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While I don't entirely disagree, how many web sites need the kind of features you're talking about? Have you ever looked at Hacker News and thought "if only thi
by chipotle_coyote 7y ago
While I don't entirely disagree, how many web sites need the kind of features you're talking about? Have you ever looked at Hacker News and thought "if only this had user-definable menu shortcuts," or been shopping on Amazon and thought "this would be so much better if it had toolbars with custom icons"? Probably not.
One of the most frustrating things about modern web development, at least to cranky old people like me, is the conflation of web sites with web applications. If the use case you're talking about is truly trying to replace what would otherwise be a desktop application, like Gmail or (heaven help us) a code editor or word processor, then many of the features you're talking about start becoming useful. But for so, so many web sites, the focus on feature-rich client side toolkits has become, well, kind of a distraction. Is there any real advantage to the user if the New York Times web site is a state-of-the-art React application? Is it improving my reading experience? I not only don't need them to be using a toolkit that gives them desktop-class drag and drop capability, I don't want it, because I'm just there to read a damn article.
So when you write "web application UX designers are still re-inventing the wheel and without some enforced UI guidelines like Apple had in the 90s websites will never fully catch up with desktop apps in terms of usability," my reaction can't help but be: you literally just used "web application" and "website" as if they were interchangeable, and they are not. There's a worthwhile discussion to be had over how much "desktop-class UX" we actually need for our web applications, but I'd like to see our web sites stop being built like they were web applications when they don't need to be.
- mc32 7y ago>”it had toolbars with custom icons" This would be pretty cool, actually. Specially the AWS services where the icons are more or less divorced from what they’re supposed to represent.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoThat's true. Sort of like avatars for your specific services. :)
- marcosdumay 7y agoHonestly, I have never wanted user-definable menu shortcuts on a 90's desktop application either. Each time I saw it, it was a crutch for making a badly designed menu a bit less worse, and things would be much better if the time spent on that feature was simply spent on a better menu. Very few CAD programs gained something from customized menus (not icons). But this one was also almost always a crutch for fixing bad designs, and those same few programs always gained much more by having a good keyboard based interface.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoThere's a few times I've used macOS's ability to define menu shortcuts -- although it's generally either to add a shortcut to a menu item that didn't have one or to make the shortcut consistent with the OS and/or other applications. But in general, it's not something I think of as a critical missing feature in apps, you're right.
- fjp 7y agoEven if everyone is doing everything really well, there will always be the endless battle between "usability" aka having a few obviously-named-and-organized features that a new user can instantly understand (while severely limiting overall functionality) - think Asana task management software - vs. "flexibility" which is having all the features anyone could want which almost invariable leads to bloated incomprehensible menus that lead to menus that lead to more damn menus - think Jira or Salesforce. I think non-enterprise sites/web apps are usually going to tack toward "usability" and enterprise sites/web apps are usually going to tack toward "flexibility".