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I just cancelled my Prime as well. Too far. And I don't even
| have their hardware.
| pier25 wrote:
| I've never understood this Amazon Sidewalk thing.
|
| 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?
| kersplody wrote:
| It enables Amazon devices to transparently connect to amazon
| with near zero user configuration as long as the device is
| within range of an authorized AP or another sidewalk device
| owned by anyone. This makes Amazon devices to "just work" in
| more places and most users will love it because they don't
| know and/or don't care about the privacy and network security
| implications.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| It uses much longer range radios (900 mhz range) to blanket
| areas where most home routers don't reach.
|
| Comcast does the same thing but with standard Wifi with their
| routers, with some hidden SSIDs you can't opt out of (Xfinity
| Home etc.)
| SergeAx wrote:
| > easy for the average user
|
| 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.
| Torwald wrote:
| What grates me with these situations is that they have my data,
| which is one thing, but I don't have access to that data!
| hosteur wrote:
| In eu you do as per gdpr
| criddell wrote:
| What grates me is that I can't turn it off by saying "Alexa,
| turnoff sidewalk". They make you go into the app and dig for
| it. IMHO, you should be able to access all of the settings
| via voice.
| dgb23 wrote:
| > 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...
| fnimick wrote:
| Unfortunately, companies that don't extract maximum revenue
| from their customers/workers get outcompeted and put out of
| business by those that do.
| chrischattin wrote:
| Treating customers, suppliers, and employees with fairness,
| dignity, and respect is a competitive ADVANTAGE in the long
| term. You might make a quick buck in the short term doing
| otherwise, but you'll lose out over the long term.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I hear that often but is it really true?
|
| There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to
| medium ones, who provide quality services and products and
| have earned the trust of their customers, workers and
| partners over the years without screwing them over left and
| right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in
| regards to environmental issues on top of all of this.
|
| Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a
| bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche.
|
| Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts
| people into positions where they have overwhelming levels
| of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this
| leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an
| unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| 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.
| cma wrote:
| Can you opt out of Apple's similar thing for airtags?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://www.macworld.com/article/347243/how-to-opt-out-of-
| th...
| cma wrote:
| So both are opt out. Which one is worse?
| pdpi wrote:
| The one that lets my neighbour look up kiddy porn over my
| connection.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I get the anger about Sidewalk, but this is absolutely
| not a thing you can do with it.
|
| Sidewalk isn't a wifi network that people can just
| connect to, it's a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long
| range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-
| registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an
| endpoint in AWS.
|
| Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary
| web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly
| slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how
| much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN
| immediately traceable to their AWS account.
| jiofih wrote:
| Amazon. Apple's system doesn't use much of your bandwidth
| or have anyone else's data going through your device
| (it's completely anonymous).
| pranau wrote:
| Can you please explain how Apple's Find My is anonymous
| while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My
| collects device location information through other
| iPhones and then upload them to Apple's cloud where it
| can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a
| privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers. In
| the case of Amazon, they state that all the device
| information being relayed through your device is
| encrypted and capped at 80kbps.
|
| I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the
| other isn't.
| jiofih wrote:
| Sidewalk is carrying all kinds of data from other users.
| You have absolutely no idea what. It's a loosely defined
| system that Amazon controls remotely at their will. The
| encryption stops you from snooping like any other TLS
| traffic, but Amazon itself is the receiver on the other
| end. And it piggybacks on your own internet connection -
| 80Kbps is a _huge_ amount of data.
|
| Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to
| anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple
| for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the
| entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look
| completely different to me.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > You have absolutely no idea what. It's a loosely
| defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their
| will.
|
| s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag
| protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both
| are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.
| wyager wrote:
| We know exactly what goes in an airtag message. It's very
| limited. https://positive.security/blog/send-my
| smoldesu wrote:
| The article you just linked is about an exploit that
| allows you to propagate arbitrary data through the Airtag
| network, which is the _exact opposite_ of knowing what
| goes into an Airtag message.
| wyager wrote:
| Actually read the article. It's so bandwidth-limited as
| to be useless
| rodiger wrote:
| afaik it is a relay system so it does have other's data
| possibly going through. That being said the information
| being passed is less comprehensive.
| amelius wrote:
| Instead of "opinionated", perhaps this word is a better fit:
| Paternalistic (adjective) (of people in authority)
| making decisions for other people rather than letting them take
| responsibility for their own lives
|
| Source: Cambridge Dictionary
| Torwald wrote:
| "Opinionated software" is a established term, hence the use I
| guess.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| > 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".
| anoncake wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with having good defaults, just with
| not being able to override them. "Opinionated" usually means
| latter.
| corty wrote:
| Not just usually, opinionated means exactly paternalistic:
| "opinionated" is the opposite of "configureable". That is a
| basic tenet of the article.
| bobthechef wrote:
| That makes it sound easy. Overriding means the capacity to
| be overriden. I.e., if you can change the default, then it
| presupposed that you have a mechanism for dealing with
| various options PLUS some other options. That's additional
| work.
| anoncake wrote:
| Yes, you need to implement a configuration mechanism, but
| you almost always do anyway.
