Jun 10, 2017, 9:55 AM

@faraday said in UX: It's time for The Talk:

I fail to see how extending the 'mail' command to do something more (what I'm suggesting) is any more confusing than disabling it and forcing players to use a +mail system instead (which is what people do today). The player doesn't care whether it's softcoded or hardcoded; they just want to send mail.

This. This right here. This is the fucking essence of UX 101.

Don't make the user care about irrelevant bullshit.

There's plenty of historical reasons (good or otherwise) for MUSHes to have a terrible UX. I get it. There's a lot of baggage here.

But…

This doesn't stop it from being a terrible UX! That's the part people have to get through their skulls. There's plenty of reasons why DOS was the way it was too, historically. It doesn't change the fact that DOS was a piece of shit that everybody was glad to see the back of … except for the DOS grognards who spouted a lot of the same shit that's being spouted here about how MUSHes do it right.