[ChrisMarshallNY]

The biggest issue that I come across, is users of my software, developing mental models of the software that I would never, in a million years, have developed, myself.

They often work with the software, based on their "strange" mental model, and can have very weird workflows.

In some cases, this is excellent, and it is worth it for me to learn the new model, and maybe add affordances for it.

[leokennis]

One example for me is iMovie on macOS. They dedicate 50% of the screen to a sort of “project media library” where you put all videos and audio you want to use in your project and that also holds all titles, transitions etc. you can add.

Literally everyone I ever see using this software drags videos directly from the finder onto the timeline, then pick a transition once and then just copy/paste it within the timeline. So 50% of the screen is wasted real estate for a lot of the users.

[PoignardAzur]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

Are you saying that this is wrong because picking "assets" (rushes, transitions) is done once at the beginning of the edit process, so the screen space is wasted the rest of the time?

[xsmasher]

Not the poster you replied to, but I think I understand.

* instead of using a two step process (add to library, then drag from library to timeline) users just drag media to the timeline. Makes sense. How often do you re-use the same clip?

* instead of dragging in a transition and having to re-set the values from the defaults to the value you want, users drag in once, set the values, and then copy-paste it around.

In both cases the users are doing the most efficient thing. With the real workflow in mind, having the media library take up so much screen space is a huge waste.

[leokennis]

Yep, exactly!

This is the interface:

https://kennis.cc/public_uploads/c39f8aab.jpeg

The entire yellow part is basically a poor approximation of the Finder, and you can see how little space that leaves for the video preview.

Either that or I genuinely misunderstand some brilliant concept from Apple.

[PoignardAzur]

Oh, I see. From the description, I thought the library was the finder (never used iMovie), so I didn't understand the complaint.

[uhoh-itsmaciek]

Could you talk about some concrete examples?

[ThePadawan]

Not parent, but here's an example from a past project.

Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names."

Me: "Why?"

Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily."

Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have."

Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."

[pradn]

This is why listings on Amazon are a million words long. They do an adequate job pulling important attributes into the metadata so you can filter on them, for some categories. For example, the size and type of TVs. But it's not really possible to do that for all product categories. Moreover, users can't easily see the attributes in the search page, so it's best to just put it all in the title. For things like motherboards, they get super dense with jargon.

[ThePadawan]

I worked at Switzerland's biggest online retailer whose USP was that it actually did strongly typed attributes really really well.

To date, it's still incredibly searchable. Want to find a 5.5" phone running Android 10+ and at least a 12MP back-facing camera for below $350? You can filter for it.

It was an absolute nightmare on the (normalized, backend) technical level, but a real pleasure to consume on the denormalized, frontend level.

[leokennis]

https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/ is also a great example of this. No idea how they do it.

[ThePadawan]

As someone who worked in the space - there are standards and commercial solutions which all do lots of good work (some are now unfortunately having to break into the AI space, literally because manufacturers are too cheap to use standards).

But they all come at some cost - my employer decided to cheap out slash invest in a highly custom in-house solution instead that relied on lots and lots and lots of data entry.

[bombcar]

This SO MUCH!

It doesn't matter that you can add any fields you want in Salesforce, and we do, nobody will use them and continue to encode all the information in the title of the object.

[ThePadawan]

Funnily enough - I was building this application ...to replace Salesforce (for this business process, not company-wide).

Because the person managing Salesforce approved all requests to add any field, there were just 400 instead of the 5 I mentioned, and none had any validation - so no one knew which ones to fill with data, which ones to keep updated, and which ones absolutely to never touch because you would accidentally commit fraud because you falsified sales figures.

[leokennis]

Worst part is, even if the fields are there (let’s say in JIRA) there will still be a soulless bureaucrat middle manager who’ll regularly remind everyone by e-mail to use the “JIRA task title template guidelines” so you end up with stories like “[PRD][Feature X][XL][Development][JAVA] Bugfix for calling API Y with empty order ID [Prio 4][Impact 2][2022Q3-sprint5]”

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Gimme a bit. I’m going to have to come up with examples that don’t compromise any proprietary information. Most of the examples are from my work for a photography equipment manufacturer, and they wouldn’t want me to talk about it.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I'm not going to follow up on this. The examples I could come up with, outside that experience, would not be accurate recollections.

That company considered exactly that kind of experience to be one of their "trade secrets," and they were fairly well-known for "leaning into" customer mental models.

Even though I could legally discuss it, I won't. I feel they could use all the help they can get, right now, and I won't make things harder for them.

[bombcar]

Git is a pile of patches!

[lopis]

My favourite XKCD "Workflow" [0] is very relevant here.

Unfortunately, because people function that way, there's a lot of pain ahead for those to learn to rely of obscure uses of software. Sooner or later those pathways are dropped, if for no other reason than cutting down on maintenance costs.

https://xkcd.com/1172/