Amazon recently turned on support for Amazon Sidewalk on all of their hardware in my home (convention) and decided it was fine to do this because I could opt out (configuration).
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
I would argue there is a difference between "being opinionated about how to implement a use-case" + "being opinionated about focusing on a small set of use-cases" and "forcing new use-cases on the user".
The article is about the former, Amazon Sidewalk about the later.
Also nothing while being opinionated can be very use-full for product design there is no reason why people can't be opinionated in a "bad" way.
What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
> What this article is about, and what most people mean when they say you should be more opinionated is that you should not be to generic, that you should focus on your core use-case and from a companies POV that is always a good idea IMHO. At least as long as you core use-case is the use-case people by your software for.
Nowadays I think the problem isn't a lack of opinions but people's opinions chasing messy (it not outright useless) data and feedback without a vision for what the product is. They become so obsessed about whether they could [implement this feature/expand to more markets/get more big clients/earn more revenue] according to X data ("because SCIENCE!") that they never stop to think whether they should.
IMO that's how opinionated people help build great products: by stopping cargo culting, scope creep, and desperate measures of all kinds that are backed by bad data. That doesn't mean that they know exactly what their team should be working on next sprint, but they do care enough to shut down attempts from other departments that would degrade the product, even if that means passing up short term gains that look good on paper due to customer feedback or usage data.
Default opt in to all changes could be Amazon’s self interested and opinionated position.
The comment above can also be an opinionated response as well.
Saying a company is client centric, but then not.. can be a mixed signal. There is plenty of brainpower to allow customers to tailor and optimize their experience so are less likely to leave, especially influential power users.
Given that most people won't even know what is happening without their consent it's not that different from forcing.
Opt-out is NOT consent, consent requires you do know about it, at least somewhat understand it and then "say yes". Opt-out it's more like forcing with a way to defend yourself.
I didn't say that opt-out is consent... and no opt-out is opt-out, and forcing is forcing.
Can you imagine how silly it would sound to talk about all the "forcing" that MacOS and Windows do that you can change by going in to settings and changing it? Indeed, Apple has famously made tons of decisions for their users about what the reasonable defaults might be, and is praised for this; no one calls it forcing.
I get it. I don't like the defaults either. That doesn't mean you can just slap on whatever word has negative connotations and say that's what is happening.
> I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.
This is it. It actually induces some kind of anxiety and mild paranoia.
We can also very easily support companies that don't treat their customers this way, or their workers, or business partners...
There seem to be tons of companies, typically small to medium ones, who provide quality services and products and have earned the trust of their customers, workers and partners over the years without screwing them over left and right. Some of them additionally have higher standards in regards to environmental issues on top of all of this.
Nobody is perfect, but I don't think it is required to be a bully to find and keep a sustainable market niche.
Overall this behavior is harmful, partly because it puts people into positions where they have overwhelming levels of power and influence. My personal opinion is that this leads to an unreasonable amount of responsibility and an unhealthy detachment or distance from affected people.
Treating customers, suppliers, and employees with fairness, dignity, and respect is a competitive ADVANTAGE in the long term. You might make a quick buck in the short term doing otherwise, but you'll lose out over the long term.
I feel like, supporting them or not with their store, it was always a no-brainer to not purchase smart, cloud connected doorbells and wire-tape speakers and litter my house with them.
I kinda hate my Roku even having a microphone button and my kid figuring out how to use it.
We're crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed, ripe for corporate/state abuse and we already have history and experience about the usage of tech being grown to continually spy on people one nudge at a time, that we shouldn't be fooled by this stuff.
but here we are, plenty of smart, educated, technical people who know that history, salivating at MOAR GADGETS THAT DO STUFFS.
its a combination of things. People want convenience and that desire is never ending and never sated.
in the age of consumerism, people want to consume MORE but live more minimally. This gives way to more cloud, connected services, more "renting". More.. processing by someone else, somewhere else.
