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What do you think happened there? Did the decision-makers never try using the product before it was manufactured? Were the stakeholders shown the "final product

What do you think happened there? Did the decision-makers never try using the product before it was manufactured? Were the stakeholders shown the "final product" on some high-powered prototype device?

wvenable 5y ago
The interface is very attractive -- high-resolution pictures of the various coffees, nice fonts, and a clean design. My guess is that graphic designers designed the images and interactivity without any considerations of performance. Then that design was given to developers to be shoe-horned into a machine not capable of handling it. Possibly different teams contracted out to do both jobs. The design is done by one team, finished, and then handed off to the next. I'm sure the interface could be tweaked (remove some animations, lower the resolution, etc) to make it usable but instead there was a complete failure of management and it was shipped as-is.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Been down this road many times: - UI toolkit is cross platform (cough cough Qt, or Altia, or Crank) and runs great on the UX developer's x86 box. The UX guy loves fancy CSS transitions. - Graphic assets are delivered in 32bit RGBA and the data cache chokes on the massive bit maps. And the cheap LCD is 565BGR so the CPU is constantly mixing channels. Then we discover the hardware has no alpha blending capability. More software load. - Hardware gets cost reduced. Or the flagship platform gets the beefy CPU and the consumer versions get a Rockchip. - RAM gets downsized or the project grows out of bounds and now we're blitting from QSPI flash. - The whole system runs in JavaScript because that's what they can get out of the overseas development team, or it's too expensive to buy 2 more Qt seat licenses (or whatever the hell they want now. I think we're up to first-born children) It all repeats, over and over.
  - djmips 5y ago
    This is even happening in video games now. See Gameface for example.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
As the owner of the first company I worked for said when he was complaining about a product, "somebody said, 'fuck it, it's good enough' and shipped crap out the door."

wvenable 5y ago

The interface is very attractive -- high-resolution pictures of the various coffees, nice fonts, and a clean design. My guess is that graphic designers designed the images and interactivity without any considerations of performance. Then that design was given to developers to be shoe-horned into a machine not capable of handling it. Possibly different teams contracted out to do both jobs. The design is done by one team, finished, and then handed off to the next. I'm sure the interface could be tweaked (remove some animations, lower the resolution, etc) to make it usable but instead there was a complete failure of management and it was shipped as-is.

joezydeco 5y ago
Been down this road many times: - UI toolkit is cross platform (cough cough Qt, or Altia, or Crank) and runs great on the UX developer's x86 box. The UX guy loves fancy CSS transitions. - Graphic assets are delivered in 32bit RGBA and the data cache chokes on the massive bit maps. And the cheap LCD is 565BGR so the CPU is constantly mixing channels. Then we discover the hardware has no alpha blending capability. More software load. - Hardware gets cost reduced. Or the flagship platform gets the beefy CPU and the consumer versions get a Rockchip. - RAM gets downsized or the project grows out of bounds and now we're blitting from QSPI flash. - The whole system runs in JavaScript because that's what they can get out of the overseas development team, or it's too expensive to buy 2 more Qt seat licenses (or whatever the hell they want now. I think we're up to first-born children) It all repeats, over and over.
- djmips 5y ago
  This is even happening in video games now. See Gameface for example.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

As the owner of the first company I worked for said when he was complaining about a product, "somebody said, 'fuck it, it's good enough' and shipped crap out the door."