4 ms·

I run a small SaaS business in a niche market. The whole company is two engineers; our UI is a SPA built with react and material design. We have one direct com

I run a small SaaS business in a niche market. The whole company is two engineers; our UI is a SPA built with react and material design. We have one direct competitor, who launched around the same time we did. They have at least 6 engineers (plus support staff); they built a traditional webapp with some jquery. We get a fair number of their users. They all gush about how easy our system is to use and how much better the UX is. Some of this is the different conceptual approach we took to the problem, but we couldn't have pulled that off without the interactivity that a SPA gave us. Modern web dev tools significantly raise the bar for customer experience. Sure, you can build a PHP app with some jquery and form posts. If you have no competition, you may do alright. But customers notice UX, and you should be afraid of upstarts who do chase the "modern ecosystem".

chx 8y ago
UX design and the technology used to implement it have nothing to do with each other. Absolutely none.
- stickfigure 8y ago
  You clearly weren't trying to build rich UIs in the 90s and 2000s with the technology available then.
  - cat199 8y ago
    This isn't a fair comparison because the 'base' underlying HTML/CSS/JS language is much more standardized and feature rich - tooling + ecosystem on top of that is just that. i'm personally a pragmatist who likes systems thinking - a hand coded form + CGI still works just as well as a full featured SPA to 'correctly fulfill' requirements, the variable in question is the requirements.
  - marpstar 8y ago
    React and Material UI are still just HTML, CSS, and JS.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      ...and all computer programs are "just" machine code. But good luck writing modern apps with a hex editor.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - ndnxhs 8y ago
      The HTML, CSS and JS we have today is very different to what there was in 2000.
      - icedchai 8y ago
        Yep. In 2000, we were still mainly laying things out with tables, slicing up images, etc.

chx 8y ago

UX design and the technology used to implement it have nothing to do with each other. Absolutely none.

stickfigure 8y ago
You clearly weren't trying to build rich UIs in the 90s and 2000s with the technology available then.
- cat199 8y ago
  This isn't a fair comparison because the 'base' underlying HTML/CSS/JS language is much more standardized and feature rich - tooling + ecosystem on top of that is just that. i'm personally a pragmatist who likes systems thinking - a hand coded form + CGI still works just as well as a full featured SPA to 'correctly fulfill' requirements, the variable in question is the requirements.
- marpstar 8y ago
  React and Material UI are still just HTML, CSS, and JS.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    ...and all computer programs are "just" machine code. But good luck writing modern apps with a hex editor.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    The HTML, CSS and JS we have today is very different to what there was in 2000.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      Yep. In 2000, we were still mainly laying things out with tables, slicing up images, etc.