And yes, people spend less time creating and doing and too much time just consuming as their main hobby. They need to spend more time outdoors, doing stuff with their hands, being creative and constructive.
And lastly - my more controversial, generalized but hyper-specific point - is up until COVID and tons of protests turned riots, people were moving into cities at a high rate. They moved into gentrified areas, down played the crime, downplayed the smog, downplayed the endless mismanagement of tax money by old corrupt city governments. They'll go as far as to call people who don't want to move into the city as being racist (for wanting to avoid the crime) or for destroying the environment b/c they don't want to live packed in like sardines in a smog filled urban center.
Well for all those hipsters who think crime isn't such a problem and only something "racists" point out - they all seem to have this incessant need for RING doorbells to keep people stealing the never ending array Amazon and other CongloMo Inc packages from their middle class porches.
They go out in the streets, pumping their fist in the air for BLM, then go home, waiting for their packages from amazon, hopefully protected by Amazon RING doorbells which are expanding the private/public partnership in an ever growing police and surveillance state. They get online and finger wag in one direction and allow their money to vote in another. They're an awful lot like rural republicans voting against their own economic interests, but at least on the Republican side there's a bit of a bait and switch going on. here, it's just direct hypocrisy.
Can someone explain why there’s so much outrage against Amazon Sidewalk when it’s doing a similar thing to Apple’s Find My/AirTags which was met with almost universal praise?
I wouldn't like if I would specifically keep my Samsung Smart TV offline because Samsung themselves advice not to talk about sensitive things in front of the telly [0], and then finding out that it did go online, via my neighbor's helpful Alexa... No thank you.
Maybe not, but as always it comes down to trust. And I trust Apple to be more diligent with my iPhone's AirTag locating capabilities than Amazon is with their ability to help any device get online.
Amazon makes things cheap and easy but not always in ways agree with.
As a counter Example, Canonical got some critique with their "telemetry in the installer", but if you ask me, they did it in the nicest way possible: They told everyone that they want some data to focus developers' efforts where it counts and they let me inspect the json object I was about to send them, so I trust them and sent it to them with a smile.
In all fairness, there are several ways to transmit arbitrary information on the AirTag protocol. The overall reason why people trust Apple with Airtags/Find My is because they're too big to fail. Everyone has already come to terms with the fact that iCloud owns their photos, iTunes owns their music... what's the difference if they also have your location data?
I agree with this, but I'd add that if you have already trusted Amazon enough to purchase and run 24/7 with full access to your home network their remotely controlled and configured internet microphone, drawing the line at this feature seems a little odd to me.
If you own an Echo device and used it prior to this feature you had already granted a large degree (relative to this feature) of trust to Amazon anyway. It reminds me a little of people who swear they will never use an Echo device due to concerns about eavesdropping but happily carry an internet microphone equiped smartphone everywhere.
Thanks, that makes sense. Eventually, it does come down to trust then. I was under the impression that there was a technical reason as to why Amazon Sidewalk is worse than Find My.
1) A big thing is trust - people trust Apple to keep their data secure much more than they trust Amazon, especially when you contrast both company's main business model.
2) Apple's "Find My" was pitched first and foremost as a feature and benefit for the user. And the value proposition was very clear and useful from day 1. You can find your lost phone even in a place there is no signal. Now with Airtags you can find any device. It's easy to imagine a horror story where you lose your $1000 phone in a basement bar or drop it in a parking garage somewhere. Apple in general has better PR.
3) No one's losing their Alexa device. I mean for 99.99% of users it's never moving once it's placed. So what's the point of this feature? It's just pure revenue gain for Amazon with like zero benefit to the average user. They want to use our wifi purely for their benefit? Come on. I know there is Tile functionality, but it's still creepy - you're using my _home_ as a tracking beacon? At least when it's my phone, I'm on the move and could be anywhere.
