Good customer experience matters. People remember how they were treated and they will be more loyal to a company that goes the extra mile to give them what they need.
Years ago when I worked at Amazon, leaders made customer experience a priority and empowered us to do what was needed to ensure a good customer experience even if would cost the company more. I am not sure if things are the same there now, but it taught me a lot about how a company's relationship with its customers matters for the company's long-term growth and customer loyalty.
The enshittification trends we see today are the opposite. Companies are all to happy to make quick profits by choosing to put what is best for the company ahead of the customer experience. Customer data is sold and shared. Ads are cramed into every possible space. Customers are opted in to onerous legal agreements and forced arbitration. Dark patterns abound.
Customers notice. Customers remember. And when the circumstances are right they will drop such companies and watch them burn with pleasure. The golden rule still holds and no company is "too big to fail".
All these things matter when you try to build an enduring company instead of the embrace, squeeze, and run strategy. I don't think that happens a lot any more, if we are lucky one company might keep its course for 20 years and then it gets sold or the founder moves on.
I once took a hard look at our user surveys. As a software engineer I’m not really expected to care. All our happiest customers talked about the service experience. All our grumpiest customers talk about the service experience.
None of our users gave two shits about the software. All they cared about was did we solve their problem on that day when they needed us.
That’s when I realized we’re a software-enabled service company. It changed how I prioritize things.
Funny you mention surveys! Businesses have been sending me surveys which are far worse than the service experience was itself. This is not a good move: the service was fine but the survey itself was a truly bad experience both in broad lines and detail. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
I just had an Amazon package stolen from my porch with $500 of items in it that I needed quickly. I reordered everything for delivery next day, and started a chat in the app. The only thing they wanted to know was if I wanted the refund on my credit card or as a gift balance. (I’ve been an Amazon customer since 1997, so that might factor in.)
But on the other hand, the quality of the actual product catalog is now abysmal. Way too many clones of Ali Express items with literally random brand names and scam listings. I still sort of trust “Sold by Amazon” listings, but they’re making it harder to filter on that. So in this area the accounting department is clearly outranking the customer experience department.
Re. product quality: And yet the service still makes a difference - or the entire difference perhaps. Recently two items were botched by Aliexpress for me. Talking to the vendors, the shippers and then Aliexpress was absurdly horrible. These were not expensive products but all of them fought every step of the way to deliver the shittiest experience possible (irrelevant of the products themselves). And 6 months later I still don't have functional parts.
It was entirely up to Aliexpress to lose my business and they did with gusto. Amazon probably sells the same item, just for more money, but they were reinforced as the right balance of price and assurance that I will end up with the item reasonably fast and low-hassle.
Tangential, but the line saying: "smiles are always free" reminds me of the often overlooked cost of emotional labour performed especially by the service industry. We should also acknowledge this small thing.
I am so far removed from this now that it feels foreign to me.
In my house we must have a good attitude or be silent. It's fine to be angry or sad, just no crying or whining. Every request for a hug must be met with a hug.
I expect the emotional exercise to help workout the management of emotions and adjusting of attitude.
Your house sounds a little toxic. I couldn’t tell in your post if you were positive or negative toward this, but it sounds like a denial of human emotion. Why would anyone ban crying? Sounds like the “turn it off” approach from the Book of Mormon.
Emotions are real and to be well managed. There's a time to cry. Working with adults who cry when their work or effort is brought under examination will lead to a toxic work environment.
> In my house we must have a good attitude or be silent.
Having grown up in a house like that and re-learning to express my feelings and being able to empathize with people close to me later in life - I ask you to take a harder look at that stance.
When you put it this way, it seems more reasonable. Obviously you shouldn't reward or validate tantrums. At the same time, however, empathy is an easy way to acknowledge misplaced emotional reactions without encouraging them.
Meeting a tantrum with "I know you don't like the taste of vegetables, but they're an important part of growing up and you must eat them before having sweets." is different from "In this house, you cannot cry if there's no real pain."
There's no fine line between valid responses and manipulation. For manipulators, the pain FEELS real. The pain is a part of a learned behavior. Guiding those feelings instead of making a hard rule cutoff will have better results and build better trust.
On the one hand, I agree that it is important for children to learn that manipulation is not the best way to get the things that they want. On the other hand, I think it is also important for them to learn that they can trust their parents to be there for them when they truly feel they have a problem, even if it isn't physical pain, and even if it is really quite silly. But you don't want them to learn that they can't trust you, because someday they might have problems that aren't silly.
Today it might be "the socks you picked out for me aren't the right color and the boys at school will make fun of them". But tomorrow it might be a developing drinking or drug problem or early signs that a romantic interest is becoming abusive. If they learn they can't bug you about the socks, they might also learn that they can't bug you about those things either.
