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1. Embed this notice
   Tristan Harward (trisweb@m.trisweb.com)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:21 JST Tristan Harward

   Nearly all business software, at its peril, is dreadfully afraid of having an opinion about how its users should do their jobs.

   The principal reason is that it does not confidently understand its users jobs better than they do (a pursuit that should be required of a company designing software to help with a job, in my opinion) and is therefore ill equipped to recommend better.

   Imagine the world if understanding the fields we purport to help was so elevated as to actually have a chance of improving them.

   #productmanagement #design #ux #productdesign #engineering

   • Embed this notice
     Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:16 JST Jeremy Kahn

     in reply to

     • Andy Nortrup :cascadia: 🌳

     @andy
     "It will be so easy for business people they won't need to hire programmers, they can just write the business logic themselves" has been around since _at least_ the COBOL boom

     Turns out "precisely saying what you want" is _what programmers do_

     Having a magic genie that tolerates imprecision and still DWIM is what every founding "non technical techbro" thinks their "technical co-founder" does

     And the AI hype is "maybe I won't need to hire her next time"
     @trisweb

   • Embed this notice
     Andy Nortrup :cascadia: 🌳 (andy@social.seattle.wa.us)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:17 JST Andy Nortrup :cascadia: 🌳

     in reply to

     • Jeremy Kahn

     @trisweb @trochee there is a lot of throw spaghetti at the wall looking for the killer app for a random bullshit generator. I think that some of that is genuine experimentation by designers and engineers and product managers.

     There is great appeal to letting people use natural language to get the computer to speak human language rather than requiring humans to do the difficult work of expressing themselves in a precise computer language.

     Kit Rhett Aultman repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tristan Harward (trisweb@m.trisweb.com)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:18 JST Tristan Harward

     in reply to

     • Jeremy Kahn

     @trochee oddly enough this thought came from a discussion about Figma’s new AI features.

     I don’t think they’re playing 3D chess with the point of these features, they’re just following the hype train and trying to be reasonable about how it might help people, with a lot of uncertainty in how that happens.

     My conclusion here is, if they understood the jobs their customers actually do (in Figma’s case the discussion was around getting out of high fidelity and actually modeling solutions and conceptual directions) then they could design tools, AI or otherwise, that are genuinely valuable. Like, I don’t know, something that helps designers work through a fantastic approach to their process in a humanistic and user-centric way, rather than just helps plagiarize high-fidelity UIs for useless conceptual ideas that have no connection to reality.

     I don’t believe that their customers are demanding “replace humans with AI” or expect that to be realistic (yet).

   • Embed this notice
     Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:19 JST Jeremy Kahn

     in reply to

     @trisweb

     If the customer isn't the user, but the user is the customer's employee, a lot of these decisions make more sense

     Also applies to AI writing and art

     The people paying for it want to automate the labor of the people they're paying SO THEY CAN PAY THEM LESS PER UNIT, not so they can do better work

   • Embed this notice
     Tristan Harward (trisweb@m.trisweb.com)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2024 03:24:20 JST Tristan Harward

     in reply to

     Corollary: the mission of product development (note: not a specific job title) is to understand your customer’s job better than they do, so that you might create a tool to guide them to do it better.

     If you’re making a tool based on a poor understanding of their job, aren’t you simply targeting poor execution of that job? Who would want that? Who would want to take part in building that?