Just to expand a bit on the last point - the way Apple's "Find my" works is that the only information shared is that there was an iPhone at some location and crossed paths with a lost item at that location. The way Amazon's Tile will work is that a lost item is crossing paths with an "anonymous beacon" which happens to reside in a very specific location.
In Apple's implementation, there is almost no way to personally identify whose iPhone made the detection. In Amazon's case, it's trivial to identify it - it's the beacon that's at the same place all the time, which happens to be your house.
Isn't it the same with airtags? Your iphone will forward data about other people's airtags as long as you have upgraded to the latest ios. You can opt-out, but you need to know about it first. Same deal I think with sidewalk.
The funny thing is - if Apple made Find My opt-in - most users would chose not to use their device for Find My, though it benefits them all and hardly has a downside.
The sheer fact of asking the user to opt-in automatically decreases opt-in rate a lot (like a LOT), even if that tech is super good. It is way easier to dismiss a dialog than to think what it even does.
I'll grant that the outrage against Sidewalk does seem to be worse, but there are at least some of us who dislike both. I have Find My turned off on my iPhone.
What grates me is that I can't turn it off by saying "Alexa, turnoff sidewalk". They make you go into the app and dig for it. IMHO, you should be able to access all of the settings via voice.
It enables Amazon devices to transparently connect to amazon with near zero user configuration as long as the device is within range of an authorized AP or another sidewalk device owned by anyone. This makes Amazon devices to "just work" in more places and most users will love it because they don't know and/or don't care about the privacy and network security implications.
Turns out you are not average user. I am quite sure that Amazon's profit from Sidewalk will shadow losses from you and other leavers by couple magnitudes.
I get the anger about Sidewalk, but this is absolutely not a thing you can do with it.
Sidewalk isn’t a wifi network that people can just connect to, it’s a LoRa radio. A low bandwidth, long range protocol. Devices connecting need to be pre-registered with Amazon, and can only communicate via an endpoint in AWS.
Even if someone somehow created a device for arbitrary web browsing via Sidewall, and put up with the incredibly slow connection speed, combined with strict limits on how much bandwidth can be consumed, all they get is a VPN immediately traceable to their AWS account.
Can you please explain how Apple’s Find My is anonymous while Sidewalk is not? As far as I understand, Find My collects device location information through other iPhones and then upload them to Apple’s cloud where it can be viewed by you. Apple states that this is done in a privacy preserving way by using rotating identifiers.
In the case of Amazon, they state that all the device information being relayed through your device is encrypted and capped at 80kbps.
I am not sure I understand why one is a concern while the other isn’t.
Sidewalk is carrying all kinds of data from other users. You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will. The encryption stops you from snooping like any other TLS traffic, but Amazon itself is the receiver on the other end. And it piggybacks on your own internet connection - 80Kbps is a huge amount of data.
Find My identifiers have a single purpose, are useless to anything but the owners device, cannot be used by Apple for tracking, ads or whatever, and id be surprised if the entire payload after a day out is > 8KB total. These look completely different to me.
> You have absolutely no idea what. It’s a loosely defined system that Amazon controls remotely at their will.
s/Amazon/Apple and you've got yourself the Airtag protocol. Obviously Airtags use less bandwidth, but both are proprietary and about equally as evil in my eyes.
The article you just linked is about an exploit that allows you to propagate arbitrary data through the Airtag network, which is the exact opposite of knowing what goes into an Airtag message.
I feel like I read something new every week on HN about design philosophy; make your product this way not that way, try to do this and not that, here's 10 examples of products that failed because of x, here's 5 products that were successful because of y - maybe it's time to realise that there's no monolithic overarching "right" way to design a product. This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
"Why this HN comment is correct on design", "Why said revered HN comment is incorrect on design", "HN comment creates cult"
Jokes aside, I tend to agree with you. No matter is so black or white, if something failed, it was a host of things that went wrong. If something succeeded, it was as well numerous things. The most common successful factors are the ones people role their eyes over cause everyone already knows 'dedication' and 'hard work' are factors, but they don't always get you results, they're just the most common factors.
