I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that owning chess.com is 99% of their success if it's not great at the game or great at the engineering aspect.
The game reviews are really nice to quickly see the key points of the game. Plus the UI all over is better than Lichess. That and network effects explain the rest.
Yeah, I am with you on this. It isn't even the case that Lichess UI is simple because it lacks advanced features, it just straight up feels more intuitive and way more pleasant to interact with. Chess.com UI reminds me of overcluttered websites from late 2000s/early 2010s.
Pure anecdata, but I only know one person irl who prefers chess.com, and I never managed to get a straight answer from him as to why, other than "i just play there and like it more, maybe i will check out Lichess at some point, idk."
Could easily go into a very long list of reasons as a long-time app/UX developer, but playing against the computer is a good starting point: on Chess.com as a beginner I was immediately able to play against a wide variety of AI's, each is given to you by their ELO strength, and they are tuned to have different personalities so you can practice against the different types. This is so much better than Lichess where you literally choose "Strength" 1-8 (no idea what that means) and it only then clarifies "Stockfish 14 Level 8"... ok? And after the game, analysis and review interfaces have so many more helpful things for understanding the game, seeing threats, etc. Maybe if I was already very experienced with Chess I'd not mind so much. But this is just one example of many I found as I tested both a couple months ago when I was starting.
On Lichess the puzzles are less well organized and explained, the Lessons interface is arcane and much less polished in terms of content overall though there are gems if you hunt and eventually figure out the UI, and online play is likewise has a lot of small things all over that make a big difference.
Worryingly, I disagree with your opinions despite your credentials. There's no accounting for taste, but then of course, all the carefully designed interfaces I don't like were made by people who thought they were great.
Some of the UI is really tiny on the smart phone version of the lichess app is my only complaint against their UI vs chess.com. As far as I'm concerned though they both could use a good designer. Neither of them are very good.
Besides that I tend to use, and pay for, chess.com more for their other features than for anything directly UI related. Their puzzles are better. I think their post game analysis is nicer to use, the way they do analysis in general is easier to use than lichess I think. They also have a lot of learning material.
As far as playing games go, I have friends who use both and therefor I play on both. It's about the same as far as I'm concerned.
In retrospect UX rather than UI would have been better in my post as I agree with this mostly (and I'd love a chance to redesign either app, that'd be a joy).
Thank you for mentioning this, it’s a very interesting thought actually.
For the uninitiated, the idea is that a product needs good engineering + good marketing to be successful. Products with only one of them will fail. The idea of Berkson’s fallacy is that even though it seems that good marketing is negatively correlated with engineering (and vice-versa) it’s actually because the baseline level of engineering and marketing is low, and products which happen to excel in one don’t need to excel in the other.
this is a sad fact of life. a great project in terms of engineering can be beaten by a job that is just a wordpress page but great in terms of marketing.
> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.
Black and white thinking that leads people to decry "elitist thinking" is exactly a signal of a person I never want to work with, because such un-nuanced understanding of tradeoffs required to work on professional projects is demonstrably beyond their current understanding of things that do exist for good reason.
"Hacked together" is the software equivalent of fixing things with duct tape. It sounds cool and fun, and is fun to do for your own playthings, but it is a terrible mentality for developing solid projects.
That was more a commentary on hate-the-game not the playa. Lots of smart and talented people in the field, yet software coming out the door routinely has egregious usability and performance defects. Bizarre prioritization of features that are dictated by anything other than end-user needs.
Edit: remove the dig at management which is too easy a scapegoat to explain all ills
"#20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html