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If you make your site completely unusable for 30% of people, no matter how many try to use it, they'll end up making up a miniscule portion of your user base, w

by tspike 8y ago

If you make your site completely unusable for 30% of people, no matter how many try to use it, they'll end up making up a miniscule portion of your user base, which you'll then use as justification for ignoring them.

Jacqued 8y ago
Which can be ok. There's no ethical duty to make websites for literally everyone. Accessibility is a different issue of course, but to illustrate my point: I have never translated my websites to Chinese, making them unusable for 1/7th of the world population. I don't think it's necessarily a failure on my part.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Well, yes, you didn’t communicate it in Chinese. But did you make the text easily machine identifiable? Was the source language indicated? That would allow their browser to offer the ability to translate. You didn’t intend it for a blind audience, but they’re certainly capable of reading the text. Did you avoid making the text actively toxic to screen readers? Many of the whiz bang features on new sites, ostensibly because “users want features!”, hinder even this functionality. It’s fair to criticize this as a regression. I use a browser extension that lets me click links and buttons from the keyboard. The more bleeding edge they make the sites, the less I can use this feature. That’s not an improvement.
qwerty9876 8y ago
It's not worth it to gain 30% more customers by spending 10x the original development time micro-optimizing everything.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  But it would be better to gain that 30% of customers by not doing a shit job in the first place. This was the point of the presentation. Not doing a shit job doesn't take that much more effort.
  - lostgame 8y ago
    A really important addition to this would be: it has to have been from the start. The issue is that so many projects have not been designed with these ideas from the outset, that it indeed usually does take a mammoth amount of re-engineering and dev time to make these kinds of changes and optimizations after the fact.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      Which is exactly why I cringe - often visibly - at any suggestion that a duct-tape-and-bubble-gum "MVP" is in any way/shape/form acceptable. That "prototype" will end up being the final product because dev teams have a tendency to accumulate technical debt like gangbusters. To continue with the mediocre carpentry analogies floating around: a (competent) carpenter doesn't build a sturdy table by first building a shitty table and reinforcing it later.

by tspike 8y ago

Jacqued 8y ago

Which can be ok. There's no ethical duty to make websites for literally everyone. Accessibility is a different issue of course, but to illustrate my point: I have never translated my websites to Chinese, making them unusable for 1/7th of the world population. I don't think it's necessarily a failure on my part.

SilasX 8y ago
Well, yes, you didn’t communicate it in Chinese. But did you make the text easily machine identifiable? Was the source language indicated? That would allow their browser to offer the ability to translate. You didn’t intend it for a blind audience, but they’re certainly capable of reading the text. Did you avoid making the text actively toxic to screen readers? Many of the whiz bang features on new sites, ostensibly because “users want features!”, hinder even this functionality. It’s fair to criticize this as a regression. I use a browser extension that lets me click links and buttons from the keyboard. The more bleeding edge they make the sites, the less I can use this feature. That’s not an improvement.

qwerty9876 8y ago

It's not worth it to gain 30% more customers by spending 10x the original development time micro-optimizing everything.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
But it would be better to gain that 30% of customers by not doing a shit job in the first place. This was the point of the presentation. Not doing a shit job doesn't take that much more effort.
- lostgame 8y ago
  A really important addition to this would be: it has to have been from the start. The issue is that so many projects have not been designed with these ideas from the outset, that it indeed usually does take a mammoth amount of re-engineering and dev time to make these kinds of changes and optimizations after the fact.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Which is exactly why I cringe - often visibly - at any suggestion that a duct-tape-and-bubble-gum "MVP" is in any way/shape/form acceptable. That "prototype" will end up being the final product because dev teams have a tendency to accumulate technical debt like gangbusters. To continue with the mediocre carpentry analogies floating around: a (competent) carpenter doesn't build a sturdy table by first building a shitty table and reinforcing it later.