Same, and with each new article the X or Y reasons get that little bit more abstract. Eventually I'm sure we'll see articles that say "They failed because they didn't _care_" or "They succeeded becasuse they _listened_" and that's as much depth as we'll get from them.
>This is how we ended up with the current trendy cohort of minimalist apps with flat dark designs, with mobile apps that all look the same, with products that miss killer features for the sake of simplicity, with the annoying typefaces that all tech companies use that make it "trendy".
i like all these things, and am glad this is the way the world is.
Right, in a way I think this opening tweet just undercuts the entire argument. It's a simplistic description of a problem, which the body of the article returns with a simplistic sort of solution.
The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.
In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.
Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.
In every functional department, there is some amount of this - UX folks want to update the design language, advertising needs a fresh campaign for the new version, devs want to move to some new framework, and/or rewrite etc. Everyone thinks their actions are well justified - except for the user who rarely benefits :)
Well I would argue the monolithic look on apps is a to some degree a byproduct of testing. It makes sense that most apps' buttons, layouts, design patterns look the same and are considered "easiest" to use by A/B testing standards. You don't have to learn anything new to use those designs.
I think the tweet in the opening screenshot is simply wrong. I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting. Most copy/paste is within the same document, where you obviously want the odd bolded or italicized word to retain its formatting. But you don't notice those cases, because everything is working as expected. What you notice is that when you paste from an external source, the formatting is completely wrong.
I know that this is tangential to the point of the article, but it highlights an important point: you can't always trust what users say they want. You need to listen to them, because their frustrations point to real problems, but finding out what the actual solution is involves more work than just taking the user's suggestions at face value.
I almost never want paste to preserve any formatting, because I've almost never seen it work perfectly. If I need to reformat it anyway, I'd rather not have to clean up its messes first.
BTW in most programs that handle rich text, SHIFT-CTRL-V does a plain-text paste without the source formatting.
this. the sheer volume of times i have to paste text into a notepad or a URL bar or just any space that will lose the formatting, just to re-copy/paste it into some (usually MS) product that wants to preserve it is way higher than it should be.
I suspect that a more nuanced approach could suit general users the best. Retain boldness, italics and underlining, change to fit target colour and font.
Boldness, italics and underlining actually denote meaning, whereas font and colour are generally just aesthetic
In real Desktop Publishing software, text (content) and its style (layout) are separate — the text usually comes in from an external source (e.g. a file on an SMB share; a document in a CMS) and can be updated independently of the layout.
The linked text format is usually Rich Text (RTF). This allows a lot of things, but the Desktop Publishing tools only interpret the tags for bold, italics, underline, and a few other things (strikeout, subscript, etc.) All other styling in the linked text, they throw away.
This is precisely because, as you say, those specific styles actually denote meaning. They're something the writer adds. No other styling is used from the linked text, because none of the other styling is the writer's job.
All other styling is instead applied to the block(s) within the layout where the text gets embedded into. It's the layout designer that gets to decide the font, size, spacing, etc. for the text. Those attributes aren't stored with the text; they're stored with the layout.
To me, this makes far more sense as a workflow, even if you're a single author. I constantly wish that "word processors" had restructured and absorbed ideas from Desktop Publishing software when it came about. Instead, we got the garbled hybrid: you can have "document styles" like Title, Heading, Body, List Item, etc.; but they are essentially markup, moving around with the text (rather than there being any concept of an "section of the document" that gets styled, that text can be moved into/out of, and where the styles of that section will apply to the text only while it remains inside that section, such that moving text out of that area doesn't copy the styles of the section, only the styles of the text.)
In my case, I almost always want paste to override most formatting — if I copy something from a website, I want it to match my formatting.
What I'm looking for, though, is particularly for the font itself, the font color and maybe the size to match. If something is bolded, or italicized, that should ideally be retained.
A good configuration could be to ask whether you want the formatting of what you're pasting to match the document, and then ask if they want to set that choice as default.
