> This is possibly the best article on software design I have ever read. I would go as far as suggesting that it gets added to the YC recommended reading page.
I definitely believe that visual communications is a huge part of good software design.
But AFAICT there's a kind of capability rot associated with an awful lot of software where "don't make me think" has been shallowly translated "don't let me think" with such wild and popular abandon that I'd guess the majority of professionals using it either don't appreciate the difference or are part of organizational cultures that disincentivize appreciating it (or user-focused design at all).
And there's a lot of conceptual overlap there between "focus on graphic design not interaction design" and "make decisions for the user."
I don't find the division into categories Information software, Manipulation software, and then supposedly Communication software = Information software + Manipulation software that helpful. For me, creating is developing a model of something and making it explicit; I don't see this adequately represented in any of these three categories.
Hopefully on-device LLMs can use private history to predict user context.
> .. information software that learns from history is still rare. Typically, users can only hope for last-value prediction, if that. Most software wakes up each day with a fresh case of amnesia ... software that doesn’t learn from history dooms users to repeat it. And repeat it they will — tediously explaining their context, mouse click by mouse click, keystroke by keystroke, wasted hour by wasted hour. This is called interactivity.
12 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread2009 - 13 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600799
And a dozen other submissions over the years including the first submission 17 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8120
With a single comment:
> This is possibly the best article on software design I have ever read. I would go as far as suggesting that it gets added to the YC recommended reading page.
- Most software design should focus on information graphic design, not interaction design
- The case study of Amazon’s book listings drives that point home
- Try using sentences to describe settings rather than have a list of toggles (illustrated with his BART widget)
- Instead of requiring interaction, make decisions for the user based on context
But AFAICT there's a kind of capability rot associated with an awful lot of software where "don't make me think" has been shallowly translated "don't let me think" with such wild and popular abandon that I'd guess the majority of professionals using it either don't appreciate the difference or are part of organizational cultures that disincentivize appreciating it (or user-focused design at all).
And there's a lot of conceptual overlap there between "focus on graphic design not interaction design" and "make decisions for the user."
> .. information software that learns from history is still rare. Typically, users can only hope for last-value prediction, if that. Most software wakes up each day with a fresh case of amnesia ... software that doesn’t learn from history dooms users to repeat it. And repeat it they will — tediously explaining their context, mouse click by mouse click, keystroke by keystroke, wasted hour by wasted hour. This is called interactivity.