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I worked at car shopping related site. We had just done the yearly replatforming to Angular, then the rereplatforming to make it server side rendered, and then
by nkrisc 6y ago
I worked at car shopping related site. We had just done the yearly replatforming to Angular, then the rereplatforming to make it server side rendered, and then the complaints started. It wasn't many, but I read our feedback report every single day and it was a few a day which is actually pretty notable. I knew from user testing and interviews that when shopping for used cars people would print out a few of the details pages and look at them side by side on paper. They were typically older but isn't like it was only old people who did this. Younger people who were more price conscious did as well since they really took their time. But after all the fancy new frameworks the page printed out on something like 10 sheets of paper when it would have fit on one. Most of them were blank. I managed to get a week of a dev's time to hack something barely usable together, but even getting that took some pleading.
Next time you design a site that gets any use by a wide, tech illiterate audience, print it out and see how it looks. I guarantee you someone is printing it out and then cursing you.
- hinkley 6y agoIn particular I think there's a high barrier to entry for sharing computer content among a large group of people - in person. Even projectors have their own layers of pain, from connectivity, to availability, to image quality. And then there's the quality of the presenter, who often was hired based on their merits in their field of expertise, not on their presenting skills. And let's be honest: if they could do all of this stuff well, they probably wouldn't be working for some of my customers. And then there's the quality of the audience. Back-seat driving can end up distracting everyone from the point of the meeting. I know I've been guilty of that myself. Not to mention all of the people who don't have 20/20 vision and can't or won't do anything about it. The most expedient thing sometimes is to print out a few copies so everyone can absorb the information at their own pace.
- slver 6y agoYou implied printing is tech illiterate. I've had to print web content for many reasons, including sharing it with strangers whose email/phone/messenger I don't have. Or a group of people whose details I do have, but I don't necessarily want to fill their inbox with this content. You also can't highlight interesting parts or scribble notes on a web bookmark. You can print it to a PDF or paste in Word and annotate that. But aside from it being much clumsier and messier as an approach... it still needs decent print styles to print to a PDF.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]