Not only that, but I think the "average user" probably has lesser taste than the tweeter. They see a blue font on the text they are copying from some random web page, they expect a blue font when they paste it. This would be especially important to the average user if they are copying a lot of text with bullets and headers.
So the tweet may be describing a better practice for many use cases, but it may not be the practice most people want.
So if you make paste match the formatting of the destination not the source, both you and the tweeter are happy. Make a funky shortcut to override this if you want but this should be the default.
* Copying formatting works well and is desired when it is done within an app but it is janky and undesired when the apps are different.
I furiously hates copying/pasting of formatting. After reflecting, the problems all exist when I'm pasting from one app to another.
I just think out of the apps I use, the ones where paste with formatting is the default (eg it's what CMD+V does) are the ones where I'm usually pasting from somewhere else.
Is there an option in Word to change the default paste? I think that's what many of these opinions boil down to, and while I imagine there's hundreds of opinions on even the smallest thing I suspect many of these large pain points could be solved relatively easily if those in charge had a vision like the article is suggesting.
I agree, I often copy and paste to a basic no-formatting text editor and back just to clear formatting, eg before pasting to an email or whatever. I rarely want formatting retained when pasting to/from emails. Same when copying from a website, as someone else here mentioned.
>I would argue that you almost always want paste to preserve the pasteboard formatting.
Perhaps you should consider asking the user what they want by just giving them options. No need to prematurely break your software. (which is what most good software does now.)
I use copy/paste in powerpoint explicitly with the intent to copy over the formatting of the original to the destination deck. Easiest way to add a theme to an existing deck.
> I will design it for the average user rather than the power user.
But do power users or average users drive purchasing and ensure market share?
I was at a company that tried to switch to Google Cloud over Office 365. Know what saved MSFT? The Excel and Word power users. Average users had no opinion, but the power users all wanted Office.
In the context of this article, "average user" and "power user" does not have much meaning. Take the copy-paste example. One group of users is going to find paste-with-formatting more practical while another group of users is going to find paste-without-formatting more useful. The distinction has more to do with the task at hand than the ability of the user. Consider someone working withing a document or within a set of documents for a project. Losing formatting means they will have to go back to recreate it. Now consider someone pulling information from various sources. Maintaining formatting means a loss of consistency in the destination, so it is less desirable.
As for the opinion of average verses power users, I suspect it has a lot more to do with expectations. Power users are more inclined to expect software to do work for them, while the average user seems to be willing to work for the software. As an example, take a table that spans multiple pages. Power users will expect an option to add the table heading on each page, while the average user will do it themselves manually (even if the feature exists and even if they have to redo the work each time the page boundaries change).
Anecdotal and a complete digression from your point - I consider myself a poweruser of excel/word/etc and I loathe the online variants in O365. There's quite a few features missing in both that require me to use the offline variant that are both supported in GSuite. Table of Contents generator in Word is probably the biggest one I hate that is missing, and the clipboard nonsense isn't great either, but last time I used it in gsuite it wasn't a problem.
Makes sense, that must be my Microsoft office products are winning at software shops /s
Best for you, maybe. I haven't found a real use for either in the past 5 years writing software and running product. The only role in the org that has needed Excel over Sheets is finance, and the only time we touch Word is when we're dealing with outside legal and they aren't comfortable with anything but Word for redlines. Even then, junior partners have apologized and said they've tried to convince the firm to switch.
Why did they apologize? I have to say, this smells political - if Excel and Sheets are just two pieces of software, then there's no reason to apologize for liking one more than the other. For somebody at the partner level to apologize and ask for a change in a users' workflow - seems like catering to people who have a political issue with Microsoft, rather than judging on technical merits.
Because it's a pain in the ass for us, their clients, to interface with their office software.
Note that this particular firm serves a ton of tech startups. I don't expect a firm that does, say, real estate financing hears many complaints from their clientele.
