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Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable

The reason that junk like flat design and derivatives like Material Design are awful for usability has nothing to do with being old and everything to do with being unpredictable. Often, a user literally can't tell what parts of an interface are interactive or how they work, because affordances barely exist. It's like the old mystery meat navigation meme for web sites, except they actually did it seriously and thought it was good.

But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits?

Well, firstly, a testing methodology is literally the opposite of worthless if it gives you an objective measure of the increased financial value generated by a change under consideration.

Secondly, you assert without evidence that the kind of change we're talking about does violate the user's expectations and habits, and you further imply that this causes a loss of productivity. As I have argued in earlier comments, the assumption that the user's expectations are governed primarily by their native platform's conventions is not necessarily valid any more, because users spend so much of their time inside a browser using online facilities instead of other native applications.

Moreover, the answer to your other question is yes, we have done many tests over the years that compared options including the native approach on various platforms with some other options we were considering. In the nature of such tests, the outcomes varied. In some cases, we did end up going with presentation similar to the native conventions on one or more platforms; often this coincided with cases where the native conventions across major platforms were similar as well. In other cases, we went with a completely different presentation style, as performance with the native conventions was significantly worse.

The point of all of this is still that ideally you don't want to make UI decisions based on assumptions or dogma if you could try different possibilities with real users and make your decisions based on objective evidence instead.




> The reason that junk like flat design and derivatives like Material Design are awful for usability has nothing to do with being old and everything to do with being unpredictable.

I'm surprised to see you mentioning the flat design trend as something you consider "old" in any way. I see it as a fad that is past its peak but still far too prevalent to regard as being in the past. And when I was talking about platform native UI conventions, I definitely had older stuff in mind than Windows 8.

> Well, firstly, a testing methodology is literally the opposite of worthless if it gives you an objective measure of the increased financial value generated by a change under consideration.

See, this is the biggest problem here. I'm talking about usability and value to the user. You're talking about optimizing the UI to exploit the users for your maximum profit. Those two motivations are obviously not well-aligned, and if you're on the side of that divide where the ad-tech stuff is, then you're not even trying to have the same conversation I'm having. Your incentives are to maximize the user's engagement with your product, so of course you don't care about how well it fits into their multitasking workflow; you want to monopolize the user's time.


I'm talking about usability and value to the user. You're talking about optimizing the UI to exploit the users for your maximum profit. Those two motivations are obviously not well-aligned

I could not disagree more strongly. I have built a career built, in no small part, on a simple business model of creating software that users like because it's easy and works well, and consequently attracting and retaining happy (and paying) customers. This has absolutely nothing to do with ad-tech, which I generally regard as a toxic business model for exactly the reasons you're arguing.




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