[IAmPym]

At some point I need to write an article about this topic. I disagree with a lot of the conclusions about that article.

You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience. Anyone who is a potential customer for a lathe has SOME experience, even if it's just enough to say "I want a lathe" and the amount of effort they will need to go through to onboard to using the lathe properly is directly proportional to the applicable mental models they have for similar tasks. This probably involves hand eye coordination and gestures along with physics and a bunch of other things to onboard quickly.

Intuition is about using the most fundamental mental models that your customer(s) should have and simplifying the connection of those to the new task.

So intuition is contextual. The main goal is to save the user time. The narrow goal is to make the product easier to learn compared to your competitors. The big problem is no matter WHAT you do, the mental model a user will use when they approach a new task for the first time is inevitably different than the one you did.

Or, "You are not your customer" or however you want to phrase it.

[fuzzy2]

Haha, oh yes. Ever had a project where, at some point, the (key) users said “but Excel”? Well, you better listen to them. Sure it may be great for the layperson to edit a building’s layout visually. But know what? The expect just wants to enter the coordinates. In a grid, using only the keyboard.

I’ve had so many projects where we took users for fools. Boy did they fail.

[CoastalCoder]

> You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience.

Probably the #1 image I wish I could purge from my mind is that of a lathe accident. I saw the picture maybe 15 years ago, and I still remember it in horrifying detail.

Some tools really shouldn't be used until a person has had thorough safety training. The two that immediately come to mind are lathes and table saws.

[petsfed]

I said it elsewhere, but one of the first things I learned about power tools, from my father, is that if you don't know how to use a tool or tool setting, you don't use it.

Granted, power drills are moderately benign as these things go, but you can do a lot of damage to a work piece really fast if you select a tool or setting you're unfamiliar with. Which is why there manuals, books, videos, and classes to teach you.

Blogging about discoverability in the context of power tool interfaces is just peak software engineer naval gazing.

[kedikedi]

Pretty benign until an idiot holds a small piece of sheet metal in one hand and drills it with the other. Guess how I know :)

To my defense, I put a bit of wood between the metal and my hand to prevent drilling my hand but little did I know how the drill catches the steel on the very last part of the cut.

[_heimdall]

Power drills are pretty benign to the operator as long as they know not to try to use the drill bit as a router or sander. I've seen plenty of people try to knock off an edge with the side of a bit. Sure it can be done, but its also a great way to have it jump and catch the side of your hand.

[nick7376182]

You can also easily break your wrist with some of the stronger ones that are available. I've also had one wind-up part of my work glove on accident. And the big plug-in drills are just terrifying in general, with how much rotational inertia they have. I won't touch those.

[verve_rat]

Never wear gloves with tools that rotate.

[nick7376182]

Easy to say, but working on a house framing/electric/plumbing project for 8+ hours I would rather have the gloves on. With a lathe or mill, of course I'm not gonna wear gloves.

[formerly_proven]

Anti-kickback is a great feature on hammer drills, angle grinders etc.

[m463]

Even "standard" tools have dangers. I was wearing gloves to protect my hands and was using an impact driver to loosen a nut... and I tapped the trigger, tool ran, my glove wound around the socket and pulled my finger in. Hurt my finger, luckily didn't break/permanently damage it. Took a second. I wouldn't have predicted.

[verve_rat]

I said this elsewhere: never wear gloves with roots that rotate.

Drill, table saw, router, belt sander are all big no-nos.

Orbital sander is about the only power tool I'd be comfortable wearing gloves with.

[kmoser]

How do you prevent your bare hand from getting abraded when it accidentally brushes up against the sanding belt, drill bit, or other fast moving parts of the tool? Yes, I know, exercising caution is always a great idea, but accidents do happen, right?

I have a bench grinder that I use to clean rust off various pieces of metal, and you'd better believe I wear gloves when using it. My reasoning is that the chance of accidentally touching the grinding wheel is high, and a glove will prevent most injuries, while the chance of the glove getting wound around the grinding wheel is near zero because it doesn't take much pressure to stop the wheel. Am I wrong?

[m463]

How does this uncommon knowledge become common sense?

Took me long enough to LEARN to wear gloves, now I have to unlearn it in specific cases :)

[CoastalCoder]

Yeah it's weird to me how many tools are less safe with work gloves.

[formerly_proven]

Almost like work safety rules ban using gloves with those tools.

[_heimdall]

Power tool woodworking injuries are no joke. Table saws, lathes, routers, and planers all want to absolutely destroy the operator.

[eropple]

Planers aren't so bad once you get into power feeders, which can be gotten as cheap as $500 with a DW735. (Yeah you can get a power feeder for a table saw too; it's $500 and more like $1500 just for the feeder!)

The others: very, very yes. Very yes. Jointers too. Jointers exist to show malice.

[_heimdall]

Ah I mistyped there, jointers are actually what I meant rather than planers! I use hand planes when jointing boards and forget that power planers aren't that fancy.

I don't remember hearing about any serious planer injuries (though I'm sure it happens), jointers on the other hand are more ornery than an alligator with all them teeth and no toothbrush.

[eropple]

I've had knots thrown back at me by my planer before. That was before I upgraded to the DW735 with those power feeders and a much deeper body to keep the cutters further away from the human, though.

I have a reasonably safe checklist and set practice for my jointer and I still don't trust the thing.

[morkalork]

I learned to use a lathe in highschool for shop class in the mid 2000s, was this abnormal?

[SoftTalker]

Not in a vocational program, but by that time “shop” or “industrial arts” class for the typical student was no longer common.

[arp242]

A lot of software doesn't really follow the business/consumer model though, and is either outright public infrastructure or de-facto public infrastructure. Something like train ticket machines are a good example – I don't know what the current situation is because I haven't been there in years, but for a long time the train ticket machines on the Dutch/German border were a completely unusable mess of confusion. How can you mess something like this up so badly? I don't know, but they did. And then there are things like tax services, e-identity services, and all of that, much of which is far more complex, and easier to screw up.

De-facto public infrastructure are things like banking, energy companies, stuff like that. "Public infrastructure" is perhaps not entirely the right term for this, but it is something more or less anyone is expected to be able to use, and where competition is often limited (or sometimes even non-existent).

Remember the UK Post Office scandal? While I strongly feel the main cause was not the software[1], one reason the cunts in charge manage to gaslight people for so long was because the software is so complex, difficult, and does suck.

[1]: Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39013418

[Animats]

Some tools are very standardized. Basic modern lathes are all very similar to Maudsley's original precision lathe, which is in the Science Museum in London and worth a look. Someone who knew how to use Maudsley's original lathe would be able to use a modern non-CNC lathe with about five minutes of checking it out.

But faced with a basic modern 3-axis CNC mill, they'd be totally lost.

[hulitu]

> You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience.

No, today it is a lathe, tomorrow is capucino, the day after tomorrow is shit. See the evolution of GUI in Windows and Android.