They're toddlers so discussion about drugs, peer pressure, and other abuse is discussed.
Those are well managed. I practiced tonight with name calling.
After preparing him I insulted my oldest.
I said "you have donkey breath"
I asked if what I said was true. "No." Okay. Now you have power and I have none. Lies cannot hurt you. Insults are lies. No one can harm you with words if you know who you are.
And if you live with a toddler, even those have to exist and are necessary for becoming a healthy being. At least if they are met with understanding by the parents.
They can cry if they have a good reason. Complaining? No. That's not tolerated. Life can be much harder so if they complain their life gets much more difficult and suddenly complaints stop.
No matter what, if they request a hug they get one. Mid punishment? During correction? They want a hug? Absolutely. Love and affection will never be denied.
This sounds like a very bad idea to me. If a request for a hug must be granted, how does one express the real emotional cluster of "I want to hug you"?
Do you think the people you most admire in your own life and in the broader world, both current and historical, have emotional artificiality deeply engrained in them? For me, that is very much not the case.
No - and I would not characterize my lack of interest in this article as disagreement. Labeling the cost of a smile as "free" demonstrates a lack of empathy or breadth of experience that I find distasteful and would prefer not to be part of a readership to.
small things don't show up on p&l reports or a/b tests so the bean counters ignore them. But they have an outsized impact on long term success and people who are really great at what they do sweat the small stuff regardless of the numbers
I recently moved and wanted the post office to forward my mail. I could fill out the physical card or I could go online and fill out a form and pay a $1.10 fee for verification. The fee was small enough that I thought it was worth saving the hassle.
As I write this, the other browser tab for the post office web site is still displaying the 'loading' window with no end in sight after I entered all my info. I guess it is back to doing it the hard way.
This is something Apple does amazingly well. The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish. When you go to open the box, the interface between the bottom and top halves is so perfectly fitted that there’s a weightiness to removing the lid, like it has a seal. It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that, but every time I buy an Apple product I notice it, and I feel like they care about the small things.
I used to be anti-Apple. I used Android or Windows Phone and used Windows or Linux on PC. I thought the extra cost of Apple was a scam. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a company that doesn’t BS me and waste my time.
Windows has ads and malware built into the OS. They charge you for OS upgrades. macOS is just free and ad-free.
The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.
This extends to all their other products and services. I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy. I’ll make that deal all day.
“It’s the small things” has driven Apple design for decades. And it’s a cultural thing, not just the “design department”. I remember back in the mid-90s when I left Apple to work at Microsoft and realized how rare it is to have software developers who view everything through the lens of the end user experience, even if they’re working on the file system or the boot sequence.
Random example: One of the first things I asked when I got there was “why, when you turn on a Windows PC, does it start your user experience by filling the screen with scary gibberish?” That got fixed, but it took many years, partially because of all the coordination needed in the PC ecosystem to do anything, but mostly because nobody really cared all that much.
That ingrained cultural attention to detail is probably the only thing I miss about working there. Too many other tech companies I've worked at just don't care about things they consider "edge cases". Make the "key customer journey" (in other words the happy-path) work and you're done. Is "making it beautiful" in the contract? No? Then don't work on it! Oh, the software doesn't work in landscape mode? P3 bug, we'll fix it later--just ship ship ship. Cheap out and make the casing plastic instead of metal so you can save $0.30 on each device. KPIs! OKRs! metrics! That's all the rest of the industry runs on.
The key is that Apple's product lineup is relatively small. Compare that with e.g. Lenovo, who offer a mindblowing amount of SKUs.
Too many SKUs tend to be correlated with lack of polish and attention to detail. And this comes from someone who prefers Linux, and hence ThinkPad.
Even basic user experiences, such as buying online, are vastly better at Apple. For instance, lenovo.com is handled by a third party in many markets, including the EU.
"Too many SKUs tend to be correlated with lack of polish and attention to detail."
So true. Back a decade ago, Nokia had an enormous amount of SKUs. The firmwares were usually crap, and even the hardware was often subpar. You were obviously not expected to keep the same Symbian smartphone for 5+ years, with the possible exception of the Communicator.
Blackberry, on the other hand, had much fewer SKUs and much better quality.
Yeah, Nokia was the other example that came to mind. They were really capable. When they had a small team focused on a single thing, the Nokia N9, the product they developed was outstanding. However, as an organization, they were totally dysfunctional. Lots of internal fights, politics, etc. I sadly know that well as I interacted a lot with Nokia during the mid 2000s.
The technical talent of their R&D was top notch, and it was sadly wasted by a dysfunctional decision making culture.
People here on the HN tend to value engineers highly and look with disdain on mere managers. They may be right when it comes to the Pointy-Haired Bosses, but good management is a large force multiplier when it comes to the capabilities of any org. And bad management will easily drag a good engineering corps into an endless mire of meaningless work.
