Every tool and device has their opinion. Each of them influence you in their ways. They make certain actions easy and others annoying.
Yes everything has a tradeoff. Very flexible system offers a lot of choices to make, but less guidance. Opinionated system offers guidance and less choices to make.
The reason people or businesses buy opinionated or built systems is the same reason people buy buildings, cars, iPhones, or sandwiches. Someone made the choices and they can benefit from those choices, get the benefits quickly and move on to what matters most to them, the work or realizing their goals or just going one A to B.
The economy and productivity will grind to halt if everyone is doing everything from sandwiches to software from scratch.
Everything has opinions or conventions even down to programming languages to machine code.
few will understand this.
for the last few decades, UI/UX has been built on a stable background assumption: the human is the only general intelligence in the loop.
software is procedural.
UI's job is to make that procedure discoverable and efficient:
- show the state of the system.
- expose available operations.
- help users compose operations into workflows.
the questions then are the following:
how do we reduce cognitive load?
how do we make navigation and affordances clear?
how do we get from novice -> expert performance within a fixed interaction grammar?
this assumption breaks when the system can interpret language, infer goals, propose plans, and adapt across tasks.
a lot of today's UI patterns will feel as strange as command lines do to a 10‑year‑old.
@asallen To me, software design includes what algorithms and data structures you use, system architecture, deployment systems, etc.
Like how a person designing a bridge is not (primarily) someone making it pleasant to walk on but making it function properly, efficiently, etc.
Make Something Wonderful. Read the new online book we designed at LoveFrom with the Steve Jobs Archive. — “Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” https://t.co/ZZRLCcaySA
IMO, one of the most underrated "stories" in the app world is Subway Surfers.
It's an endless runner game launched in 2012 by Denmark-based studios SYBO and Kiloo.
A decade later, they are still picking up steam, cracking top 10 global downloads for ALL apps, not just games!