GSuite (and probably O365) are probably actually pretty good examples of opinionated vs. the all the options offline MS Office.
Personally, myself and people I work with mostly like GSuite. We're probably generally described as heavy users but not power users, i.e. we don't need the features that only a few percent of people do. I actually find GSuite much more streamlined for my uses and collaborative editing is such a win. I do create fairly long docs sometimes but they're not complicated docs.
Do you have any examples of what is superior in O365? As my other reply states I've found it to be the opposite - GSuite supports _more_ than MS does online.
If you are chasing RFPs, propose and build everything that checks all the boxes. If you are a product company and building for people who will hopefully love your product, it’s your job to understand the customers, understand the data, and build the right solution rather than building ALL the solutions.
Some where in the mythical “Business 101” course is the lesson that you can either find a customer and figure out what they need (customer-focus), or find a need and figure out which customers have that need (product-focus).
This dynamic is everywhere: Apple has customers, they look at what their customers need, and do various product extensions (like streaming games) to fill their needs.
Whereas many vendors on the Apple platform do the reverse: They fill just one need, and arrange their marketing to find the customers with that need across all ecosystems.
Things get interesting in “Business 201,” where a company with product focus builds up enough goodwill with their customers that they switch strategies and become customer-focused.
Which is also Apple’s story, going from being a microcomputer specialist to a device specialist to a services behemoth. It’s now about filling more needs for existing customers.
Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing.
If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.
It is more honest to say Apple breaks things like streaming games to fulfill business needs of locking out or taxing third party providers of it and making their own. Not to fulfill cusomer needs: blocking it hurt customers.
Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities.
That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.
They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.
I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project.
It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.
Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors, etc.
I'll be honest, because most people who work for municipalities and other governments are not the best and brightest, and they will ask for a lot of stuff "because that's how we do it on paper" or other similar reasons, without much critical thinking.
Opinionated products are killer products when lots of people realize they share your opinion.
Apple banks on that. They are commonly derided by technical people for what their products don't do, but for a lot of users, they're happy with what the product does. Making it more capable would often make it harder for them to use.
Even making it configurable doesn't make it better. Even if the options are hidden, just having it there makes users nervous. They think, "Well, I could maybe make my device better, but that involves going into the no-no hell menu of billions of options". They're literally happier to just do it the opinionated way.
The trick, of course, is to actually have an opinion that a lot of people share. Often, that opinion doesn't exist. Even if it exists, you need to find it among the thousands of voices trying to tell you that they need some variant of it. It seems to require a fair bit of luck, though chance favors the prepared mind.
It probably matters how this opinion is formed. Often it’s formed first by your own pain, and if you start talk to people and do user research you might discover that you’re on to something.
>> Opinionated products are better than flexible products.
But they will rub some users the wrong way, and that's OK. In the open source CAD world you see the distinction in Solvespace vs FreeCAD. One is loved by its users as an easy, highly productive tool, if a bit odd looking. The other is regarded as more capable and feature complete - which is true - but is considered bloated, annoying, and crash-prone by users of the former.
There is definitely room for both approaches, or even multiple "this is the one true way" products. If you delight a segment of the market you'll never be obsolete.
This is there the Proctor & Gamble branding approach to products begins to make sense. In development, there is one code base, but multiple configurations of build. In the market the company has a "product line" of software, each opinionated towards a different work flow. Similar to being multi-lingual, this is multi-opinionazation to address different process styles.
Dear chat clients, I never want any formatting on any pasted text, ever. Thank you. (That is destination theme matching indeed.)
And with respect to the Whatsapp - Signal comparison, Signal came to the stage (at least for me) when whatsapp was already huge (and also had a focus on privacy by the way!), so that comparison is unfair.
> Beyond the laughs, there is a product lesson in this tweet. It is an example of a product design principle: “convention over configuration”, aka “make the easy things easy, the hard things possible”.
