Nerds continue to fail to grasp the value of UI/UX. This has always been why FOSS and similar solutions have failed to compete in the market in spite of being "free" and often technically superior.
UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined.
The importance of user experience is only growing as the world becomes more and more time poor and we move more and more into an "attention economy." Saving seconds counts. If it doesn't work instantly it's broken, period.
Here's two ways I can explain it:
(1) If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive. It only makes sense to do this if you have a lot of surplus time on your hands.
(2) If you have ten million users and make a UI/UX improvement that saves them one minute a month and you value their time at an average of $50/hour, you just created about $8.3 million in value since that's the value of the time you just saved.
A rule of thumb that I use is that every step required to do something halves adoption. So if you have a 10 step install process, only 1 out of 1024 people who look at your product will make it to trying it.
Every developer needs to have "user experience is everything" tattooed on their forehead.
Most users don't want to tweak anything related to their phones, tablets, computers, watches. If everything your app does, isn't reachable within 1-3 clicks/swipes/presses, then forget it.
Someone suggested using two versions KeePass files...one for shared passwords, one for not shared passwords. This is NOT a substitute for clicking Share Password and literally not doing anything else.
Someone suggested storing all your passwords in the browser. This is NOT a substitute for having all of your passwords available at the app level on your iPhone. This is NOT a substitute for sharing passwords with your whole family.
I have been hearing about how X11/MOTIF will "end the Windows/Apple hegemony" for decades.
I don't know how often I've heard "X Windows is just as good as Mac OS."
It's like when your vegan friend keeps telling you that "Falafel tastes just like beef."
They have never tasted beef (or they hated the taste), so they don't have anything to compare it to. X Windows is GUI, written by people that hate GUI.
What could possibly go wrong?
All that said, it's a crazy amount of money, and I really feel that the only real work the password manager needs, is to be rewritten in native. Electron is less-than-excellent.
They must have some kind of strategy that goes beyond just being a password wallet.
Also, for some software "everyone uses" like e-mail or an office suite, you can afford maybe some complexity or annoyance. The alternative "do not use e-mail" or "do not use an office suite" is a no go for almost anyone.
The alternative "do not use a password manager" is however totally common. So if you want to get someone with limited time or affordance for annoyance (like your wife) to use a password manager, the process of setting it up and using it better be very smooth and frictionless.
I made the same argument below but I was downvoted to hell.
Bitwarden is not an alternative to 1Password that passes the wife/parent/elder test because the UX is so bad they need to call me everytime something isnt exactly working as before.
Really? I use both (Bitwarden for personal, 1Password for work) and find the UI for Bitwarden to be more complete and consistent. Like if I want to edit a login item, I must open a new browser tab in 1Password. Not so in Bitwarden. I still can't figure out how to consistently trigger the workflow to add a new login for the current website automatically without opening a new tab in 1Password. You click "Add Login" in Bitwarden.
Agreed, I used lastpass in 2016 and tried to switch to keepass. I'm more than technical enough to use keypass and sync a vault across all my devices, but I needed this to be as easy as possible. I know myself enough to understand if something doesn't feel as easy as humanly possible, I'm much less likely to use it. A decent chunk of people are not like this, which is why I believe there is this huge debate over "Keepass vs 1Password". But anyway, I switched to bitwarden and the UX was more than good enough for me. It "just works".
I even started self hosting it this year and it continues to "just work" - although I don't recommend it to most people since I now have to manage a server. I was already self hosting a lot of other things last year (wanted to move away from google/apple services) so the "cost" of self hosting Bitwarden was negligible.
Anyway I know I rambled a lot, but just wanted to chime in and throw in my opinion about bitwarden
I really hope that Bitwarden improves their UI and UX, because I really want to like it. But their Collections and sharing feature is very unclear, especially once multiple people/orgs are involved.
I'm afraid to use it because they co-mingle everything in UI and I dont accidently want to share a personal password with another org.
Being worried of sharing a password accidently is very scary UX
This seems to be a general characteristic of enthusiasts.
To design a good car for people other than car enthusiasts, you have to hate cars or at least be able to place oneself in the shoes of someone who hates cars. People who don't love cars want a car that makes them think about cars as little as possible. The purpose of a car is to carry you from one point to another, not to make you spend time on cars.
Maybe it’s because Bitwarden’s UX is actually quite good? I found 1password’s to be substantially worse when I tried it a few years ago, especially on non-Apple devices. Perhaps that’s changed, but for something so heavily touted for being well designed, I found it to be very disappointing.
