Comment by adiabatty
6 years ago
> The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity.
What are you seeing that leads you to think this? The ads and engagement drivers (autoplaying videos of other content on the site) on sites that need eyeballs to keep the lights on, or the articles showing how to download the minimum usable assets so you don't waste the user's bandwidth, battery, and disk space[1]? The latter is what I tend to see when I'm looking at pages describing "best practice".
1: https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-s...
The best practices that encourage you to minimize content and maximize whitespace on your screen. To change text for icons. To hijack the scrollbar. To replace perfectly good default controls with custom alternatives that look prettier, but lose most of the ergonomic features the default controls provided. To favor infinite scrolling. Etc.
Some "best practices" articles discourage all this, but in my experience, that's ignored. The trend is in ever decreasing density.
It all makes sense if you consider apps following the practices I mention as sales drivers and ad delivery vectors. Putting aside the ethical issues of building such things, my issue is that people take practices developed for marketing material, and reapply them to tools they build, without giving it any second thought.