I don't know if the author is trying to use this as an example (since you can customize the behavior) or a counterexample, but the situation describe me of pasting in Word is a bad example of this. It's not even generally possible to paste from another word document and completely match the source formatting 100% (including stuff like text boxes) because of how pasting interacts with the terrible style system.
About a year ago I wrote a Mac application to strip formatting out of copy-pasted text. (Note: I was mostly interested in getting an application in the store as a learning exercise.)
In general, copying formatted text is a mess on Mac. (I haven't tried an equivalent Windows app, although I'm primarily a Windows developer.) The problem is that many of the data structures for formatted text don't preserve context. IE, it's impossible to know that something is just "italic," "bold," or "underline," because the formatting is details about how to render the fonts. IE, "italic" converts to kerning, "bold" and "underline" are really separate fonts.
In theory, I could try to infer formatting changes, and then convert to very basic HTML, but I only had about a month in between jobs to finish the app.
The simpler keystroke should do the more common operation. My guess is 90-99% of the time, users want to paste text and match the format to the existing doc or app. Therefore, cmd+v should strip formatting if done according to that rule.
The place for opinion in your product is in its configuration. Applications need to be flexible, otherwise they are useless to anyone who doesn't share your opinion.
Opinions are like estimates. The only things we can be sure of is that they are not exactly right and will likely drift over time.
Similar to a shortcut, opinions can be useful - but should not be a limiting factor.
It has been a long time since programs were written in a sane way: with lots of functionality so that experienced users can figure out a routine speed and become blazingly fast. Modern computing has decided to make people dumb. They like them like that, mindless drones who can only scroll and press YES. In life you get what you pay for, and right now we get users who don't care because they don't know, and big tech keeps feeding them more of the same.
When developers care more about imposing their opinions on others they have jumped to the class of people who care about power. They are the new lawyers and people should start making jokes about them being at the bottom of the sea.
It isn’t very clear. The author says you have to create flexible products (using configuration) but down the line, be more opinionated (using convention). He lost me.
The two are not exclusive; in fact, "convention" means that out of all the possibilities a certain set is chosen and used by default. It is not possible to have a "convention" if there is no "configuration", otherwise it's just a limited set of features.
What the author says is that's it's good to have configuration, because then everyone can find what they want, but configuration alone is not enough. You need good defaults, and because "good" is subjective it means you need defaults that will please a specific category of users, and you need to go all-in on it because then your software will have its own identity. It also means that those who want to use the software another way can still do it because it's configurable.
AKA support doing the entire work, and pay attention to what defaults you choose. Don't stop at the first part.
He also says that your flexibility should be enough to fit the target audience, and not much more because you should focus on delighting that audience, not on broadening it.
I actually didn't like the article either. The means he pushes are known to not be very effective, and he makes a completely one sided analysis of a cost/benefit situation. But I think you are focusing too hard on the trees and missed the forest.
I understand where the author is coming from, and that it tends to work sometimes, blablabla, but if I saved a dollar every time an "opinionated" application, framework, library, or programming language appeared on Github, I would have likely saved for a slightly used Toyota by now.
Regarding the "paste without formatting by default" opinion:
- Pasting a body of text with multiple headlines between two documents would require using a special paste command that explicitly preserves formatting.
- Some benefits of "convention over configuration" are only present if you stick to your existing conventions. Millions of people are already used to explicitly pasting without formatting.
Other remarks:
- Opinions need to be informed by facts and customer-facing research.
- There is room for divergent (Yes AND) thinking, as well as convergent (Just say no) thinking in product design. See "Double Diamond"[1].
There are certainly two use cases here. One is pasting complex blocks where you want the whole thing to copy over. And the other is copying text out of an email or website where you want it treated as dumb text.
Word actually offers a solution with the “paste without formatting” but it’s lost behind the million features of word.
This article mix a bit of everything. There are no rules to create a killer product. That's the whole purpose of the product management domain.