Perhaps one needs a specific genetic disposition to even notice good design. I immediately knew what OP meant and I also unpacked Google and Samsung products; it’s not the same thing. Nobody managed to match the way Apples design language is coherent from the moment I open the lid of the box all the way to the UI.
I agree with most of this and generally like Apple stuff, but...
The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish.
...I can’t agree with this. Their boxes are bad! They’re probably really proud of their boxes and think they’re the best, and they do have a nice surface sheen, but they’re bad.
They’re too heavy, too hard to open, near impossible to break down to recycle.
Every time I mention this somebody says “that’s out of date, they’ve really improved recently”, but I’m still seeing the same shitty plastic-infused boxes.
Nintendo are great at doing amazing things with simple cardboard. But there are plenty of other companies doing this now. Apple is well behind the times.
Anecdote: I recently received a new M3 MacBook Pro at work, and the box was 100% recyclable, as well as everything inside of it - instruction manuals (why?) were held together with paper, the power cord had paper around it, and the keyboard/screen separator was also tissue paper.
I'm not denying that there's "plasticized paper" in the box, but as far as I could tell, it was 100% recyclable. As for "breaking down the box", if you flip the lid around to the bottom of the box, and then stack them together, then it saves a good bit of space. But yes the moulded cardboard that held the laptop itself was a pain to get out of the bottom section.
Was it a box you opened via a flap? Or one of those board game style boxes with a close-fitting lid, but manufactured in super heavyweight material with sub-micron snugness of fit? Those look nice but I find them pretty annoying.
> It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that
On the contrary, it costs a LOT to make the box that good.
I can't find it now, but I recall some article posted here about how lots of startups spent insane amounts of money trying to make their packaging as good as Apple's (UHD foam, aluminum milling) when they should be working on their actual product instead.
Their hardware is pretty good, but my overall impression (as a mainly Apple user for 30 years) is just that the experience sucks less.
I don’t actually know, but my impression is that they work harder “under the hood” than on the user facing stuff (which ironically is what I want. But in applications and user interfaces, in many cases they have simply lost their way.
But the physical quality from, as you say, the box to the device does feel like it improves the quality, making up in part for indifferent software.
The double irony here is that I can afford to buy expensive goods, but I won’t buy a Prada pullover any more because the zippers are functionally poor. Apple provides a luxurious experience (a nice box with a lovely watch inside) at a cost that a supermarket worker can afford.
The box? Really? The box does not matter at all. As long as it's not a plastic clamshell, it's good enough. The box just not justify the 2x price over mostly similar products
The box isn't the only justification for the higher price. It's just an example. If apple cares that much about the box, imagine the effort they put into the rest of the hardware, software, and experience.
I'm not an apple user but it is obvious to me that apple users aren't paying more just for the box.
> If apple cares that much about the box, imagine the effort they put into the rest of the hardware, software, and experience
faulty logic. if that was the case, they would intentionally over engineer the box, and leave everything else shitty, in order to save money. the box doesn't matter, the product matters.
But their customers would quickly spot that. In fact, other companies now get close to / match apple's packaging attention to detail, but the rest of the customer experience itself rarely matches that first impression.
So the box matters; and the product; and the customer service. Focussing on just the product is missing the big picture.
The box matters to some people including me, it is, after all, part of the package that you buy, and the most visible one.
That does not mean that I would buy worthless product just because it has a great box. It just means that I appreciate work spent on the box design, too.
Sometimes. Other times not so much. Sometimes they make changes just for the sake of making changes so that they can continue to be the "cool new thing" and in so doing they make things objectively worse. The canonical examples were the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.
Another example is the move away from discoverability and towards hidden controls. In mail.app, for example, the controls to save attachments are hidden until you hover over them. There is no visual clue that they exist until you hover. You either have to know where they are, or stumble upon them by sheer luck. There is, obviously, no manual to clue you in.
windows "ads" are suggestions about what software to use, the same as mac has
>the charge you for os upgrades
not for either 11 or 10
> The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.
you can find plenty on resellers at a considerable fraction of their original price, same as with mac hardware. obviously laptops that were cheap when they were sold don't fetch much.
> I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy.
you pay for a fashion statement. nobodies blaming you for that, but lets be honest
The attention to detail and completeness in the APIs was why I switched to the mac many years ago.
I find that developers who disrespect Apple and use Android, Linux, and Windows, have almost never written a single GUI app with the platform tools. Which I find baffling. The desktop environment is what you interact with all day, why wouldn't you learn to customize it?
I agree with all the points here but I would argue that even Apple experiences have degraded over time. Specially the in store purchase experience degraded miserably. I used to be able to walk into a store and be guided to purchase what I was looking for. Now unless you have a time slot all you can do is schedule one.
Management by key process indicators is such a surreal thing.
