> "yes children, once you grow up you'll realize how foolish your idealism has been and you'll stuff your game full of gems you can overpay for!"
As someone who has worked at a start up that really took off, didn't truly think out monetization and prayed at some point the free users would be willing to play assuming we gave the right features and benefits, I would say you're incredibly naïve. So in retrospect, this isn't that poor of a take.
The isotope of copper known as CU64 is used for seeing what is happening inside the body. When CU64 decays back into normal copper, it emits a particle called a positron, which passes through the body and we can detect. By putting CU64 inside the body we can see things like internal organs where the copper accumulates. This is called positron emission tomography, or a PET scan.
CU64 is one of many isotopes you can use for this, and is nice because unlike other options it emits a good quantity of particles (resulting in good image quality) and lasts a long time (so we don’t have to worry about it getting to where it needs to be - in the world and in the body - before it decays).
While I agree with everyone this certification is probably useless (idk a single hiring manager in my company that told me oh hey the certifications on this candidate are really stellar) and that Microsoft CAN have some hidden agenda here...
I would disagree in saying that Microsoft is making Github shit. There have been so many good things Github released since Microsoft took over (Github sponsoring, Github actions, bunch of other things) IMO it's been a major benefit. I'm hoping they don't screw it up
So you never use Amazon for product discovery or evaluation? You've never gone to a store and said "I wonder what Amazon prices that at and what people say about it?"
Sure I did. But by that time I know exactly what I want to buy - I've discovered the product and evaluated it compared to alternatives prior to setting foot in the brick&mortar store (I don't trust store salespeople either). I never do casually browse Amazon, or type a generic description and buy something from presented search results.
As for "what people say about" a particular product on Amazon, I don't even bother reading it.
Honestly I like some aspects of the fashion industry -- shoes, hats, even shirts or collar shirts all have some personality you can showcase who you are and give yourself an identity (I think that's what makes fashion kinda interesting).
However, pants? It's not really that different. I could care less lol
HN users, on the whole, are terrible UX critics who have no idea what they're talking about on the subject.
The average HN user probably:
- knows their way around a terminal
- understands default browser behavior in depth
- has the programmer's mentality of 'everything should be governed by universal logical rules that apply equally everywhere'
The truth is, this is not how most users think. Good UX for a cli application is not the same as good UX for a website. If you think of websites in terms of what programmers think good UX is, you get... HN and Craigslist and all the other things that HN users typically think are fantastic user experiences, because they meet their expectations. These applications are also almost uniformly ugly. This actually makes perfect sense, and for these users, this is fantastic UX.
But what makes UX good is that the target audience can easily use the software. That's it. There's no such thing as an 'intuitive user interface'. Clicking on stuff in computers is not natively intuitive to humans. There are only familiar and unfamiliar interfaces. Every interface we haven't seen before is unfamiliar and 'terrible' at first glance. People will train themselves to use and love extremely bad interfaces, or refuse to use very good interfaces that are difficult to learn. The HN user is someone who has typically put a lot of effort into learning how computers work and how web browsers work by default, so they develop intuitions like, "If a website breaks the default browser behavior, it's bad UX." And for them, that's true, but what makes the default browser UX better than an alternative, other than that you already know it? Now maybe it actually is better, and I can think of many examples of websites that change default behavior in ways that are absolutely worse. But I've also seen websites do cool things with scrolljacking that aren't inherently wrong because they defied expectations for 3 seconds.
Every application has to be learned by the user. How easy it is to learn it depends on the background knowledge and experiences of the user, so it's very very hard, if not completely impossible, to develop a UX that will be good for every possible user. But if some UX isn't good FOR YOU, that doesn't mean that it's bad, it might just mean you aren't the target audience.
> If you think of websites in terms of what programmers think good UX is, you get... HN and Craigslist and all the other things that HN users typically think are fantastic user experiences, because they meet their expectations. These applications are also almost uniformly ugly. This actually makes perfect sense, and for these users, this is fantastic UX.
So would you argue that the Craigslist experience is only good for those with the "programmer's mentality"? "Ugly" is perhaps a smaller factor in UX than designers account for.
> And for them, that's true, but what makes the default browser UX better than an alternative, other than that you already know it?
Nothing, that's just it: you already know it. What you call "programmer's mentality" is actually fundamental to human cognition. In making sense of things we use what we've already made sense of. The more we can rely on our existing knowledge to figure something out, the less cognitive friction there will be.