Regarding opinionated software they are great at creating alignment between people who have different background. But are not really good for complex use case. Look at excel, nobody is going to say that this is not a killer product but still being not opinionated at all. On the other side Github is a killer product and very opinionated.
But anything is possible, look I'm currently building an alternative to Confluence. You could say that knowledge management is a perfect area for opinionated software, so why is Notion (not opinionated) the killer product in that domain now ?
Maybe Microsoft did the user research and knows that most users want to preserve formatting when they paste in text. You prefer it to match style when pasting, but how do you know most users don't prefer it the way it is now?
User research, A/B testing, etc. is the way to make those decisions. And yes, I do believe in being opinionated when making software - but I didn't find your primary example to be compelling evidence of that fact.
All of my favorite products are completely unopinionated. Of course, aligning yourself with a specific audience will move units, but it won't make your product any better or worse. The only way you can actually improve your product is by becoming less opinionated and listening to the community who uses your product. Oftentimes their insight will be much more valuable than just "being opinionated".
This is the actual key to building MVPs. A good MVP provides exactly 1 way to do something impactful for a certain target customer base. If you have alternative paths/options/configurations, you built too much before testing in the market.
> Conventions create an opinionated product. Opinions create user delight. User delight creates successful businesses.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions. Go for example is a famously opinionated language - it even has a standardized way to format source code via go fmt which everyone uses. But if these opinions clash with the opinions of equally opinionated people, those people may refuse to touch it. Me not included (I have to stress that), my opinions are not set in stone, and I see the reasons why the language designers did it the way they did - in the end, having a standard way of doing things, even if it's not everyone's favorite way, is better than fragmentation.
It's usually how corporate programming languages are designed: they have corporate environments in mind which is the exact opposite of hacking. Strict standards, predictability and low bars to entry. Hence opinionated approach even to source code formatting and pretty much everything else. Java, C# and Go are all examples of this. Swift is kind of there too, though it's probably the least opinionated language of them all, the corporate ones. (Some would say C# is also kind of okay. Probably)
But the point of the article was a bit broader. Opinionated products can build a strong devoted userbase around them. The question is only how reasonable your opinions are.
An example from Apple's UI: the way multiple windows of the same app are cycled on the desktop with Cmd-` is absolutely beyond any logic. It tries to be smart but makes cycling so unpredictable that it becomes practically useless. It's probably even worse than MS Word's copy/paste one (actually I'm not sure which is worse).
This is someone's opinion and I can't imagine anyone on Earth except the creator of this logic being happy with it. It's an edge case that illustrates the point: your opinion should resonate with enough people to sustain your business, that's all.
The problem with opinionated products is people who have very strong opposite opinions.
Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity. Those will kill a product quicker than limiting it to a small portion of the market that agrees with the opinion you choose.
> Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity.
I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for.
Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
Being opinionated is okay if your product is interoperable with others. Then people have the choice between your product and its potential replacements so having choices within your product is not as important. I guess Go is okay because we can afford multiple library ecosystems and programs written in different languages can interoperate.
Unfortunately for-profit companies really don't like giving their customers the choice to switch to a competitor.
In order to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgement. Value judgements take courage. Value judgements require saying this is more important, these types of users will not be included.
> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives
It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".
That makes it sound easy. Overriding means the capacity to be overriden. I.e., if you can change the default, then it presupposed that you have a mechanism for dealing with various options PLUS some other options. That's additional work.
I don't really understand the objection. The article is only meaningful as a response to those who try to make a product that is everything to everyone, thus producing a product for nobody. Besides, unless you only buy bespoke, made-to-order products design in consultation with you, anything with a design has already been decided potentially in a way that you dislike but others don't.
That decision was the final straw for me. Every Amazon device is now unplugged, Prime membership and Amazon music canceled, no longer shopping on their site.
Doing what is "easy for the average user" is not sufficient for me, some configurations should be off by default. I shouldn't have to constantly worry that a remote code change could turn my hardware into a new source of revenue for you while I am on vacation at the beach.