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I'm sure the Gmail team has done great research on this, and this might have worked for the majority of the users, but just not for some power users such as Hacker News readers. And I think, that's because we might have one false belief, that is User Experience/User Interface is one big, beautiful, monolithic top of the mountain everyone wants to reach. It is not: Power users and the normies might have different needs. A normie like your mom and mine don't know how to turn off annoying notification emails from Facebook, so they might need a tool to help them hide spammy emails. They need something easy to hit, hard to miss, because they use their fingers to point. But you and I use keyboard shortcut and know exactly not to give our serious email addresses away, we don't need that. An UX that is great for your mom and mine might be bad for you and I. I noticed that on one of my project that got on Hacker News and Hackaday, then got viral on reddit and media and such a week or so later. It has both a github and a couple of videos linked on the site. What I noticed from my rudimentary Cloudflare log and Youtube analytics was that the HN crowd read and looked at the github, but most didn't watch the video. The normies crowd watched the video, but most didn't read. To me, it was kinda funny. I think that's part of the crisis that GNOME 3 suffered lately. I seriously tried GNOME 3 for a while and their macOS approach - simplify, trying to make good choices by default - genuinely sucks for me. I want to see my options, don't hide them away from me. I want to be able to make choices. The problem that the GNOME 3 team doesn't realize is that their users aren't made up of majority normies. They are the ones who are savvy enough to install a Linux distro on their desktop. They are the ones that will go great lengths to customize something to make it work exactly the way they wanted. And GNOME 3 fails to deliver that [1]. At first when I worked on my project, I wanted to create something very simple that "just works." As time went by, it turned out to me many of my users, the ones that stick and support my project aren't the ones that just install and forget. They read the docs, wiki and the source code to tease out what I was trying to do. So I realized having a great, updated wiki is a very valuable asset. It takes great pain to do it, but it is worth it. The problem with project that are extremely popular like Gmail is that you tend to carter for the mass. But are they loyal? Are they the ones that actually use and love your product? Are they the ones that influence other people's choices? I think those are the questions worth asking and considering when designing products. 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8etezq/_/ |
They need a tool to make the source of the spam stop spamming them, not a tool to hide this. Sweeping the dirt under that carpet is not an actual solution or fix.