Comment by leesalminen
6 years ago
In my experience (years of talking IRL with thousands of users of my B2B SaaS product), there exists a large cohort of users that don't want to improve their computer skills. They want the software to make things as absolutely "user friendly" as possible.
As an example, I tried standardizing on <input type="date" /> across our product (hundreds of fields). Within 24 hours we logged >1,000 tickets with users saying they disliked the change. They preferred the fancy datepicker because it let them see a full calendar and that enabled a more fluid conversation with the customer (like "next Wednesday").
Yes, Chrome does offer a calendar for this field type, but Safari for desktop does not (just off the top of my head).
I'm a vim-writing, tmux-ing, bash-loving developer. If it were up to me, I'd do everything in the terminal and never open a browser.
I recognize that the world doesn't revolve around me and my skills, interests and tastes. If a large cohort of my customers tell me they don't want to improve their computer skills and want a fancy UI, who am I to tell them they're wrong? They're paying me. They get what they want.
You're conflating a couple of things here. It's true that users don't like change - and for good reason; messing with UI invalidates their acquired experience, and even if you know you've changed only one small thing, they don't know that. It quite naturally stresses people out.
Two, I'll grant you that you sometimes have to use a custom control, because web moves forward faster than browsers, and so you can't count on a browser-level or OS-level calendar widget being available. But then the issue is, how do you do it. Can the user type in the date directly into your custom field? Is the calendar widget operable by keyboard? Such functionality doesn't interfere with first-time use, but is important to enable users to develop mastery.
A lot of my dissatisfaction with modern UI/UX trends comes from that last point: very low ceiling for mastery. Power users aren't born, they're made. And they aren't made in school, but through repeated use that makes them seek out ways to alleviate their frustrations. A lot of software is being used hours a day, day in, day out by people in offices. Users of such software will be naturally driven towards improving efficiency of their work (if only to have more time to burn watching cat photos). If an application doesn't provide for such improvements, it wastes the time of everyone who's forced to interact with it regularly.
Extending Web capability by building in features to HTML, such as calendar-based date-pickers (sometimes useful, often tedious), is one thing. Those standards can either be retrofited into a console-mode browser (it is possible to display a calendar in plain text, see e.g. cal(1)), or degrade gracefully to a text-based input field of, oh, take your pick, YYYY-MM-DD, YY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YY, etc.
Better forms inputs could very well be useful, I agree.
The recent MSFT + GOOG snogfest announcing major improvements to HTML by ... improving form and input fields in their (GUI-only) browsers strikes me, in light of rather ominous icebergs looming on the HTML horizon, of rather gratuitious deckchair-rearanging. No matter how fine those arrangements might be.
This seems to be exactly where progressive enhancement is preferred. If you use input=date, it’ll probably work on mobile much better than s as JavaScript calendar solution. Also, I hope your date picker also allows typing by hand on desktop, otherwise may God have mercy on your soul...
Then you have to make a choice - do you want to support pushing down the lowest common denominator? Or will you be a person of integrity, and take the most technically simple solutions to build a more powerful and fast tool?
Greed and morality can't mix. I personally support morals.
> Greed and morality can't mix. I personally support morals.
Hold up, your position is that users that prefer something 'easy to use' as opposed to something 'powerful' are immoral? What am I missing here?
I thought the parent was referring to the developers/business choice as being immoral, not the customers.
If I choose to offer predatory loans which I would never accept for my friends or family to a community that is not financially savvy, and someone calls me out on it, it doesn't fly to say "hey, what do you have against these people taking advantage of my easy to use service?".
What you're missing is that I'm talking about developers having a choice between providing the best possible product in a technical sense, or simply going the way of profit and greed. To me, when you knowingly produce a substandard product and seek non-savvy users, that's an immoral act. I believe the goal should be to constantly raise the floor, not lower the ceiling.
How can what the parent did be considered immoral? It's not like they pushed tracking and ads down their customers throats, they just made the interface easier for people to use.
Parent's idea, as far as I can tell, not that I lean any which way, is that if you create a deficient product because you're financially incentivized, that's immoral.