[js8]

On a related note, I wish product designers stop to cater to beginners. That is, stop equating easy of use and ease of use by somebody who never used the product.

Somebody who sees the product for the first time will have very different requirements than somebody who is seeing it every day. The latter is able to learn some productivity tricks, that might be opaque to beginner, but make the product actually easier to use.

[1_player]

Yes! I always hear on HN "grandma wouldn't understand" a particularly complex interface that hasn't been dumbed down to its extremes.

Can we have some products and interfaces that are tailored for power users instead? I mean the ones that need your biggest plan and are creating real stuff with your apps.

It's condescending to only cater to new users and dumbing everything down. One needs to remember even grandma is a power user of some niche.

[GuB-42]

The worst part is that grandma doesn't understand these childish interfaces.

What grandma needs (according to my experience with my own grandma) is something that is consistent and doesn't change.

It doesn't matter if there are 50 buttons as long as the button she needs is always at the same place looks the same and does the same thing.

Old people are slow learners but they are not stupid. They can handle complex interfaces if you give them the time. What they can't handle is interfaces that change every week, especially those with hidden elements, no matter how simple they look.

[TeMPOraL]

Strongly seconded. I get the desire to simplify the initial UI for the beginners, but for the sake of all that's holy, think of people who're using your product regularly. Like salaried employees sitting in front of it eight hours a day, five days a week, for years.

Power users aren't born, they're created by exposure and a minimum of aptitude. Power features need to be put in places where people who use software will eventually discover them. Hiding them, or not creating them at all, is essentially wasting people's lives and money.

An example I like to use is when I visited my wife's workplace once, and while waiting for her, was asked to help with a task that involved changing some values on couple hundred entries in their e-commerce management system. They expected it to take me two or three hours, as this is how much time they spend on it every couple days. I completed it in 15 minutes, after discovering a well-hidden feature for batch-editing entries. I shared the knowledge, and that simple visit saved them countless man-hours ever since. How much more time would've been saved if that batch-editing option was more prominent, and explained in-app, instead of diminished and hidden in a place where someone who didn't know what to look for would never find it?

And what your users do with time saved is of course their decision. They may use it to complete other work, enriching their employers. Or they may blow it watching funny cat videos on YouTube, improving their mental well-being. Point is, they have a choice, they have an option to grow and get better, do their jobs faster, with less effort and less mistakes. That's the promise of technology, that's the whole point for building software in the first place.

[Nextgrid]

Being more productive would mean less time spent on the product, thus less "engagement". Not catering to idiots means less new users signing up and thus less "growth".

Nowadays nobody gives a shit about solving a problem or actually getting paid customers; it's all about growth and engagement now.

[AmericanChopper]

I think the product designers have the right approach here. Having worked in a lot of large corporates, you find a lot of people who are just experts in using some over complicated piece of garbage software. If I have to attend a 3 day training seminar just to figure out the basic functionality of your app, then I think you’ve done it wrong.

Software should make it as easy as possible for people to immediately start doing something useful with it. Make advanced features available via the API, and make sure logs and APM are easy to ingest. Advanced users likely won’t have any interest in your web interface anyhow.

[swiley]

I’d disagree. Some things are hard and the ergonomics makes it worth a little confusion. CAD software like xcircuit is a good example of this (although they definitely could stand to make the save dialog a little more intuitive.)

[AmericanChopper]

Becoming an advanced photoshop user is difficult too. But I can still fire it up and doing basic image editing with about 2 minutes worth of figuring-out. Excel is almost a full RDBMS, but the basics don’t really need any training.

[swiley]

I don’t think excel can do joins which is a big part of the “R” in RDBMS but I don’t use excel often so I could be wrong.

[LyndsySimon]

I'm fairly sure it can. It's been years - almost a decade, now! - since I've had to use Excel for anything productive, but I vividly recall using VLOOKUP to create what were effectively views from a SQL perspective.

[AmericanChopper]

Excel merge supports joins, and you can do ordinary SQL joins using Power Query. I don't know if it full complies with all of Codd's 12 rules, I suspect it probably doesn't fully meet the schema definition or non-subversion bits, but I haven't looked into it closely enough, the Excel Data Model functionality looks like it might actually do that.

[js8]

Just to clarify, I don't think that they have to be mutually exclusive. But focusing only on new users is wrong, IMHO.

But when I hear your justification, maybe the blame should fall on managers. They should be the ones to understand that expertise increases productivity and therefore can be useful.

[AmericanChopper]

The let the advanced users find the advanced functionality. Don't predicate operating your product on knowing every subtle in and out of it.

> But when I hear your justification, maybe the blame should fall on managers.

I'm really just describing the kind of software that I personally hate to use. But in any case, any time my manager asks me whether I can do something or how long it'll take, I just give him an honest estimate. If it's going to take me 3 weeks to even figure out a basic understanding of some new thing, I just tell him. If I just told him "yeah, I'll have that done in a day" every time, who exactly would be failing to communicate in that situation?

[_ZeD_]

good luck: their job is to acquire new users, not to keep the old ones

[ethanbond]

This is certainly not “baked into” product design or a product designer’s role. That’s a decision that someone makes.

[lunias]

It never makes sense to me when one of my ideas gets swatted down for being: "more of a thing for power users". Is that not exactly who you want to reward? The most devoted users of your product?

[davidivadavid]

Power users are not necessarily devoted to your product, they might just have to use it.

While a feature being targeted at power users is certainly not a reason to swat it down in itself, feature prioritization is usually based on impact. And it's usually easier to get impact by improving the satisfaction of a broader user base. That's why many product people tend to favor optimizing not for power user, not for beginners, but for the average user. (This whole discussion is kind of a red herring tbh).

Of course, you need a balance, and getting people to really love a product often takes things such as smartly implemented power-user features.