Any sane human would notice that it's pointless to go out of your way to make a completely optional interaction with your customers and do it so badly that the customer will leave unsatisfied.
The only way you get that is by building a clearly stupid AI, and subjecting people to its whims. What is a management best practice, so yeah, let's do it.
I do this with UI. In fact, I'm working on a backend dashboard app, right now. Only two of us (nerdy) types will ever use it (maybe more, if things take off, but it's not a priority).
I will be spending at least three days, polishing up a "thermometer" UI, for the date ranges.
The main public app, itself, is a big aggregation of "small things," like custom transition animations, haptics, font choices, etc. The designer was quite adamant about "small things," often complaining about half-pixel (!) offsets.
That's one of the reasons I write native, and also one of the reasons that I'm using UIKit/AutoLayout, because they let me do anything I want (but I don't really like AutoLayout -I'm just good with it).
There are longstanding lessons in this point that predate software.
The US car companies slid in the 60s and 70s by incrementally cutting “irrelevant” costs, like not painting under the seats, cheaper knobs, and the like. Each of these changes was imperceptible but their sum was noticeable. Ironically their own European and especially Japanese competition went the other way: started cheap (so people expected cheap knobs) and then incrementally moved upmarket (“Wow, this cheap car is nicer than I had expected” -> premium market).
Right now the software and especially SaaS worlds seem stuck in their own 1970s Detroit era. Dangerous crap,but with little alternative. I don’t see any “Japanese manufacturers” (to extend the analogy) on the horizon.
Yes and no. You have to do the big things right before you can do the small things right. For instance, every flight I've taken on United in the past 5 years (about 10 or so) has been delayed by a mechanical or scheduling issue. Two of them were delayed to the point where I missed a connection.
I do not fly United anymore.
I my mind (and it's likely largely affected by which airports I frequently fly into) it's Delta, American and Alaska competing for my business. Even though I fly to/through DFW frequently, I try to avoid American because of how enshittified their frequent flyer program has become. How the mighty have fallen.
It is a little thing (the enshittified frequent flyer program), but it keeps me from seriously considering flying American unless there's no alternative.
So yes... small things matter (American) but only because big things have already eliminated potential service providers (United.)
> You have to do the big things right before you can do the small things right.
Doing the small things right is how the big things get done right.
Attention to detail is a culture, and it's as applicable to turning planes around on time as it is to giving premium customers a premium experience, and ordinary customers a surprisingly nice experience.
For me Delta has been the one that is garbage lately. It used to be my favorite but the last five flights have all had something go wrong. When I requested proof of delay for travel insurance it took them ages to send it over. Tbf though a lot of the issues might just be related to their hub being in Atlanta. I suppose it is hard to make such a gigantic airport efficient but wow do I hate Atlanta layovers (and being stuck there overnight when something goes wrong).
Only one I've never had issues with is Alaska but Southwest is usually good, plus their boarding procedure is by far the most organized. Seriously, why do so many airlines just make it a mad-dash by group?
I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that is renowned for "small things."
Their stuff costs a lot more than most, but thousands of customers thought they were worth the premium, and built their entire careers around that equipment.
I think they ran into trouble, when they started selling huge numbers of cheaper items. They made a lot of money, but their brand lost its sheen.
I'm hoping that they are re-establishing their original baseline.
It did teach me to take this stuff seriously, though. It's not a matter of process; it's a matter of culture, and that is something that needs to be developed organically.
I think this is sort of a "barbell effect" thing. Both models can work very well, but you can't really do both, you have to pick your approach and commit to it.
This reminds me of something I realized fairly late (maybe embarrassingly so) into my career. For the longest time, I had all these opinions about how software should be made, that is, universally, and would often feel very frustrated and discontented because nobody seemed to want to do things the right way.
But then I finally realized at some point that what was really going on was that different projects can be very different, and different approaches make more sense for different things. To use extreme examples, a single instance of a typical website-with-some-behavior vs. the control systems for a spacecraft. It's perfectly fine to build that website in a blitz using a CMS or framework with bog standard components and limited testing. But all you're going to manage with that same approach in the latter case is to crash your spacecraft.
But I also realized that where I was going wrong was in trying to impose my desires onto whatever project I happened to be working on, rather than imposing them onto my choice of what to work on. So I started thinking harder about what kinds of things I wanted to do, and being more deliberate in finding those projects, and convincing people to bring me onto them. (With somewhat mixed success of course... career development is hard enough when just going with the flow, let alone adding on conditions...)
To bring it back on topic, the analogy I'm drawing is: If you really want to do formal verification in all your projects, you shouldn't work on websites! And if you really want to pay attention to all the small little niceties, you shouldn't build a business with tight margins that are made up in volume!
> you have to pick your approach and commit to it.
