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points by criddell 3 days ago | 0 comments

I think you and I align closer to Robert Pirsig's ideas on quality. It feels worse, so it is and you can't really measure it.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Bit didn't it also feel bad back then, you just forgot about it and has a rose-tinted view of the past?

Like software used to crash, were single-threaded and constantly frozen. How many times did you have to issue Ctrl+alt+del vs today? Even UIs were constantly out of sync with the underlying data, I would even go as far to claim that reactive frameworks like react cut down a big category of software bugs.

[–] worble 2 days ago

For me I think the difference is that software never used to be actually important, it was either games or just otherwise hobby software.

Now when something crashes I actually need it for work, or to bank, or to navigate, or hell sometimes the only menu at a restaurant is a QR code but my damn phone is failing to recognise it again.

When you introduce technology into every facet of life, it's suddenly death by a thousand cuts when things don't work, or are a slow buggy mess.

[–] sloob 2 days ago

I agree. Though some software pain used to be more intense (blue screen of death, etc), our lives have become more deeply enmeshed into software, so we feel the friction more. I think we also expect a lot more from software in our daily lives than we did 20 years ago.

[–] gf000 2 days ago

Well, banking is digitalized for a long time (such a long time that they actually are using mainframes and cobol), and it's definitely not the epitome of good software, so I think it was always important, maybe we were just less directly reliant on it.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

Feel worse? No. Was it clunkier to navigate and figure out the workflow? Perhaps. But I rarely remember saying "this application feels slow" in the late 00's/early 2010's, on much worse hardware.

Websites are the obvious example here. Much slower speeds but pages loaded at acceptable paces. Now I'm on gigabit internet and webpages likely take longer to load. And we all know what it's loading in the background are not things that make the UX better.

[–] Insanity 2 days ago

This definitely plays a role, and depending on your use-case the “stability” of your software and system varies greatly. E.g Messing around with mods could leave your game in an unplayable state (to the point it just wouldn’t launch properly), whilst today you just download/install them from Steam workshop with 1-click.

[–] Buttons840 2 days ago

I can measure the number of times my computer blue-screens and just dies. It used to happen all the time, and now it never does.

[–] titzer 2 days ago

Yeah but they keep moving the buttons for no reason and somehow 34GB OS updates only result in rounded corners and less functionality.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

Do I blue screen? No. Does my computer regularly stall out, screen glitches out, or otherwise controls become entirely unresponsive, to the point I can't even bring up task manager? Yup.

I suppose sleep has never been great on Windows, but I don't know what it's doing these days.

[–] publlus_enigma 2 days ago

Now it just auto updates right in the middle of a task.

[–] hulitu 19 hours ago

> and now it never does.

For you. Sometimes one needs to restart the zombie Windows. (Graphics problems, file access problems)

[–] justonceokay 2 days ago

Funny to see this comment here. I was just thinking this morning whether the socratics or the sophists would be more alighted with conversational AI

[–] kranke155 2 days ago

You can measure UX. Just ask 100 people "does it feel worse? did you like it better 5 years ago?"

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

I would be careful with trusting the answers to those questions.

People remember things to be more positive than they were. This is an established bias in human psychology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

[–] titzer 2 days ago

You're right. Better keep to not asking and just weirdly spy on them, concluding the emergency recovery buttons are never used, and remove them.

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

I think that’s a non sequitur…

[–] titzer 2 days ago

I'm saying I wish they did more user studies where they actually asked people what they wanted the software to do, instead of lacing it with creepy telemetry that tells them that less-often-used functionality is...less-often-used, and that they would stop removing said less-often-used functionality.

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

Ah okay, then I’m sorry.

I read your response as “okay then, if we can’t ask that question, we have to spy” etc. which I think did not follow from my post - I misunderstood you, thanks for clarifying.

[–] rlue 2 days ago

Fair point; to correct for this bias, ask n people to rate their experience with software reliability, then wait five years and do it again. The larger your n, the more you correct for individual variation (via the Law of Large Numbers)

[–] throw-qqqqq 2 days ago

1) Asking five years apart only confirms if the bias is stable/changing. It doesn’t correct anything.

2) Asking more people gives you an answer closer to the ‘truth’ (i.e. the true population mean; the mean answer if you asked ‘everyone’). It lowers sample error, not directional bias.

[–] andsoitis 2 days ago

Direction is right, but more rigorous is A/B testing to learn what people actually prefer.

Stated preference is very often different from demonstrated preference.

[–] quacked 2 days ago

A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design. If you A/B test what people want based on their revealed user preference, you get gambling apps and doomscrolling.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

Even better is actual testing.

They put windows 95 in front of users, asked them to perform tasks, and, at the end of the test, asked them to shut down the computer. Almost everyone clicked on the start menu first, so that's where they put the shut down button.

[–] andsoitis 22 hours ago

> A/B testing does not inherently lead you to good design.

Good design comes from product acumen, understanding the user, taste.

But A/B testing helps you confirm whether or not your hypothesis resonates or not.

[–] titzer 2 days ago

"I want a steak dinner." Yeah, but based on usage patterns, here's some cigarettes and beer. /s

[–] Larrikin 2 days ago

All of the pizza chains from my youth A/B tested their ingredients into a weird hill climbing problem. They are all worse tasting and more expensive but despite tasting very differently they are basically equal in how good they taste. You can't really say one is better than the other but they are definitely all worse than they were before.

[–] bigstrat2003 2 days ago

It has become very clear over the past decade or so that you cannot make truly good software just going off A/B testing. It leads to something which is tolerable to everyone, but not actually good for anyone, and which taps into the self-destructive impulses of your users (doomscrolling, etc).

[–] Eji1700 2 days ago

To be a bit difficult, depends on the 100 you ask. Yes yes statistical sampling, but I think my point here is more about how generations are trained growing up.

A lot of people dislike change and sure as shit hate relearning a skill they didn't enjoy or have aptitude in the first place. I know exactly what kind of UX my dad prefers and he HATES all modern design patterns. I think several of them are great for information density and despise everything twitter popularized. Entire generations have grown up on twitter and they think it's basically the only way to display information.

Point being when we're discussing as large a surface area as "software" I'm not really sure you're going to get much out of asking 100 people except what decade they were born in and what software/patterns they grew up on. Clearly some things can outcompete others, but inertia and network effects drive adoption, and can turn people from "ugh I hate this" to "ugh why would you do anything other than this".