alt Hacker Newswhich company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary
Replies
For the all the necessary complexity and race-to-the-bottom features, I am a fan of Jetbrains. I like using Uber, Twitch (wrote a plugin for it one weekend to integrate with chrome), Netflix, Discord. There are plenty of companies that manage to be enjoyable to end users and expose apis without the inscrutable abstractions and terminology I encounter using google products. It feels the same as working with Oracle.
Its not hating - just stating the facts. Most companies unfortunately dont have a nice UX these days, because common UX practices like not making user think (i.e. overcomplicating the UIs) and not blocking users (showing annoying popups in the middle of UI workflows) somehow became a lost art. Some products are inherently easy to use like draw.io for example. I really like the UX on Stripe, in particular their onboarding process. There is also a semi-famous e-commerce company, in the furniture space. I forgot their name (something with W?), but I ordered something once, and was really impressed by how smooth and uncomplicated the process from browsing the inventory to checkout and delivery itself was.
No one's. Everyone sucks. Find a product and you'll find a population collating complaints about it. Whining about interface design is like the cheapest form of shared currency in our subculture.
Fundamentally it's a bikeshed effect. Complaining about hard features like performance is likely to get you in trouble if you aren't actually doing the leg work to measure it and/or expert enough to shout down the people who show up to argue. But UI paradigms are inherently squishy and subjective, so you get to grouse without consequences.
None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware.
For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.
Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.
I would say basically everything that has won a an Apple Design Award before 2020.
Things for macOS for example.
Nothing is perfect, but here are a few things I enjoy using:
https://www.geogebra.org/calculator
https://regex101.com/
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/
https://www.figma.com
https://www.affinity.studio
https://bluecinema.ch (To buy movie tickets for a certain movie chain in Switzerland. I haven't used this in many years, but at first glance it looks like I remember it. Back then, this was a very smooth experience both on desktop and mobile. Just perfectly done.)
Any spreadsheet program (it's the spreadsheet itself, which I like, not necessarily how the UI is aranged around it)
Apple's Spotlight, GNOME's similiar thing (don't know the name)
I also like Tantacrul's interface design work: https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul/videos