<story><title>Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX</title><url>https://www.gabrielpickard.com/posts/developer-experience-fundamentally-harder-than-normal-ux/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Glench</author><text>To make some of the ideas in this article a little more concrete, here are some research demos I’ve made:&lt;p&gt;* Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: 
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.com&amp;#x2F;LegibleMathematics&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.com&amp;#x2F;LegibleMathematics&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.github.io&amp;#x2F;fuzzyset.js&amp;#x2F;ui&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.github.io&amp;#x2F;fuzzyset.js&amp;#x2F;ui&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs:
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;* Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works:
&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.com&amp;#x2F;MarilynMaloney&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;glench.com&amp;#x2F;MarilynMaloney&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX</title><url>https://www.gabrielpickard.com/posts/developer-experience-fundamentally-harder-than-normal-ux/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alxlaz</author><text>Far from me to defend every UI of every development tool out there but I think statements like these, and their illustration, could benefit from some explanation for those of us who are not designers:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;  We coders still put up with horrid UX&amp;#x2F;UI when programming.&lt;p&gt;which is illustrated with a screenshot from Visual Studio... .NET 2002, I think, judging by the application icon?&lt;p&gt;Setting aside the relevance of a 20-year old screenshot, what exactly is wrong with that interface and what makes it horrid? I mean it definitely had its quirks but:&lt;p&gt;- It&amp;#x27;s spectacularly compact, certainly way better than anything I&amp;#x27;ve seen in the last five years. We could display an UI builder and the associated code on single 1024x768 screen and work on it semi-comfortably. &amp;quot;Beautiful&amp;quot; UI&amp;#x2F;UX, as understood today, is so cluttered by whitespace (oh, the irony...) that it&amp;#x27;s barely usable on a 1920x1080 screen. A similarly compact interface on today&amp;#x27;s huge screens would be a dramatic productivity improvement that, twenty years ago, we could only dream of.&lt;p&gt;- You could easily access any function through textual menus -- no hamburger menus, no obscure, monochrome icons. Granted, the toolbar icons were a pain, but the way I remember it, most of us either disabled it straight away, or just populated with a couple of items that were of real value and which we knew well.&lt;p&gt;- The colors have great contrast, the whole thing is readable even on a very poor-quality screenshot that seems to have been actually downsized.&lt;p&gt;- UI items have enough relief and&amp;#x2F;or distinction that it&amp;#x27;s clear what you can interact with and what you can&amp;#x27;t (maybe the item palette from the diagram editor is an exception, or at least the screenshot makes it look like one, but virtually every program in that era made it look like that so it wasn&amp;#x27;t so hard to use).&lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#x27;s wrong with that thing?</text></comment>