[syshum]

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability

For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem

Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,

[ethbro]

> Many people are robotic [...] going through the same steps day after day, file after file, and any change to the workflow is cause of extreme frustration,

Work in semi-related process automation, and this. So much!

Software engineers can't begin to understand what happens when you change a hotkey, when someone has been doing something 100 times a day for 10 years.

[TallGuyShort]

Using a hot key 100 times a day for 10 years sounds like exactly the kind of thing software engineers SHOULD understand. I heard a lot of anger from Vim users when Apple messed with the escape key.

[ethbro]

In my experience (~10 years of doing this sort of work) software engineers typically understand how their users use the software in the abstract, but not in the actual experience.

E.g. It is well understood that users rely on a hotkey "a lot." It is not understood that users are so familiar with a hotkey that, if you relocated it on the keyboard, productivity would decrease 40% for 3 months.

That distinction is fairly important when trying to decide whether {new feature X} is actually worth disrupting {old feature Y}.

[brutt]

UX design is done by designers and product managers. Developer just implemented ability to assign hot key X to function Y. How this ability used was not his/her concern.

[TallGuyShort]

Personally, I'd push back on such a change unless there was a very good reason. I feel like this violates the same kind of principle as "we do not break user space EVER". My point above is that a programmer should understand better than most how important muscle memory and shortcuts are to productivity.

[TeMPOraL]

I would push back too, and I think most experienced programmers understand the needs of power users[0] - problem is, they don't push back all that often. I encourage developers to try and voice their opinion about UX more often. Who knows, maybe your PM isn't a pointy-haired boss, but will turn out to be a professional willing to listen to rational arguments? I had a privilege working with such PMs; at one place, I ended up having a lot of say about UX (and provided a counterbalance to our designer) - just because I spoke up about the issues. It turned out that my views were shared by the rest of the dev team, it's just that they never bothered to voice it.

--

[0] - Almost everyone who spent most of their day job using a particular set of software tools quickly becomes a power user of these particular tools. The corollary to that is that if your software is the kind to be used at a job, it better be power user friendly, or you're going to wasting your customer's money and the life their employees.

[ethbro]

I've worked at both kinds of shops. I'd never work at somewhere that follows the above strictly again.

It's been my experience that you get crappy software, produced with great effort and much gnashing of teeth, if your developers don't know your users.

[syshum]

My Experience is software engineers understand how users SHOULD use the software, which rarely matches how users DO use the software

Most of the time I experience a scenario of the engineer or support person saying "Show me what you are doing" only for the user to show some weird and non-logical (to the engineer) way of doing some task, and the engineer or support person replying "Well you should be doing it this other completely different way"

[d4rti]

It's only reinforced my capslock is escape habit.

[zorked]

Software engineers do get that, they have been using vim, emacs for decades with few changes.

Product designers on the other hand.

[snoopen]

MS Office, or at least Word and PowerPoint have lacked innovation to the user experience on a fundamental level. Years ago they overhauled the UI because people weren't using many of the features on offer. What they failed to do is make those features easy to use. Prime example is numbered lists in Word which is still unnecessarily complicated to use. This isn't a compatibility issue, purely UX. Numbered lists are also buggy, like they were 15 years ago, and are still the best way to corrupt your document.

[grawprog]

It's not just lists, just about all word's auto formatting is buggy and unintuitive. Page numbers, tables, headings, tables of contents, paragraph layout on pages with pictures, just putting pictures in a document can be a pain in and of itself. Pretty much anything you do in word above some simple formatting starts to get buggy and unpredictable and the more of these things you have in a document, the more painful editing that document becomes.

[fendy3002]

The problem for microsoft, it's not a simply "fixing the auto formatting", but "changing how auto formatting behave". Nowadays the buggy auto formatting may be expected by some people and changing (fixing) it may distrupt their workflow (xkcd reference).

Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.

[NikolaNovak]

This nails it.

There's a class of software I want rapid improvements to.

And frankly there's a class of software I want to just work and not move the needle needlessly. Even with Adobe, I have NO idea why I have to have 27 processes constantly running to check for updates; why it actually performs updates that grind my system all the time; I can't honestly say that I have personally advanced and started using anything new or different in Photoshop in many many years, let alone MS Word. :-/

(understanding this is a different use case to original-original-poster; most of the software I DO want to advance - our database engine or process scheduler or OS monitoring software can always get better as far as I'm concerned, etc.

[cosmie]

> Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products,

Many people aren't just robotic, they're straight up ritualistic.

I've worked with several people that are absolute wizards at PowerPoint, love to get new features, and quickly integrate them into their workflows.

But those same people have absolutely no mental framework for how Excel works. They'll quite literally use a physical calculator (or their phone's calculator app) in tandem with Excel, treating Excel as a glorified text editor that lets you do cell-by-cell text placement/formatting. They have such a weak grasp of how Excel works that any tiny change whatsoever doesn't just cause extreme frustration, but also extreme anxiety as they scramble to re-establish the thin veneer of usability they previously held.

Having witnessed the above more than once, I've taken to heart the level of naivety that should be presumed when creating UX flows and documentation.

[chansiky]

> people that want innovation and people that want stability

Ha! very true. You should see what some people can make in Autocad,