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- Hacker News
- Fyi this article is not about gravity.by danangReader
- I am struck by the resemblance between this logic and the logic behind drinking. I remember back in my 20s one of the devs would come over at the end of the day and go, "Coming to the pub?" The standard answer was, of course, "I might come for one." The word "one" was a kind of punchline all on its own of course, a running joke.by alex-moon
- I don't understand what the title has to do with the content.by zahlman
- They reference gravity in this paragraph and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean
> Not only is it very hard to create interfaces that have limitations, but a bad decision is not just precedent – it’s code that can be copied and reused. Existing code always had tons of… well, gravity, even before LLMs.
I assume this is just LLM nonsense?
by dwroberts - I think they mean inertia, not "gravity"by graemep
- The context for that is in Gruber’s original post, I believe.by nizmow
- Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.by SCdF
- Some decisions, once made, exert a noticeable pull on others, so exceptions quickly turn into standard practice.by TeMPOraL
- The text quoted in a sibling comment implies the author is describing an effect whereby poor ux decisions - even if seemingly small - serve as a foundation to "attract" further negative patterns, gravity being the analogy.by mellosouls
- The article has a link to a previous Gruber article that mentions things falling to the ground because of "gravity" as an analogy for asking about seemingly basic questions about "why things happen".
It's an article that inadvertently confuses readers with too many layers of indirection and requires reading another article to get the prerequisite "Insider Baseball" knowledge to connect all the metaphors together.
So... asking "why not Intel stickers on MacBooks?" ... analogous to asking about gravity. And "too many confusing options on GUIs" ... lines of code to enable extra options has a gravity.
by jasode - I know that "Great Man" theory is considered debunked.
That being said, it seems a LOT of drops in quality trace back to some very senior person who cared about quality and put resources behind delivering quality and then either:
- stops caring
- leaves (retires, switches jobs or gets pushed out).
Jobs is the classic example of this but I'm sure if you are reading this then you have an example from your own career history.
by alexpotato - That's not the great man theory that's called having a user advocate in the C Suite.by esafak
- I would call this the "bus factor" theory. If a process (here, quality control) revolves around one person, and then that person stops doing the work, the work stops getting done.by wizzwizz4
- Blizzard changed as soon as Morhaime left.by StilesCrisis
- The "Great Man" theory of history is considered debunked.
The idea that visionary leadership in a single organization can make a difference is very true.
by hvs - I daily drive linux (arch btw) with all the adblocking bells and whistles and I was dumbfounded when I saw my grandma's PC with all the clutter and ads. Really makes you miss the old era.by po1nt
- When was the ad-free era on Windows (Home)? I don't remember it.by steve1977
- You don't even need add blocking for most open source software: the threat of forking backs a culture where the software is just there to to its job and not to sell something.
I started using the f-droid app "store" recently and it's amazing: bare bones stuff that just does what you want.
by dguest - Screenshot and share functionality get massively overloaded on iOS, but it's not because a product person / designer lacks the necessary taste, vision or "courage". It's because the OS is not capable of composing apps well: "I want to X, but with Y". As a result, functionality like screenshots, sharing, clipboard get overloaded with all kinds of adhoc half-baked workflows to work around the single app mindset.by vnorilo
- I kind of agree with what you're saying, in that screenshot and share functionality is increasingly overloaded with options and things that just don't make any sense in that context. I disagree that this isn't because a product designer lacks vision, Apple control the entire stack on iOS, and there's nothing stopping them from rethinking things so that "Share" isn't a weird synonym for "Junk drawer menu".
There is no justifiable reason that Safari's find in page option is under the share menu, hidden underneath a View More button. Finding within a page has nothing to do with sharing, and even if somehow a user guessed that it might be in that menu without searching the web for it, they're probably going to dismiss it because they haven't expanded the view more menu.
iOS and macOS are riddled with illogical decisions like this. The menu bar is an unusable mess of icons that things have added, a problem that Windows (kind of) solved about a decade ago by allowing me to select which icons appear by default. The Dock seems to choose at random whether an app remains pinned or not, with particular confusion brought by apps updating themselves. Shortcuts is a wonderful idea in principle while in practice anytime I try to do something with it some part is missing.
I used to be a huge proponent of macOS in particular, and I would like to be one again, but currently its incredibly hard to do that.
by jon-wood - > This is why it’s important to hire and recognize people who will understand that those limitations have to be imposed arbitrarily
Better get the folks that recognize users exist and are different, so instead of arbitrary mistakes UI should be tailored to a user.
Case in point:
> five options I have to choose from, every time, even if I never touch four of them:
So the way out is to allow you to remove those 4 rather than arbitrarily stop at 3 where you don't need 2 instead of 4?
by eviks - Having the menu exist at all is already well onto the slippery slope - once upon a time the screenshots went directly into the photo library, without any interstitial at all...
And at the time, everyone was perfectly fine with opening the photo library to access the options that are now in that menu
by swiftcoder - There is no good middle. Either have no options, or have many and make them configurable.
I use 4 of those 5 options all the time. But there are other places where options make me slow because I need to was through them.
by yoz-y - This reminded me of a 20 year old 'viral' video "Microsoft Designs the iPod Package":
- This is good, but I think it's missing a discussion of the business logic, which is IMO the mechanism behind the gravity we're discussing here. And really it's just about the fact that you always get more positive attention in an org (and therefore a better shot at promotion etc.) for suggesting and implementing new stuff than pruning what's already there. Pruning only becomes possible when there's a coherent vision, for which you need a small-to-medium team (at most) and one person with the vision in charge of it.
- The minimalist approach is great until it isn't. You can cover 98% of use cases with a single button is a great motto, until you are in the other 2%. I often fail to find basic functionality in software today, because some smart product manager decided that nobody really needs it. For example, it is now often impossible to load all elements from a list and filter/sort it along basic properties.by matusp
- this is a discussion we often have where I work, where we're debating removing a feature due to difficulties maintaining it and few people needing it. I usually fight to keep it, with the argument "we aren't doing it for the people that don't need it, but for the ones that do." But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who has to pay for it.by pixlmint
- yeah like i do find apple software is now full of ads, bugs and often feels very unpolished. but i also think they have recently increased complexity in a bunch of places and i like that a lot haha... like being able to customize your homescreen more or even the screenshot example! i def use like 3 of those options at least weekly...by zeratax
- I wouldn’t call Apple style minimalist. It was more focused on being approachable, in a way that works for both beginners and advanced users. That means something consistent, discoverable. It looks easy to get started, but has depth when needed.
If you look at or used macOS 9 and the early OS X none of that expresses minimalism
by dgellow - You can make something customisable
"links to show with screenshots"
I always want to either copy and delete or save and forget, so I'd select those two options (or rather have the old behaviour) and ignore the rest. You can choose other things.
Same with adverts. I would select "zero adverts", but you could select "upto six adverts" or whatever. After all adverts are for the benefit of the customer right - that's what advert apologists say.
by iso1631