gmurphy · HackerTrans

3 дня назадdiscuss

This is lovely - I used to use YouTube recordings of Yamanote line trips as a way to fall asleep.

As a small bit of feedback - from the sleep perspective, the melodies and door chimes seem quite loud and frequent - would love an even more "backgroundy" version where the ambient travel sections are longer, and those chimes and melodies are quieter. Perhaps even with masking of human noises.

gmurphy

2 месяца назадdiscuss

At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.

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gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

We did a lot of experimentation with keyboards in Android - finding better ways to type and click is pure HCI dream work

The key challenge is:

- At first, people don't care about speed - they just want to type well and accurately - for most people, that means standardised layout across all their devices, and they won't consider phones that push them into other models.

- Only after they've mastered that standard layout do they start to care about speed, but by then they've gotten good enough at the basic system that swapping to anything else is too much of a regression

So I really do love the existence of third party keyboards that cater to the set of people that are willing to deal with that setback

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

cloudpebble was the best part about Pebble - it made development so easy I did so much more of it

The developer experience for modern devices is so awful - the teams driving it are so immersed in big team development that they leak build systems, config, package management, certificates, permissions, and store integration concerns all over the place - then some of them have minor errors and you're stuck

Sometimes you just want to write a single file of code and have it run. Cloudpebble will probably be the thing that brings me back to pebble.

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

When we started work on Chrome my favourite browser was a now-forgotten IE shell called iRider, which implemented tree-ish style tabs in a better way than anyone, and we did take multiple attempts at vertical tabs early on.

We didn't ship them because they were only a mitigation of the too-many-tabs problem, not a solution, and they didn't really fit our model of 'tabs are titlebars'. They were also never going to be default - most people did not have that many tabs, and we had a very strong opinion was that we shouldn't have configuration - it was better to very strongly execute on one vision we loved and risk losing people (but hope the quality would bring people along), than to execute and support multiple directions poorly.

The world has changed a lot since I last worked on Chrome ten years ago, so as an outsider I'm excited to see what the team currently attempting it can do.

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

Replacing the Android home buttons with the swipe up gesture. It was demonstrably a very clear usability and efficiency loss, but most people strongly preferred it.

Before we had that latter data I actually argued against attempting it - I figured having a clear usability win vs iPhone would be an area we could capitalize on, and didn't believe we'd be able to execute the swipe system well in the time we had (I'd rather be behind and robust than leading edge and flaky), but doing it was definitely the right call - felt pretty sheepish about that one for a few years. The eng and ux teams that pulled it off were next level.

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules. But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision:

I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I also agree that uniform colors are awful, but that was after my time so I have no stake in that).

However, usability is not about pure efficiency - a huge amount of it is approachability - people have to _want_ to use the UI. If they don't want to use it, no amount of pure-usability work will mean anything - it will just be "shitty computers" in their heads. In Android's case, the developer-provided weirdly shaped icons were a major sticking point - people would take one look at an Android homescreen with all kinds of mismatched splatters of icons, mentally lump it with Windows and Linux in the must-be-for-geeks bucket, and walk off to the Apple store.

It drove us nuts - in actual tests, people would often find Android easier and more efficient to use, but would still pick iPhone as the "easier" product, because that's the one that was inviting, that fit their style, that looked easy to use.

So we did a lot of work nudging Android to a place where real people would find it desirable, easy, and powerful - making really difficult tradeoffs - sometimes breaking expectations, sometimes sacrificing a little bit here and there to gain a lot somewhere else, sometimes just taking a chance.

It took a lot of effort from a lot of wonderful people, and it involved a stupidly large amount of arguing against "just copy iPhone" laziness and pressure (a major reason I left), but I am still deeply proud of what the team was able to do. We couldn't please everyone, but I think more people were pleased afterwards than before.

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions

Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice"

The trick was it didn't follow the golden ratio at all because the golden ratio is not some magic number that leads to balance and peace - lighting, rounding, color, and visual strength all dramatically outweigh it

gmurphy

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

My wife and I have both used gmail for twenty years - she's been sending me email from her account for years, with my personal domain forwarding to my gmail. But since the Google Domains > Squarespace disaster, the gmail spam filter has lost the plot - it will occasionally spam filter of her from-gmail emails mid thread.

I am certain I have missed critical emails because of this, so trust is gone. I now have to dedicate time each day to going through my gets-an-email-every-two-minutes spam folder. Even though I happily worked there for 16 years, I sadly now find myself in the process of de-Googling.

gmurphy

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Since our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-versa

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