The cost of surprise can certainly be outweighed by other factors, or surprise in itself can be exploited to usefully convey something, but in my experience it is not generally used to these effects. For every zooming interface or slideshow where scrolljacking might make perfect sense there are hundreds where those three seconds of defied expectations are wasted to implement something that is either useless or entirely detrimental to usability.
> But if some UX isn't good FOR YOU, that doesn't mean that it's bad, it might just mean you aren't the target audience.
Or I am the target audience and the designers have failed to design for the target audience. Or I am not the target audience only because the designer has failed to identify and characterize their target audience correctly. Or the designers primarily work with making business-required anti-features bearable. Or they're optimizing for first impressions and not long term usability. Or they're optimizing for generating more work opportunities ahead of themselves.
To decidedly say that you, our user, is not our intended target audience seems like a conclusion that must be backed with a lot of data, something which IME not a lot of organizations can muster. From that perspective these alternatives seem more likely.
I don't think you're arguing against what I actually said.
> So would you argue that the Craigslist experience is only good for those with the "programmer's mentality"?
No, I think I was clear - I think the Craiglist experience is good for people who are familiar with simple sites like Craigslist, but not for all people. Craigslist has a very simple UX, so it would be hard to find someone who had trouble using it. It would be easy to find someone who finds the UX unpleasant, because I personally find it unpleasant because it's very ugly.
> Nothing, that's just it: you already know it. What you call "programmer's mentality" is actually fundamental to human cognition. In making sense of things we use what we've already made sense of. The more we can rely on our existing knowledge to figure something out, the less cognitive friction there will be.
Here, you're just agreeing with me, except that I didn't call the "programmer's mentality" the general rule of familiarity, it was the general rule that all things must behave according to the same rules.
> The cost of surprise can certainly be outweighed by other factors, or surprise in itself can be exploited to usefully convey something, but in my experience it is not generally used to these effects. For every zooming interface or slideshow where scrolljacking might make perfect sense there are hundreds where those three seconds of defied expectations are wasted to implement something that is either useless or entirely detrimental to usability.
I'm not claiming anywhere that it's impossible to make a bad UX, either by breaking previously known rules OR by following them, I'm claiming that good UX is context based and the rule of "scrolljacking is always bad" isn't true. You seem to agree with me here.
> Or I am the target audience and the designers have failed to design for the target audience. Or I am not the target audience only because the designer has failed to identify and characterize their target audience correctly. Or the designers primarily work with making business-required anti-features bearable. Or they're optimizing for first impressions and not long term usability. Or they're optimizing for generating more work opportunities ahead of themselves.
Sure, bad UX exists, and these are plausible reasons why it might happen. I never claimed that no UX ever was bad for any reason.
> To decidedly say that you, our user, is not our intended target audience seems like a conclusion that must be backed with a lot of data, something which IME not a lot of organizations can muster. From that perspective these alternatives seem more likely.
Here you're either misunderstanding me or knocking down a straw man. I didn't use the word 'decidedly', I said it 'might mean'. I also wasn't focused on the perspective of the organization or person creating a user experience, I was focusing on the person consuming it and criticizing it, without any regard for everyone else who also consumes it and whether they might agree that the UX is 'obviously' terrible.
To give a concrete example: Slack recently released a redesign, and I personally hate it and many of the interactions it created. Most people I know love it and had no issues adapting to the changes they made. Did Slack release a bad UX? I would argue no, even though I personally do not like the UX they created, because I think I am a rare case and for the majority of their userbase, they made the correct call and improved the experience. It seems to me that most arguments on HN about UX boil down to "I immediately closed the tab because it hijacked my scrolling, terrible UX." I'm saying that's a bad argument, and your personal enjoyment is not a complete picture of what makes an experience good or bad for the complete audience of users.
I, too, am curious about this. Not just Coursera but also LinkedIn Learning certificates, etc.
This isn't that I would avoid doing Coursera but it might mean I'd opt for other trainings offered. For example you can get AWS certified multiple ways, but the best way is prob through Amazon's AWS training.
Ahh I remember when AWS went down (think it was 2 years ago now?) or at least a data center in us-east? Majority of the internet went down and status page went down as well. Man good times.
As someone who has worked at a start up that really took off, didn't truly think out monetization and prayed at some point the free users would be willing to play assuming we gave the right features and benefits, I would say you're incredibly naïve. So in retrospect, this isn't that poor of a take.