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Shit like Electron and PWAs seem to be championed by user-hostile developers that just want things to be easy for themselves, without considering what's best fo

Shit like Electron and PWAs seem to be championed by user-hostile developers that just want things to be easy for themselves, without considering what's best for the users and their hardware resources. There is a standard counter to that argument at this point. Developers on native platforms might be able to achieve a better experience on that platform than a web app given the same time and resources. However, if the time and resources have to be split N ways to build a native app on each of N platforms, compared to investing everything into polishing a single web application, the outcome might be very different. While each native developer is still worrying about whether they're aligning and labelling a button in the platform-standard way, the web team is already refining their UI using the results of their third round of usability testing and has determined that the button shouldn't have been there in the first place and designed and implemented a more intuitive UI. And since they launched their version 1 two months earlier than any of the native apps did, they even have the extra revenue in the bank to pay for those usability tests, too.

wtallis 6y ago
> While each native developer is still worrying about whether they're aligning and labelling a button in the platform-standard way, the web team is already refining their UI using the results of their third round of usability testing and has determined that the button shouldn't have been there in the first place and designed and implemented a more intuitive UI Your hypothetical scenario seems to be treating the app's UI as if it exists in a vacuum, rather than existing alongside other apps. If there's a platform-standard UI convention that applies to a button, then UI testing in the context of that platform is probably not going to tell you to remove that button entirely—you shouldn't be surprising users by removing functionality they expect to find present. And if there is a UI convention that tells you how to position that button, you probably shouldn't A/B test the positioning of that button and should focus your usability testing on the UI elements that are not dictated by the platform's standards and conventions.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  In God we trust; all others must bring data. (Origin unknown) Your arguments use the word "probably" a lot. As someone who does a lot of UI design professionally, I prefer to rely on the kind of user testing you apparently dismiss, precisely because prior expectations about what works well so often turn out to be inaccurate. Indeed, there have been plenty of native platform standards that have awful usability in recent years, which have rightly been criticised for it by professionals wielding empirical evidence.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    > Indeed, there have been plenty of native platform standards that have awful usability in recent years, which have rightly been criticised for it by professionals wielding empirical evidence. Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable, and are definitely preferable to having to juggle multiple conflicting UI conventions at the same time when multitasking. That's why we still have QWERTY, and why all the surviving scrollbars are on the right, and why pie menus never caught on. You say you test UI designs professionally, and claim the higher ground of having empirical evidence. But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits?
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable The reason that junk like flat design and derivatives like Material Design are awful for usability has nothing to do with being old and everything to do with being unpredictable. Often, a user literally can't tell what parts of an interface are interactive or how they work, because affordances barely exist. It's like the old mystery meat navigation meme for web sites, except they actually did it seriously and thought it was good. But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits? Well, firstly, a testing methodology is literally the opposite of worthless if it gives you an objective measure of the increased financial value generated by a change under consideration. Secondly, you assert without evidence that the kind of change we're talking about does violate the user's expectations and habits, and you further imply that this causes a loss of productivity. As I have argued in earlier comments, the assumption that the user's expectations are governed primarily by their native platform's conventions is not necessarily valid any more, because users spend so much of their time inside a browser using online facilities instead of other native applications. Moreover, the answer to your other question is yes, we have done many tests over the years that compared options including the native approach on various platforms with some other options we were considering. In the nature of such tests, the outcomes varied. In some cases, we did end up going with presentation similar to the native conventions on one or more platforms; often this coincided with cases where the native conventions across major platforms were similar as well. In other cases, we went with a completely different presentation style, as performance with the native conventions was significantly worse. The point of all of this is still that ideally you don't want to make UI decisions based on assumptions or dogma if you could try different possibilities with real users and make your decisions based on objective evidence instead.

wtallis 6y ago

> While each native developer is still worrying about whether they're aligning and labelling a button in the platform-standard way, the web team is already refining their UI using the results of their third round of usability testing and has determined that the button shouldn't have been there in the first place and designed and implemented a more intuitive UI Your hypothetical scenario seems to be treating the app's UI as if it exists in a vacuum, rather than existing alongside other apps. If there's a platform-standard UI convention that applies to a button, then UI testing in the context of that platform is probably not going to tell you to remove that button entirely—you shouldn't be surprising users by removing functionality they expect to find present. And if there is a UI convention that tells you how to position that button, you probably shouldn't A/B test the positioning of that button and should focus your usability testing on the UI elements that are not dictated by the platform's standards and conventions.

Silhouette 6y ago
In God we trust; all others must bring data. (Origin unknown) Your arguments use the word "probably" a lot. As someone who does a lot of UI design professionally, I prefer to rely on the kind of user testing you apparently dismiss, precisely because prior expectations about what works well so often turn out to be inaccurate. Indeed, there have been plenty of native platform standards that have awful usability in recent years, which have rightly been criticised for it by professionals wielding empirical evidence.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > Indeed, there have been plenty of native platform standards that have awful usability in recent years, which have rightly been criticised for it by professionals wielding empirical evidence. Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable, and are definitely preferable to having to juggle multiple conflicting UI conventions at the same time when multitasking. That's why we still have QWERTY, and why all the surviving scrollbars are on the right, and why pie menus never caught on. You say you test UI designs professionally, and claim the higher ground of having empirical evidence. But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits?
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable The reason that junk like flat design and derivatives like Material Design are awful for usability has nothing to do with being old and everything to do with being unpredictable. Often, a user literally can't tell what parts of an interface are interactive or how they work, because affordances barely exist. It's like the old mystery meat navigation meme for web sites, except they actually did it seriously and thought it was good. But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits? Well, firstly, a testing methodology is literally the opposite of worthless if it gives you an objective measure of the increased financial value generated by a change under consideration. Secondly, you assert without evidence that the kind of change we're talking about does violate the user's expectations and habits, and you further imply that this causes a loss of productivity. As I have argued in earlier comments, the assumption that the user's expectations are governed primarily by their native platform's conventions is not necessarily valid any more, because users spend so much of their time inside a browser using online facilities instead of other native applications. Moreover, the answer to your other question is yes, we have done many tests over the years that compared options including the native approach on various platforms with some other options we were considering. In the nature of such tests, the outcomes varied. In some cases, we did end up going with presentation similar to the native conventions on one or more platforms; often this coincided with cases where the native conventions across major platforms were similar as well. In other cases, we went with a completely different presentation style, as performance with the native conventions was significantly worse. The point of all of this is still that ideally you don't want to make UI decisions based on assumptions or dogma if you could try different possibilities with real users and make your decisions based on objective evidence instead.