On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 01:59:02PM +0300, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:

[...]

> A lot of that research is pseudo scientific.  E.g. some famous
> ‘principles’ of UX design are based on academesified opition or
> misappropriation of unrelated research.  E.g. see this one [1].  If you
> read the ‘scientific’ background to the ‘laws’, what you’ll see is that
> some of those are shaky, and some of those are lesser than that.

Thanks for the link, and thanks for your appreciation. Yes, I
see it similarly; this research may be, at the bottom, genuine,
but it is strongly modulated by marketing departments (at several
points: for one, of course, the software vendor's, but also the
UX research company's).

> We should focus on what makes users *stay* with Emacs [...]

This is an important point, I think.

> We’re asking "why people aren’t coming to Emacs in hordes" too much,
> when "why are people using Emacs in the first place" is the more
> important one.

Yes. It's always a balancing act, where the equilibrium point shifts
over time.

Diverging too far from what is "customary" isn't user friendly
(most of us use other software besides Emacs, and it raises the
barrier to entry), following the "customary" too closely creates
a lot of churn along the random walk, at the cost of Emacs users.

Cheers
 - t