Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rout39574 455 days ago
I expect that a dozen humans coming to Calibre for the first time would articulate at least a half-dozen mutually conflicting perspectives on what would be "intuituve". I further expect that each of them would be mostly articulating "what I'm used to". If you unpack "Intuitive" it's mostly a tribal ingroup statement.

The FOSS author has a choice: they can attempt to chase whatever UX rabbits are scared up by The Market, or they can try to make it straightforward to learn their tool, despite its differences from the momentary fashion. I think the Calibre dev's done an excellent job there.
2 comments
9dev 455 days ago
I really want to make a stand for Kovid Goyal here, because he has indeed done an excellent job with Calibre. But every time this discussion comes up, people act like pointing out a user interface isn't intuitive is throwing shit at the developer, which it isn't.

Maybe there is a reason people do spend years studying interaction design, and we can agree there's probably things that could be improved on the interface to make it more intuitive by someone who's specialised in that?

link
skydhash 455 days ago
The interface can be definitely improved, but that requires actual research and resources to pull it off. But as of now, it's not that complicated and very well documented.
link
shinycode 455 days ago
I understand that, it’s a lot of work and resources are needed. The most important aspect in this regard is features over UX. But for a casual user, not finding UI elements we’re used to makes it harder to want to learn it for a few use cases. So maybe I’m not the target (power user in ebook domain). But dismissing any UI change as useless … maybe it’s far fetched.
link
InsideOutSanta 455 days ago
> I further expect that each of them would be mostly

> articulating "what I'm used to".

This is true, but most users spend most of their time away from any given application. Very few people become experts at using Calibre. So there's nothing wrong with taking cues from the most popular applications, the kinds of applications where people form their intuitions.

I use Calibre a few times a year, and I'm quite confused every time. I usually just Google the steps to do the thing I need to do, and even after I understand how to do it, it never makes a lot of sense to me.

Having said that, if the developers like the way it works, then that's all that matters. I'm glad it exists either way.

link