I somewhat agree with this, especially when we are talking about higher brand companies appeasing cheaper consumables.
However, the other way around, it can be done effectively. Take for IKEA instance. They made inroads into Europe and American homes, and did it by offering cheaper, well-designed and modern alternatives made of particle board. After seeing some customers wanted higher-quality products with the same design aesthetic, they introduced a sliding scale of products from cheap-and-cheerful, to better constructed, yet still flatpacked materials.
Customers could then choose the desired range and quality on a sliding scale for each product. This model seems to have worked well for them.
That's sort of what Mercedes does, with their C-class cars. I understand that European cabs are yet another class, that is not available, on this side of the pond.
The other day, I was stopped behind a brand new Tesla Model S. Looked like about a $90,000 USD trim package.
The trunk was out of square.
Not that much, but noticeable.
I don't think the cheapest Mercedes would ever go out the door, with that kind of flaw. It's a matter of a couple of tweaks with an Allen wrench, to fix.
Yeah good call. My statement was definitely not nuanced enough. I think it's more like: The base case is that it works best to pick an approach and stick with it. But sometimes there is a strategic opportunity to change approaches, which can be high reward, but also carries high risk.
I think it's also rare to successfully go the opposite direction, taking a high value brand mass market. I mean, I think it's a common "successful" cash grab strategy, but not a success in the sense of improving the long term fundamentals of the business.
It reminds me of that shields down article[0] but for your customers. Maybe it’s just me but if there are enough little interactions with a vendor that go poorly because of the counterparty clearly not giving a shit they end up in a kind of dead-to-me zone. I’ll still be polite and all but the second an alternative is there I’m gone.
Alternatively there are companies that are always pleasant to interact with. Avemco is an insurance company I use and any time I have a question for them they either have the answer or go find it immediately. When it’s time to renew they proactively check if I’m eligible for better rates. even if someone came in with a quote at a 30% premium discount I’d probably not hear them out because I just don’t expect such service elsewhere.
It’s sad that these nice experiences get optimized away, I honestly think people would be nicer to each other if it didn’t constantly feel like everyone was constantly racing to the bottom.
> Imagine if you were a cable company or publisher and re-allocate the “stop them from unsubscribing” budget where you slash prices, increase channels in a bundle or enhance broadband speeds to people who are quitting, to instead reward the most loyal customers by going to them and cutting their fees and/or upgrading their services to simply say thank you.
Imagine if they readily cancelled you, and if you were a long time customer, let you know they were either going to refund your last months bill, or gave you an additional free month, whichever would help you the most as you moved on?
I know I wouldn't ever forget that. Precisely because they had no reason to do it than to value helping me, current customer or not.
And how little would that month's service cost them? An imperceptible marginal cost.
After using my first macbook for about 8 years (bought in 2005), I went to the Apple Store in Glasgow for a new battery and they just gifted it to me. I asked them why and they replied “It’s a random act of kindness”. Well, it did tattoo in my memory.
I recently ordered some parts for my car. It was a complex schedule of repairs between my main mechanic, the tire shop, some of my own work, and another guy - and with a hard deadline at the end, so I paid for rapid shipping from one company. They got back to me the next day by email, saying "you're in California, too, so we were able to get you two-day shipping by ground: there's no need to pay for the premium option. How do you want the refund?" You better believe I ordered the rest of the parts I needed from them, and (when I need something else, next time) they'll be the first place I'll look, and probably where I buy, even if I might be able to save $10 buying something somewhere else. It was a small, unexpected thing, and it's the best marketing dollars they'll ever "spend" to win my custom.
I just purchased a Toyota and it was comforting when the US dealership sent me a check for ~$15 "because your state taxes didn't end up costing as much as we had anticipated."
>they'll be the first place I'll look, and probably where I buy, even if I might be able to save $10 buying something somewhere else.
Absolutely, but in my experience on the pricing level of automobiles $xx,xxx...
All those small things - yes including the box - add up to the brand perception. It is why we are willing to pay a higher price, because we are aware of the value we know we will get from a brand the sweats the small things.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadYears ago when I worked at Amazon, leaders made customer experience a priority and empowered us to do what was needed to ensure a good customer experience even if would cost the company more. I am not sure if things are the same there now, but it taught me a lot about how a company's relationship with its customers matters for the company's long-term growth and customer loyalty.
The enshittification trends we see today are the opposite. Companies are all to happy to make quick profits by choosing to put what is best for the company ahead of the customer experience. Customer data is sold and shared. Ads are cramed into every possible space. Customers are opted in to onerous legal agreements and forced arbitration. Dark patterns abound.
Customers notice. Customers remember. And when the circumstances are right they will drop such companies and watch them burn with pleasure. The golden rule still holds and no company is "too big to fail".
None of our users gave two shits about the software. All they cared about was did we solve their problem on that day when they needed us.