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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.
| mattacular wrote:
| I want to paste without formatting sometimes though?
| teekert wrote:
| 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.
|
| Other than this, I agree with the premise.
| ccity88 wrote:
| 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".
| fnord77 wrote:
| yes, lots of philosophy and little actual science (testing
| hypotheses etc)
| hellomyguys wrote:
| Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some
| degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps'
| buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are
| considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You
| don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| 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.
| passivate wrote:
| 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 :)
| Jenk wrote:
| 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.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| >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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| "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.
| scriptstar wrote:
| 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.
| rakoo wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| anti-nazi wrote:
| that's not good advice at all
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > 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.
| II2II wrote:
| 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).
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| And that's a pretty low bar for power users BTW.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| GSuite (and probably O365) are probably actually pretty good
| examples of opinionated vs. the all the options offline MS
| Office.
|
| Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite.
| We're probably generally described as heavy users but not
| _power_ users, i.e. we don 't need the features that only a
| few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more
| streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a
| win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not
| complicated docs.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are
| winning at software shops /s
|
| Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in
| the past 5 years writing software and running product. The
| only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is
| finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're
| dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with
| anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners
| have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm
| to switch.
| will4274 wrote:
| Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells
| political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of
| software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking
| one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level
| to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow -
| seems like catering to people who have a political issue
| with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to
| interface with their office software.
|
| Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech
| startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real
| estate financing hears many complaints from their
| clientele.
| Jenk wrote:
| Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my
| other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite
| supports _more_ than MS does online.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| I did mean the real local word etc not the shite online
| versions.
|
| Main thing is structured documents tracking changes, macros
| to automate processes.
| Jenk wrote:
| 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.
| bwb wrote:
| I always feel with titles like this I want to respond back with
| one of the following: 1. Maybe or 2. Until it is too much x aka
| "opinionated"
|
| But, still a good read :)
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| config_yml wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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".
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _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.
| mojuba wrote:
| 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.
| anoncake wrote:
| 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.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's fine, then they won't use it.
|
| Narrowing down your target market is marketing 101.
| digitalbase wrote:
| Isn't having an opinion + figuring out how to match that w
| customer needs exactly what product management is?
|
| I mean any product manager has to make a lot of decisions.
| Having an opinion does help in making decisions
| onion2k wrote:
| _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.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though,
| and that creates bloat and complexity.
|
| I don't think one has to lead to the other.
| Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable
| (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If
| it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of
| opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more
| opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users
| don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and
| extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with
| things like Pocket that nobody asked for.
|
| Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they
| should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
| xrd wrote:
| Killer product is such an amorphous phrasing.
|
| 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.
| terminalserver wrote:
| This article made no sense. The example were unrelated to the
| thesis being put forward. It had nothing to do with making a
| killer product.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| No.
| aantix wrote:
| 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.
| mistercow wrote:
| 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.
| ako wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| 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.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| this. the sheer volume of times i have to paste text into a
| notepad or a URL bar or just any space that will lose the
| formatting, just to re-copy/paste it into some (usually MS)
| product that wants to preserve it is way higher than it
| should be.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| I think you make a good point here:
|
| * 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.
| joe_fishfish wrote:
| 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.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| 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.
| akarma wrote:
| 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.
| dkersten wrote:
| 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.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| 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.
| swiley wrote:
| >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.)
| permo-w wrote:
| 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
| derefr wrote:
| In real Desktop Publishing software, text (content) and its
| style (layout) are separate -- the text usually comes in from
| an external source (e.g. a file on an SMB share; a document
| in a CMS) and can be updated independently of the layout.
|
| The linked text format is usually Rich Text (RTF). This
| allows a lot of things, but the Desktop Publishing tools only
| _interpret_ the tags for bold, italics, underline, and a few
| other things (strikeout, subscript, etc.) All other styling
| in the linked text, they throw away.
|
| This is precisely because, as you say, those specific styles
| actually denote meaning. They're something the _writer_ adds.
| No other styling is used from the linked text, because none
| of the other styling is the writer 's _job_.
|
| All other styling is instead applied to the block(s) within
| the layout where the text gets embedded into. It's the layout
| designer that gets to decide the font, size, spacing, etc.
| for the text. Those attributes aren't stored with the text;
| they're stored with the layout.
|
| To me, this makes _far_ more sense as a workflow, even if you
| 're a single author. I constantly wish that "word processors"
| had restructured and absorbed ideas from Desktop Publishing
| software when it came about. Instead, we got the garbled
| hybrid: you can have "document styles" like Title, Heading,
| Body, List Item, etc.; but they are essentially markup,
| moving around with the text (rather than there being any
| concept of an "section of the document" that gets styled,
| that text can be moved into/out of, and where the styles of
| that section will apply to the text only while it remains
| inside that section, such that moving text out of that area
| doesn't copy the styles of the section, only the styles of
| the text.)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
|
| Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/copy-
| cleaner/id1521489777?mt=1...
| thejosh wrote:
| Isn't that ctrl+shift+v? It is for Linux and I think windows
| too?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Yeah, but who knows that? Apparently the author of the
| article doesn't know that.
|
| Anyway, my app lets you see what's in the clipboard and
| adjust how much you want it cleaned.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The simpler keystroke should do the more common operation. My
| guess is 90-99% of the time, users want to paste text and
| match the format to the existing doc or app. Therefore, cmd+v
| should strip formatting if done according to that rule.
| cuddlybacon wrote:
| On Mac, the apps I happened to check use cmd+shift+alt+v.
|
| I checked MS Teams, Outlook, Mail.app, and Safari.
| polote wrote:
| 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 ?
| jhaile wrote:
| 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.
| tremoloqui wrote:
| 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.
| dchuk wrote:
| 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.
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