Building Developer Tools Your Coworkers Won't Hate (J on the Beach 2018)

@amyngyn J on the Beach 2018
building developer
tools your coworkers
won't hate
amy nguyen (@amyngyn)
j on the beach | may 24, 2018

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hello!
● observability engineer at stripe
● excited about user experience design and
education for developer tools
● @amyngyn
● amynguyen.net

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agenda
● motivation
● how to do user research
● UX design principles
○ command line tools
○ data analysis tools
○ build tools

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why care?
● bad UX causes incidents.
incidents cost money.
● bad UX wastes time.
time costs money.
● bad UX creates hostility.
hostility costs money.

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● talk to people
○ one-on-one
○ focus groups
how to do user research

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● ask the right questions
○ don't ask questions that confirm
what you were expecting
○ dig deep, don't accept the first answer

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● communicate as you follow-up
○ build trust
○ confirm your solutions are the right
solutions

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● talk to people
● ask the right questions
● communicate as you follow-up

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does anyone even know what that flag does?
command line tools

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preview as the default
● if your tool makes critical changes to
infrastructure, don't allow users to make
those changes accidentally
./run-script --confirm

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preview as the default
● provide diffs of what will change

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be consistent
% man -h
Usage: man [OPTION] [SECTION] PAGE…
[...]

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be consistent
% less -h
Value is required after -h
(--max-back-scroll)

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be consistent
● match arguments to your other tools
● match arguments to historical usage

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don’t break existing tools
● have integration tests for your internal tools
● design with existing tools in mind
cat ex.txt | grep hi | sort -r

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command line tools should
● be consistent
● integrate with the rest of your tools
● provide previews and diffs

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everyday we stray further
from unix philosophy
● these ideas have been discussed for decades!
○ rule of composition
○ rule of modularity
○ rule of least surprise

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command line tool design
● provide previews and diffs
● be consistent
● integrate with the rest of your tools
● for more, read "The Art of Unix
Programming" by Eric S. Raymond
(or just read the Wikipedia article!)

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does that data really mean what i think it means?
data analysis tools

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rapid testing
● users need a REPL or
other way of quickly
validating ideas

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discoverability
● autocomplete
● GUI or other menus for
showing all the options

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correctness
● syntax errors and highlighting
● explanations for syntax errors

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explorability
let me go back to the
previous page
don't lose my
place if I refresh
let me share URLs
let me open in a
new tab

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data analysis tool design
● rapid testing
● discoverability
● correctness
● explorability

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i don't know who broke the build
because i don't know how to find the build
build tools

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navigation
● anticipate the most common actions
○ find my latest build
○ locate failing output
○ rebuild
● autocomplete!!!

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fail fast
● if something is failing, don't wait to
finish before showing the result to
the user

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helpful messages at the right time
● remind users to lint and unit test
before kicking off a long build
process
● suggest corrections for bad input

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useful output

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summary
● communicate early and
often with users
● imagine the context in which
users will use your tools
● user experience and good
design matters even for
infrastructure tools

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thanks!

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Building Developer Tools Your Coworkers Won't Hate (J on the Beach 2018)

Building Developer Tools Your Coworkers Won't Hate (J on the Beach 2018)

Amy Nguyen

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