That’s when I realized we’re a software-enabled service company. It changed how I prioritize things.
But on the other hand, the quality of the actual product catalog is now abysmal. Way too many clones of Ali Express items with literally random brand names and scam listings. I still sort of trust “Sold by Amazon” listings, but they’re making it harder to filter on that. So in this area the accounting department is clearly outranking the customer experience department.
It was entirely up to Aliexpress to lose my business and they did with gusto. Amazon probably sells the same item, just for more money, but they were reinforced as the right balance of price and assurance that I will end up with the item reasonably fast and low-hassle.
you're not wrong; nothing is free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_mask_syndrome
> ...subjects develop depression and physical illness as a result of prolonged, unnatural smiling.
In my house we must have a good attitude or be silent. It's fine to be angry or sad, just no crying or whining. Every request for a hug must be met with a hug.
I expect the emotional exercise to help workout the management of emotions and adjusting of attitude.
I'm not familiar with that. What is it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6iKKoKyBM&list=OLAK5uy_lKH...
https://genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-the-book-of-mor...
https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1686764,1686764
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_suppression
I'm not Mormon. Not familiar with the culture.
Jesus cried twice in three years. There is a time and a place.
Gloating isn't permitted.
Most of the discussion and instruction are related to being able to integrate well with others.
I'm weird. Everyone is a little odd. Quirks aren't wrong but can be unattractive or situational inappropriate. Guidance is given.
Having grown up in a house like that and re-learning to express my feelings and being able to empathize with people close to me later in life - I ask you to take a harder look at that stance.
I appreciate your encouragement.
I wasn't taught that attitude was a choice. It was hard learned over many failures. My stress evaporated. My anxieties faded.
Crying for emotional manipulation is not permitted.
The kids can turn off the tears when they want if the manipulation is shown as ineffective
Meeting a tantrum with "I know you don't like the taste of vegetables, but they're an important part of growing up and you must eat them before having sweets." is different from "In this house, you cannot cry if there's no real pain."
There's no fine line between valid responses and manipulation. For manipulators, the pain FEELS real. The pain is a part of a learned behavior. Guiding those feelings instead of making a hard rule cutoff will have better results and build better trust.
On the one hand, I agree that it is important for children to learn that manipulation is not the best way to get the things that they want. On the other hand, I think it is also important for them to learn that they can trust their parents to be there for them when they truly feel they have a problem, even if it isn't physical pain, and even if it is really quite silly. But you don't want them to learn that they can't trust you, because someday they might have problems that aren't silly.
Today it might be "the socks you picked out for me aren't the right color and the boys at school will make fun of them". But tomorrow it might be a developing drinking or drug problem or early signs that a romantic interest is becoming abusive. If they learn they can't bug you about the socks, they might also learn that they can't bug you about those things either.
Those are well managed. I practiced tonight with name calling.
After preparing him I insulted my oldest.
I said "you have donkey breath"
I asked if what I said was true. "No." Okay. Now you have power and I have none. Lies cannot hurt you. Insults are lies. No one can harm you with words if you know who you are.
Your kids can't cry, or complain? And they have to give someone a hug even if they don't want to?
This all seems very unhealthy long-term.
No matter what, if they request a hug they get one. Mid punishment? During correction? They want a hug? Absolutely. Love and affection will never be denied.
Do you think the people you most admire in your own life and in the broader world, both current and historical, have emotional artificiality deeply engrained in them? For me, that is very much not the case.
A smile transforms from a sign of affection into just another mandatory part of a uniform.
As I write this, the other browser tab for the post office web site is still displaying the 'loading' window with no end in sight after I entered all my info. I guess it is back to doing it the hard way.
IT IS the small things...
I used to be anti-Apple. I used Android or Windows Phone and used Windows or Linux on PC. I thought the extra cost of Apple was a scam. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a company that doesn’t BS me and waste my time.
Windows has ads and malware built into the OS. They charge you for OS upgrades. macOS is just free and ad-free.
The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.
This extends to all their other products and services. I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy. I’ll make that deal all day.
Random example: One of the first things I asked when I got there was “why, when you turn on a Windows PC, does it start your user experience by filling the screen with scary gibberish?” That got fixed, but it took many years, partially because of all the coordination needed in the PC ecosystem to do anything, but mostly because nobody really cared all that much.
Too many SKUs tend to be correlated with lack of polish and attention to detail. And this comes from someone who prefers Linux, and hence ThinkPad.
Even basic user experiences, such as buying online, are vastly better at Apple. For instance, lenovo.com is handled by a third party in many markets, including the EU.
So true. Back a decade ago, Nokia had an enormous amount of SKUs. The firmwares were usually crap, and even the hardware was often subpar. You were obviously not expected to keep the same Symbian smartphone for 5+ years, with the possible exception of the Communicator.
