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When I was a kid in the 1980s I really wanted to draw comics for a living. I spent ages sat at the family dining room table pouring my heart into little comic s

When I was a kid in the 1980s I really wanted to draw comics for a living. I spent ages sat at the family dining room table pouring my heart into little comic strips like the ones in my favorite comic books. I'd try so hard to draw as well as the artists I admired but I could never quite get there. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't match the level of detail, clarity, and expression they did. When I was older I learned that comic books are drawn on much bigger paper than the comic. Part of the production process is to shrink the drawings to comic book size. Drawing bigger comics is a lot easier. I was trying to draw the comic and mimic the rest of the production process as well. The same is true for dev work. Constraining yourself to what the end user has is throwing away a ton of benefits from having access to better tools. By all means test your work on a similar machine but don't throw up artificial barriers to doing good work if you don't need to. You're just trying to go straight to the final version. That doesn't work.

gala8y 4y ago
Very good metaphor.
nicbou 4y ago
On the other hand, you have to get a feel for how the web is like for your users. Maybe your website runs well on a dev machine with a fibre internet connection and an ad blocker on DEFCON 1, but what about your users on budget laptops with crappy screens? Or what about people with crappy wi-fi?
- helmholtz 4y ago
  What do you think GP meant with "By all means test your work on a similar machine..."
  - nicbou 4y ago
    It's not just about testing your own software for a few minutes, but really experiencing the web as one of your users.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
This is a great analogy. Running the end result on end-user hardware is well understood in certain domains: Mobile app developers will use their work on mobile phones and tablets. Good web developers will test across different browsers and will use the tools to adjust window size to common resolutions. This is really easy to do and well supported by the software. The bigger problem, IMO, is the trend of having UI/UX designers completely separated from developers. They end up making prototypes that look good in presentations and other abstract formats, which are then handed off to developers to make into something usable. Good designers will use the tools to visualize designs in target resolutions, but often they end up optimizing for what will look best in their portfolio or on a presentation instead.
data-ottawa 4y ago
Similar experience: when I was young I built a website for my brother, it looked great on my iMac when I showed him. He said everyone thought it looked weird that the red of the header and graphics didn't match the background. On my iMac the jpgs were rendered correctly match the rgb hex of the html/css, but on windows the color space of the jpgs rendered them a more crimson hue. Had I tested on my brother's laptop it would have been immediately noticeable.
- MonaroVXR 4y ago
  Doesn't it depend on what browser you use? Also if it has 10-bit display and more?
rollcat 4y ago
I'm with you here, however the author has a valid point. I've been using a 43" screen (4K x1) as my main and only for several years; switching to a laptop for a business trip threw me into a world of confusion, I kept instinctively reaching around to find the button or window corner to make the window larger - but it was already as large as it gets! I don't get to do a whole lot of UI/UX work, but I feel that this kind of experience can have a huge impact on how people think about addressing the needs of their users. I felt genuinely constrained, in a way that just playing with CSS breakpoints doesn't. I think having a smaller screen on a secondary device for testing your UI/UX work is a very good idea - same as testing how your website/app works on 10 year old hardware, or over a 3G connection.
- IYasha 4y ago
  3G is still too good! ) I've recently tried to open a Goolag table and do an online payment while the ISP limited connection to 80kb/s (like a dial-up). While I KIND OF understand the futility of opening web-stuff like spreadsheets, the second task of sending a whopping 30 bytes of credit card data failed dramatically. WHY THE HECK!?! Why the heck even such critical parts of Internet became web2.0 slow over-bloated AJAX-JSON-stuffed piles of garbage?! Smoothie-drinking chilled-openspace web-cod...desig..makers? don't realize that their services JUST MIGHT happen to get accessed by people in potentially disastrous situations? Like the world never seen earhquakes, floods and wars? Or just rains. Yeah, rains that block your 4G and wet your stupid touchscreens.
XCSme 4y ago
I use a 4k Windows machine for development, recently started using a Macbook Air 13" for browsing and also testing my own websites, it works great, not only for testing different screen sizes but also for getting some insight into what people using a different OS/Browser/Device feel when navigating my apps. I tried online device testing/simulation, but it's not the same as physically using the device yourself on a daily basis.

gala8y 4y ago

Very good metaphor.

nicbou 4y ago

On the other hand, you have to get a feel for how the web is like for your users. Maybe your website runs well on a dev machine with a fibre internet connection and an ad blocker on DEFCON 1, but what about your users on budget laptops with crappy screens? Or what about people with crappy wi-fi?

helmholtz 4y ago
What do you think GP meant with "By all means test your work on a similar machine..."
- nicbou 4y ago
  It's not just about testing your own software for a few minutes, but really experiencing the web as one of your users.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

This is a great analogy. Running the end result on end-user hardware is well understood in certain domains: Mobile app developers will use their work on mobile phones and tablets. Good web developers will test across different browsers and will use the tools to adjust window size to common resolutions. This is really easy to do and well supported by the software. The bigger problem, IMO, is the trend of having UI/UX designers completely separated from developers. They end up making prototypes that look good in presentations and other abstract formats, which are then handed off to developers to make into something usable. Good designers will use the tools to visualize designs in target resolutions, but often they end up optimizing for what will look best in their portfolio or on a presentation instead.

data-ottawa 4y ago

Similar experience: when I was young I built a website for my brother, it looked great on my iMac when I showed him. He said everyone thought it looked weird that the red of the header and graphics didn't match the background. On my iMac the jpgs were rendered correctly match the rgb hex of the html/css, but on windows the color space of the jpgs rendered them a more crimson hue. Had I tested on my brother's laptop it would have been immediately noticeable.

MonaroVXR 4y ago
Doesn't it depend on what browser you use? Also if it has 10-bit display and more?

rollcat 4y ago

I'm with you here, however the author has a valid point. I've been using a 43" screen (4K x1) as my main and only for several years; switching to a laptop for a business trip threw me into a world of confusion, I kept instinctively reaching around to find the button or window corner to make the window larger - but it was already as large as it gets! I don't get to do a whole lot of UI/UX work, but I feel that this kind of experience can have a huge impact on how people think about addressing the needs of their users. I felt genuinely constrained, in a way that just playing with CSS breakpoints doesn't. I think having a smaller screen on a secondary device for testing your UI/UX work is a very good idea - same as testing how your website/app works on 10 year old hardware, or over a 3G connection.

IYasha 4y ago
3G is still too good! ) I've recently tried to open a Goolag table and do an online payment while the ISP limited connection to 80kb/s (like a dial-up). While I KIND OF understand the futility of opening web-stuff like spreadsheets, the second task of sending a whopping 30 bytes of credit card data failed dramatically. WHY THE HECK!?! Why the heck even such critical parts of Internet became web2.0 slow over-bloated AJAX-JSON-stuffed piles of garbage?! Smoothie-drinking chilled-openspace web-cod...desig..makers? don't realize that their services JUST MIGHT happen to get accessed by people in potentially disastrous situations? Like the world never seen earhquakes, floods and wars? Or just rains. Yeah, rains that block your 4G and wet your stupid touchscreens.

XCSme 4y ago

I use a 4k Windows machine for development, recently started using a Macbook Air 13" for browsing and also testing my own websites, it works great, not only for testing different screen sizes but also for getting some insight into what people using a different OS/Browser/Device feel when navigating my apps. I tried online device testing/simulation, but it's not the same as physically using the device yourself on a daily basis.