Great post! I've worked in developer tools most of my career and this resonates with me, a UI that uses familiar concepts goes a long way, even if the data behind it is complex. A couple jobs ago, I was working on distributed tracing, I remember participating in several design sprints for a new feature where we were trying to visualize complex statistical findings. We tried tree visualizations and other fancy stuff. It all tested poorly (and would have been harder to build). In the end we just went with a sorted list that had more information on demand explaining the sorting order. It turns out that even power users don't want novel UI patterns.
The stroads video... oh man. I lived in Sweden for 2 years after growing up in a US town with lots and lots of stroads. I never thought about it growing up, but now I can't unsee the stroads all around me here, as well as the general unpleasantness of needing a car to do simple errands.
Great post! I've worked in developer tools most of my career and this resonates with me, a UI that uses familiar concepts goes a long way, even if the data behind it is complex. A couple jobs ago, I was working on distributed tracing, I remember participating in several design sprints for a new feature where we were trying to visualize complex statistical findings. We tried tree visualizations and other fancy stuff. It all tested poorly (and would have been harder to build). In the end we just went with a sorted list that had more information on demand explaining the sorting order. It turns out that even power users don't want novel UI patterns.
The stroads video... oh man. I lived in Sweden for 2 years after growing up in a US town with lots and lots of stroads. I never thought about it growing up, but now I can't unsee the stroads all around me here, as well as the general unpleasantness of needing a car to do simple errands.
Cool to hear that you've found a similar thing in dev tools compared to my experience in cybersecurity.
And ohhhh the stroads. Urbanist youtube has ruined me. I can't unsee it either and now I'm like "do I need to move to Amsterdam?" haha 😭