There isn't one. I will continue to say this, people will continue to ignore it, and the computing ecosystem for the average person will continue to be locked down by corporations that do not ignore it. Free, open, and privacy respecting technology will remain irrelevant outside enthusiast techie circles.
It's a bit like climate change. Scientists will warn, people will ignore, and then we will abandon Miami and will probably blame the scientists.
Excellent, problem solved. I was thinking somebody would have to contribute UI changes to an open source project, but it turns out flaming people on the internet is much easier.
I can't stand nerds that fundamentally can't learn this nuance. It's like the biggest blind spot ever. There are just so many of them in the tech industry working as software engineers, which is why we have powerful tools that are a pain in the ass to use. It makes me hate software engineers, and I am one.
> UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined.
Huh, to me it's both. The UI/UX wouldn't be worth shit if their software ate battery like it was free, crashed often, was frequently janky, hogged resources to the point of being a problem, or all the fancy features underlying their UX didn't work pretty damn well without user fixing or intervention. Software quality is part of why their UX is so good, not just design languages or whatever. You don't get their level of auto-magic if you haven't done a whole bunch of things very right in the underlying code & architecture.
They're far from perfect (practically all consumer-facing software is at least kinda bad, IMO) and one can point to a handful of duds that they just can't seem to get right (Xcode, for instance) but I'd put software quality as my number one reason for using them, and I'd point to that as an absolutely vital element in their UX being well above average. It's that combo that no-one else seems able to touch—in fact, it often seems like no-one else is even trying, and I really wish they would.
> Nerds continue to fail to grasp the value of UI/UX.
Or perhaps nerds do grasp the negative value of anti-patterns in UI/UX, and reject attempts to create interfaces and usage models that remove control from the user, create vendor lock-in, or compromise privacy and security.
I think a better way of saying this is that "nerds" (i.e. power users, the type of people typically on HN) want different things out of their UI/UX than the average user. That's the beauty of having different solutions to choose from: the power user is free to use something like KeePass, where it's not as easy to use, but you can set it up exactly the way you like; and the "normal" user can go with something like 1P or LastPass for more of a "set it and forget it" model. The average user doesn't care one bit about the things that you mentioned.
Absolutely; this is the key to the whole thing. It's explained at length in the classic The Design of Everyday Things. Nerds v. normies are given the monikers "Homo logicus" and "Homo normalis". The nerds value control, understanding, and are concerned with edge cases; they accept complexity, workarounds, and the need for preparation as the cost. The latter prioritizes nearly the opposite, preferring simplicity to control, and guaranteed if partial success for the need to understand/invest time.
I think you understate your case. A lot of nerds and nerd culture is actively hostile to making things easy to use and will intentionally erect banners and over complicate systems in order to keep "normies" out and make themselves appear smart.Its rather sad really.
I ditched 1Password in favour of KeePass exactly because of UX issues. 1Password felt too magical and did too much implicit stuff to my taste. KeePass is dumb simple and that's what I need from password manager. I hope that its UX will not change.
> If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive.
This is quite true, but the counterpoint is that nerds enjoy spending that time. We like opening the box, poking at the wires, seeing how the cogs fit together, and tweaking things endlessly. It would be a liability for a normie, but for a nerd whose interest is piqued it's a fun Saturday project. This is why FOSS survives despite the UI/UX problems.
Not the person you were replying to, but I completely agree. I had fun setting up my Raspberry Pi as a Plex host / torrent box / home server.
Where us hobbyists go wrong is thinking any large percentage of customers want to do that. Any amount of futzing is too much. Most people want it to "just work."
This is accurate. We charge twice as much as our competitor and we consistently hear from customers that UI/UX is a massive part of the reason they choose our system.
UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined.
The importance of user experience is only growing as the world becomes more and more time poor and we move more and more into an "attention economy." Saving seconds counts. If it doesn't work instantly it's broken, period.
Here's two ways I can explain it:
(1) If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive. It only makes sense to do this if you have a lot of surplus time on your hands.
(2) If you have ten million users and make a UI/UX improvement that saves them one minute a month and you value their time at an average of $50/hour, you just created about $8.3 million in value since that's the value of the time you just saved.
A rule of thumb that I use is that every step required to do something halves adoption. So if you have a 10 step install process, only 1 out of 1024 people who look at your product will make it to trying it.
Every developer needs to have "user experience is everything" tattooed on their forehead.