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UI is a function of your organization

173 pointsby damethosover 1 year ago

20 comments

hcarvalhoalvesover 1 year ago
Sometimes, UIs are designed with unrealistic expectations and mismatches of how processes work in reality. This is maybe lost on today’s “native digital” generation, but anyone who worked at organizations a while back should understand this intuitively.<p>Back then, processes inside companies where paper-driven, a variation of “produce some kind of document, pass it along to another department, get a stamped copy&#x2F;receipt to prove it’s been done”. I always use this example when designing architectures and UIs: if you couldn’t design the same process as paper being passed around, the design is missing something. You need to really grok the company structure and the domain to design something sensible.
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vonnikover 1 year ago
This is a variation of &quot;you ship your org chart.&quot;<p>After hearing the outbound version of this truism, I discovered that the inbound version is also true; ie &quot;you buy your org chart.&quot;<p>Anyone selling to v large organizations, corporate or government, will know what I mean. Bloated and dysfunctional orgs with eternal sales cycles buy from bloated and dysfunctional orgs that can survive eternal sales cycles, and which are willing to sell bloated and dysfunctional products to satisfy arbitrary criteria.<p>This is one of many reasons why startups have a hard time selling to very large orgs.
andsoitisover 1 year ago
Conway’s Law from 1967.<p><i>[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.</i><p>— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
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exabrialover 1 year ago
I used to think Apple was the king of UIs.<p>They have long departed from quality and functionality; Jobs has a no nonsense approach where form followed functionality. If it functioned properly, the form was intuitive. Apple UI interfaces from the Jobs years were incredible. Nowadays, under forced yearly redesign policy, we’re reversed so far things are just hidden and awkward.<p>Kinda funny: you force it and it sucks.
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alias_neoover 1 year ago
So who&#x27;s going to tell us that the Domino&#x27;s Pizza Tracker is just a timer?<p>I don&#x27;t eat there often, but when I have, the Pizza sits in QA for about 10 minutes, then is &quot;out for delivery for about 15, despite the fact I could literally walk to the place in 15 minutes, and they sure as heck and walking my pizza to me.<p>Then there&#x27;s the fact that they outright lie by saying it has been delivered, then turning up about 10 minutes later.<p>Between the fact it&#x27;s not the best pizza and this dodgy behaviour, they pretty much make sure I don&#x27;t eat from there more often than about quarterly.
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ivan_gammelover 1 year ago
Many people refer to Conway&#x27;s law here, but I&#x27;d argue that this law is true only for the static organization design, where structure is rigid and never changes. This law and and the title of the link hide much more important dependency: organization is a function of business requirements. System design is a function of them too. It MAY happen that organization is designed first, but it is not necessarily the case. Organization changes happen all the time and systems tend to stay during those changes. Many companies have subdivisions organized around the customer journey or certain product topics, e.g. Acquisition tribe or B2B business unit. Those structures work very well and do not reflect the Conway&#x27;s law (system architecture required in this case is often org-wide and modular, requiring all org units to follow the same design approach).
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socialentpover 1 year ago
Steven Sinofsky wrote about this in the context of the early days of Microsoft in “Don’t ship the org chart” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;047-dont-ship-the-org-chart" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;047-dont-s...</a>
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tobrover 1 year ago
Is this a response to UI = f(statesⁿ)[1] or are they both a response to something else?<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daverupert.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;ui-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daverupert.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;02&#x2F;ui-states&#x2F;</a>
alberthover 1 year ago
Domino Pizza tracker<p>The article is centered around the pizza tracker, but I thought that tracker was fake.<p>Just for illustrative purposes.<p>Is it not?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-sun.com&#x2F;money&#x2F;6927297&#x2F;dominos-pizza-tracker-different-than-expected&#x2F;amp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-sun.com&#x2F;money&#x2F;6927297&#x2F;dominos-pizza-tracker-...</a>
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lylejantzi3rdover 1 year ago
The Only Unbreakable Law - Conway&#x27;s Law.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY</a>
btbuildemover 1 year ago
Seeing all the mentions of Conway&#x27;s Law here jogged something in my mind -- could one assert the converse and &quot;reverse engineer&quot; the org structure of a company by examining the systems it has designed?<p>This could be super useful when considering the next place of employment for example; the organizational dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies only become apparent once you&#x27;ve jumped in with both feet.
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kylecordesover 1 year ago
I have noticed that the Panera Bread status tracker used to provide good information, but doesn&#x27;t anymore. It frequently says an order is done while it is still being worked on.<p>Might be a UI&#x2F;Organization mismatch, as described in this article.<p>Or maybe it&#x27;s the staff intentionally marking things done early, to game metrics expectations from management.
bjnewman85over 1 year ago
Umm, the argument in the article seems self-defeating. UI=f(org) except we end up with the same UI with radically different orgs because we can just f() over the differences with dark design patterns and users can&#x27;t tell the difference.<p>I can show you anything in a UI - only good orgs can develop valuable products from those UIs.
cratermoonover 1 year ago
I order from Domino&#x27;s now and then. I&#x27;ve noticed that someone named Scott seems to be working preparing pizzas at all hours on all days. It didn&#x27;t take me very long to figure out that the tracker was just putting in a placeholder event. The actual delivery tracker seems to work OK, though.
tsylbaover 1 year ago
The Domino&#x27;s pizza tracking bits is a funny one for those whom had read Snowcrash, where a whole earlier section of the book is about the advancement of the pizza delivery industry.<p>I don&#x27;t know, it seem to me the 90s had a very dystopian view of future Pizza Hut.<p>« The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. [..] Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. »
shubhamjainover 1 year ago
The whole post is based on a questionable assumption that Domino Pizza Tracker accurately reflects the status of the Pizza, when it could just be a dumb timer based on a statistical average. Sure, the Pizza Delivery person in the last step has to be accurate, but that&#x27;s simpler than tracking if the Pizza is in the oven. As for the point itself, I think the real-time status tracking is a very, very small subset of UIs. Yes, it&#x27;s difficult to deliver if the organization isn&#x27;t designed around this, but most sucky UIs aren&#x27;t limited by not having the data.
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jbs789over 1 year ago
So the output of an organisation is a function of the organisation. Or the amount of effort you put into something affects the outcome. Shocking.
alxmngover 1 year ago
“To the extent that the business takes place in software, designing the software is designing the business.” @mulegirl from Twitter
gjvcover 1 year ago
see also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conway%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Conway%27s_law</a><p>and the fact that the same tropes are recapitulated over and over again without any reference to prior art. Alan Kay is correct; computing is a pop culture.
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deepsunover 1 year ago
&gt; where the step from “order received” to “pizza in the oven” happens only because of a timer in the UI<p>Then don&#x27;t lie. Instead of the status, just say outright that it takes up to 5 minutes for the pizza to get in the oven. And show a timer.