Blackberry, on the other hand, had much fewer SKUs and much better quality.
The technical talent of their R&D was top notch, and it was sadly wasted by a dysfunctional decision making culture.
People here on the HN tend to value engineers highly and look with disdain on mere managers. They may be right when it comes to the Pointy-Haired Bosses, but good management is a large force multiplier when it comes to the capabilities of any org. And bad management will easily drag a good engineering corps into an endless mire of meaningless work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish.
...I can’t agree with this. Their boxes are bad! They’re probably really proud of their boxes and think they’re the best, and they do have a nice surface sheen, but they’re bad.
They’re too heavy, too hard to open, near impossible to break down to recycle.
Every time I mention this somebody says “that’s out of date, they’ve really improved recently”, but I’m still seeing the same shitty plastic-infused boxes.
Nintendo are great at doing amazing things with simple cardboard. But there are plenty of other companies doing this now. Apple is well behind the times.
I'm not denying that there's "plasticized paper" in the box, but as far as I could tell, it was 100% recyclable. As for "breaking down the box", if you flip the lid around to the bottom of the box, and then stack them together, then it saves a good bit of space. But yes the moulded cardboard that held the laptop itself was a pain to get out of the bottom section.
On the contrary, it costs a LOT to make the box that good.
I can't find it now, but I recall some article posted here about how lots of startups spent insane amounts of money trying to make their packaging as good as Apple's (UHD foam, aluminum milling) when they should be working on their actual product instead.
I don’t actually know, but my impression is that they work harder “under the hood” than on the user facing stuff (which ironically is what I want. But in applications and user interfaces, in many cases they have simply lost their way.
But the physical quality from, as you say, the box to the device does feel like it improves the quality, making up in part for indifferent software.
The double irony here is that I can afford to buy expensive goods, but I won’t buy a Prada pullover any more because the zippers are functionally poor. Apple provides a luxurious experience (a nice box with a lovely watch inside) at a cost that a supermarket worker can afford.
I'm not an apple user but it is obvious to me that apple users aren't paying more just for the box.
faulty logic. if that was the case, they would intentionally over engineer the box, and leave everything else shitty, in order to save money. the box doesn't matter, the product matters.
So the box matters; and the product; and the customer service. Focussing on just the product is missing the big picture.
The box matters to some people including me, it is, after all, part of the package that you buy, and the most visible one.
That does not mean that I would buy worthless product just because it has a great box. It just means that I appreciate work spent on the box design, too.
Sometimes. Other times not so much. Sometimes they make changes just for the sake of making changes so that they can continue to be the "cool new thing" and in so doing they make things objectively worse. The canonical examples were the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.
Another example is the move away from discoverability and towards hidden controls. In mail.app, for example, the controls to save attachments are hidden until you hover over them. There is no visual clue that they exist until you hover. You either have to know where they are, or stumble upon them by sheer luck. There is, obviously, no manual to clue you in.
>windows has ads and malware built into the OS
windows "ads" are suggestions about what software to use, the same as mac has
>the charge you for os upgrades
not for either 11 or 10
> The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.
you can find plenty on resellers at a considerable fraction of their original price, same as with mac hardware. obviously laptops that were cheap when they were sold don't fetch much.
> I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy.
you pay for a fashion statement. nobodies blaming you for that, but lets be honest
I find that developers who disrespect Apple and use Android, Linux, and Windows, have almost never written a single GUI app with the platform tools. Which I find baffling. The desktop environment is what you interact with all day, why wouldn't you learn to customize it?
I too would notice and care if they did not. Maybe he’s on paperless?
Any sane human would notice that it's pointless to go out of your way to make a completely optional interaction with your customers and do it so badly that the customer will leave unsatisfied.
The only way you get that is by building a clearly stupid AI, and subjecting people to its whims. What is a management best practice, so yeah, let's do it.
I will be spending at least three days, polishing up a "thermometer" UI, for the date ranges.
The main public app, itself, is a big aggregation of "small things," like custom transition animations, haptics, font choices, etc. The designer was quite adamant about "small things," often complaining about half-pixel (!) offsets.
That's one of the reasons I write native, and also one of the reasons that I'm using UIKit/AutoLayout, because they let me do anything I want (but I don't really like AutoLayout -I'm just good with it).
People seem to like it.
The US car companies slid in the 60s and 70s by incrementally cutting “irrelevant” costs, like not painting under the seats, cheaper knobs, and the like. Each of these changes was imperceptible but their sum was noticeable. Ironically their own European and especially Japanese competition went the other way: started cheap (so people expected cheap knobs) and then incrementally moved upmarket (“Wow, this cheap car is nicer than I had expected” -> premium market).
