Today, I recalled a previous interview that I was asked, “What apps do you think have a better user experience and why ” At that time, I didn’t have an answer in my head, so I just made up one. The reason I suddenly remembered this today is that I finally knew why I didn’t have an answer at that time.

Beginning

I have a poor memory and I expecially like to read messy books, so I have to take notes while reading. In order to make my notes easy to look up and organize, I want my notes to be like that:

• Support various formats, such as multi-level headers, tables, images

• I can browse with the web wherever there is an internet connection, so that if I want to go through my notes wherever I am, I just need to find a device with an internet connection.

With this in mind, I found markdown – a lightweight markup language that makes it easy to type out multi-level headings, tables, and even mathematical formulas, satisfying the first requirement.

Then, thanks to GitHub, I was able to save my notes directly in markdown format and put them on GitHub, generating a website that can be viewed online, satisfying the second requirement.

The story should have ended. I write my notes on my computer with markdown-enabled software(a lot of options), upload them to GitHub, and view them on the web, a perfect closed loop.

Not the end

But then I bought an iPad.

The original perfect closed loop is completely broken and the demand now becomes:

I need a markdown App that syncs files on my iPad and iPhone, and uploads directly from my mobile device to GitHub without the need for a secondary transfer from my computer.

While searching, I realized that writing code on mobile is also a big need, and there is already mature software Working Copy for uploading files frome mobile to GitHub, so the only question left was, the app that can sync files between iPad and iPhone.

Dilemma

I ran into a big problem.

There are many markdown applications on iOS, from the heavyweight Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, Mixing, Drafts, Web, Joplin, Drafts for writing code, JiangoyunMarkdown, Simplenote, which is open source, and Joplin, which integrates well with its own cloud service. I have tried almost all the markdown applications I could find, the disadvantages are the following:

• Too expensive, like Ulysses, iA Writer
• No support for tables or formulas, like Bear
• Poor interactive experience, like Simplenote, jiangoyunMarkdown, Joplin
• Individual developers, like Web
• Confusing interaction, like Drafts

Finally I chose another minority application name MarkNotes, although the UI is not good enough and the interaction experience is not smooth enough, it supports math formulas, tables, and synchronizes files on mobile and even desktop, so I can write things on my phone and continue editing when I open my computer.

Back to the subject

I am telling such a long story because I want to say that I have learned the terminology of user experience and user psychology since I have been doing interaction for so many years, and I even use it as a weapon to try to convince others to believe in our “professional judgment” because I have a theoretical basis, “Look at my Look at the words I used.”

Talking about experiences and speculating about hearts and minds with all sorts of methodological techniques ends up being nothing more than distant spectators, making decisions that don’t require responsibility for the outcome, and thinking we’re right ourselves. But everything becomes less forgiving when the problem involves ourselves (the user becomes us).

Back to the question raised at the very beginning, why I didn’t have the answer in my head at that time, because my needs were not enough to appreciate the user experience.

Just seeking a job for food, arming myself with concepts I don’t understand either, and standing far away to make decisions that I don’t need to be responsible for the outcome, is probably the reason why I have not been able to get a sense of accomplishment in my work.

Of course, if I am asked again two years later which product interaction design I think is good, my answer is still “no”. If anyone can evaluate the good or bad of a product by feeling, then there is no point for user experience to exist.

In China’s 5,000 years of history, there are humanities and technologies, but there is no science. The reason we have technology is that we have the spirit of technology - to make anything practical; the reason we don’t have science is that we don’t have the spirit of science - to search for the root from the naive curiosity, to find out the real original.

The Chinese people are the most committed to pragmatism, and often outright pragmatism, which has saturated every warp and woof of our culture: from the pragmatic theories of Confucius, to the pragmatic Buddhism that has gone the way of the original, to the quintessentially dedicated pragmatic political science of Zizhi Tongjian. Our historical successes lie in pragmatism, and our modern and contemporary failures lie in it. Because there is no guide for seeking truth, the powerful steam engine of pragmatism then pushes the whole train to go in an unknown direction.

– What Do You Care What Other People Think? Richard Phillips Feynman