3 ms·

This is a true description of the current situation. Question is: is it a good situation? I feel like the web is a really poor paradigm for many apps. Especia

This is a true description of the current situation. Question is: is it a good situation? I feel like the web is a really poor paradigm for many apps. Especially business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style applications that anyone can use more or less without training. Which is grand for the public but I think really backwards inside organisations.

Silhouette 9y ago
Especially business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style applications that anyone can use more or less without training. There is definitely a danger of "dumbing down" our software too much, but for most purposes I think it is orthogonal to the technology used. I suspect mobile apps have done far more to dumb down software than the evolution of the web in recent years, for example. Part of the problem is that good tools to develop more powerful, flexible software haven't been available on some of these platforms. For example, JavaScript only discovered modular design relatively recently, and even today its community is still fighting early battles like how to manage dependencies and how to build larger projects efficiently. The tools are decades behind the curve compared to how we make desktop, server and embedded software. Another part of the problem is that a lot of the people developing web and mobile apps are relatively unskilled and inexperienced, either having never worked outside that part of the software industry or having moved into it from a less technical role like graphic design or marketing. They don't even realise how far behind the curve their tools are, because they wouldn't recognise or know how to use more powerful tools if they had them. There's also the non-problem that for many purposes, dumbed down software does the job just fine. A great deal of useful, real world work does not require massive business software suites, bought for staggering sums of money from big name suppliers. If there's one thing we've learned from the software success stories of recent years, it's that very often the information you're working with is relatively simple, and the abilities to organise it and to communicate about it with the right people in a convenient way are worth a lot. There's nothing wrong with providing those abilities to new users in a simple way that does not require extensive training; in fact, it's highly desirable to do so.
tylerjwilk00 9y ago
I think the situation we are in with the web proves that the distribution system with the lowest friction and that allows points of friction to be smoothed out in iterations over time will win.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  But the friction in Web apps is not smoothed out. It only becomes worse. More and more megabytes of JS that nobody knows the purpose of -- or if they do, they are bummed as to why must they be 1.5 MB minified. Also, HTTP 2.0 fell victim to too much pressure for backwards compatibility. Things aren't improving.
fpig 9y ago
I agree, but IMO that is a people problem, not a platform problem. I'd say there are 2 often conflicting goals in UX: 1. Make something as intuitive and easy to use as possible for someone seeing it for the first time 2. Make something as efficient as possible for someone who knows how to use it Now, common sense says that #1 is more important when it's a mass consumer app that many users will spend little time on. And it also says that #2 is more important when it's an app that does "work" that users will actually spend countless hours working in. The problem is that #1 is often pushed too hard by managers, salespeople and designers (especially designers with mainly web or mobile experience) even when your use case requires #2. This is because they want to make a good first impression when they show the app to potential customers, especially when the app is new and without an established user base. "Look how I can do this in 3 clicks, the app guides you through it!" And it is often because they simply don't know better and they're just parroting what they're used to. It is not an inherent problem with the platform. As an example, MS has Office on the web and they didn't create a dumbed down UI for it.

Silhouette 9y ago

Especially business apps where users can be trained to use a more complex but more efficient interface. The web drives us all to create "universal" style applications that anyone can use more or less without training. There is definitely a danger of "dumbing down" our software too much, but for most purposes I think it is orthogonal to the technology used. I suspect mobile apps have done far more to dumb down software than the evolution of the web in recent years, for example. Part of the problem is that good tools to develop more powerful, flexible software haven't been available on some of these platforms. For example, JavaScript only discovered modular design relatively recently, and even today its community is still fighting early battles like how to manage dependencies and how to build larger projects efficiently. The tools are decades behind the curve compared to how we make desktop, server and embedded software. Another part of the problem is that a lot of the people developing web and mobile apps are relatively unskilled and inexperienced, either having never worked outside that part of the software industry or having moved into it from a less technical role like graphic design or marketing. They don't even realise how far behind the curve their tools are, because they wouldn't recognise or know how to use more powerful tools if they had them. There's also the non-problem that for many purposes, dumbed down software does the job just fine. A great deal of useful, real world work does not require massive business software suites, bought for staggering sums of money from big name suppliers. If there's one thing we've learned from the software success stories of recent years, it's that very often the information you're working with is relatively simple, and the abilities to organise it and to communicate about it with the right people in a convenient way are worth a lot. There's nothing wrong with providing those abilities to new users in a simple way that does not require extensive training; in fact, it's highly desirable to do so.

tylerjwilk00 9y ago

I think the situation we are in with the web proves that the distribution system with the lowest friction and that allows points of friction to be smoothed out in iterations over time will win.

pdimitar 9y ago
But the friction in Web apps is not smoothed out. It only becomes worse. More and more megabytes of JS that nobody knows the purpose of -- or if they do, they are bummed as to why must they be 1.5 MB minified. Also, HTTP 2.0 fell victim to too much pressure for backwards compatibility. Things aren't improving.

fpig 9y ago

I agree, but IMO that is a people problem, not a platform problem. I'd say there are 2 often conflicting goals in UX: 1. Make something as intuitive and easy to use as possible for someone seeing it for the first time 2. Make something as efficient as possible for someone who knows how to use it Now, common sense says that #1 is more important when it's a mass consumer app that many users will spend little time on. And it also says that #2 is more important when it's an app that does "work" that users will actually spend countless hours working in. The problem is that #1 is often pushed too hard by managers, salespeople and designers (especially designers with mainly web or mobile experience) even when your use case requires #2. This is because they want to make a good first impression when they show the app to potential customers, especially when the app is new and without an established user base. "Look how I can do this in 3 clicks, the app guides you through it!" And it is often because they simply don't know better and they're just parroting what they're used to. It is not an inherent problem with the platform. As an example, MS has Office on the web and they didn't create a dumbed down UI for it.