Right now the software and especially SaaS worlds seem stuck in their own 1970s Detroit era. Dangerous crap,but with little alternative. I don’t see any “Japanese manufacturers” (to extend the analogy) on the horizon.
"(And smiles they are free."
Forced service smiles aren't free, but a result of continuous spend on training the service personnel
People are often not good understanding and deciding what matters, groups of people are generally even worse.
It's why aircraft have checklists and companies like Apple have certain things so ingrained in their culture.
I do not fly United anymore.
I my mind (and it's likely largely affected by which airports I frequently fly into) it's Delta, American and Alaska competing for my business. Even though I fly to/through DFW frequently, I try to avoid American because of how enshittified their frequent flyer program has become. How the mighty have fallen.
It is a little thing (the enshittified frequent flyer program), but it keeps me from seriously considering flying American unless there's no alternative.
So yes... small things matter (American) but only because big things have already eliminated potential service providers (United.)
Doing the small things right is how the big things get done right.
Attention to detail is a culture, and it's as applicable to turning planes around on time as it is to giving premium customers a premium experience, and ordinary customers a surprisingly nice experience.
Only one I've never had issues with is Alaska but Southwest is usually good, plus their boarding procedure is by far the most organized. Seriously, why do so many airlines just make it a mad-dash by group?
Their stuff costs a lot more than most, but thousands of customers thought they were worth the premium, and built their entire careers around that equipment.
I think they ran into trouble, when they started selling huge numbers of cheaper items. They made a lot of money, but their brand lost its sheen.
I'm hoping that they are re-establishing their original baseline.
It did teach me to take this stuff seriously, though. It's not a matter of process; it's a matter of culture, and that is something that needs to be developed organically.
This reminds me of something I realized fairly late (maybe embarrassingly so) into my career. For the longest time, I had all these opinions about how software should be made, that is, universally, and would often feel very frustrated and discontented because nobody seemed to want to do things the right way.
But then I finally realized at some point that what was really going on was that different projects can be very different, and different approaches make more sense for different things. To use extreme examples, a single instance of a typical website-with-some-behavior vs. the control systems for a spacecraft. It's perfectly fine to build that website in a blitz using a CMS or framework with bog standard components and limited testing. But all you're going to manage with that same approach in the latter case is to crash your spacecraft.
But I also realized that where I was going wrong was in trying to impose my desires onto whatever project I happened to be working on, rather than imposing them onto my choice of what to work on. So I started thinking harder about what kinds of things I wanted to do, and being more deliberate in finding those projects, and convincing people to bring me onto them. (With somewhat mixed success of course... career development is hard enough when just going with the flow, let alone adding on conditions...)
To bring it back on topic, the analogy I'm drawing is: If you really want to do formal verification in all your projects, you shouldn't work on websites! And if you really want to pay attention to all the small little niceties, you shouldn't build a business with tight margins that are made up in volume!
I somewhat agree with this, especially when we are talking about higher brand companies appeasing cheaper consumables.
However, the other way around, it can be done effectively. Take for IKEA instance. They made inroads into Europe and American homes, and did it by offering cheaper, well-designed and modern alternatives made of particle board. After seeing some customers wanted higher-quality products with the same design aesthetic, they introduced a sliding scale of products from cheap-and-cheerful, to better constructed, yet still flatpacked materials.
Customers could then choose the desired range and quality on a sliding scale for each product. This model seems to have worked well for them.
The other day, I was stopped behind a brand new Tesla Model S. Looked like about a $90,000 USD trim package.
The trunk was out of square.
Not that much, but noticeable.
I don't think the cheapest Mercedes would ever go out the door, with that kind of flaw. It's a matter of a couple of tweaks with an Allen wrench, to fix.
I think it's also rare to successfully go the opposite direction, taking a high value brand mass market. I mean, I think it's a common "successful" cash grab strategy, but not a success in the sense of improving the long term fundamentals of the business.
Alternatively there are companies that are always pleasant to interact with. Avemco is an insurance company I use and any time I have a question for them they either have the answer or go find it immediately. When it’s time to renew they proactively check if I’m eligible for better rates. even if someone came in with a quote at a 30% premium discount I’d probably not hear them out because I just don’t expect such service elsewhere.
It’s sad that these nice experiences get optimized away, I honestly think people would be nicer to each other if it didn’t constantly feel like everyone was constantly racing to the bottom.
0: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/
Imagine if they readily cancelled you, and if you were a long time customer, let you know they were either going to refund your last months bill, or gave you an additional free month, whichever would help you the most as you moved on?
I know I wouldn't ever forget that. Precisely because they had no reason to do it than to value helping me, current customer or not.
And how little would that month's service cost them? An imperceptible marginal cost.
>they'll be the first place I'll look, and probably where I buy, even if I might be able to save $10 buying something somewhere else.
Absolutely, but in my experience on the pricing level of automobiles $xx,xxx...