Hacker News Reader

Comment by nstj | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how stuff like this is so important, but can go to the back of your mind when you're thinking about DOM rendering or 99th percentile page load times or similar.

View on HN

Yes. The best way is probably to physically/temporally separate the phase of working on the design and product from the phase of working on the code. This has some conceptual benefits (thinking more freely when you don't have your tools in hand) but I also find there's a more straightforward issue of energy or cognitive stamina.

Some of these items are really difficult to make, such as a zooming viewer. It took me several years to get one that was right. Try to make one that works on mobile & desktop, doesn't crush your bandwidth, & operates at 60fps. There are so many plug-ins but none that feel exactly right.

I've noticed this too.

Is your solution available somewhere?

I haven't posted it on Github or documented it or really made it usable by others yet, but it's active on: http://www.futureclaw.com

Check out any fashion show gallery, for example at: https://www.futureclaw.com/fashion/chanel-resort-2017.html#l...

The large collection images, you can click/tap/pinch to zoom in. You can also pinch (on mobile) or thumbwheel/swipe up & down (on laptop/desktop) to change zoom level. Try it with Safari an MacBook Pro/iPhone/iPad for best results. Other browsers are supported but features tend to degrade.

Right now the code is tied tightly to my image gallery viewer, as well as my specialized Django backend and even my own custom single-page-app framework that isn't Angular/Ember/React.

If there's enough interest I can make these components usable by others as separate componnts. There are still some features I need to add, like sharing and more interaction controls (keyboard, swipe, etc..)

It does look like an interesting take on the problem.

Thanks for sharing.

This is why engs don't make great product designers. They are concerned with the very important foundation and performance, which doesn't leave much cognitive overhead for the actual UX.

a consumer product will not be competitive without both the foundation and the experience being top notch.

A perfectly reasonable observation but I'm sure there have to be counterexamples of engineers who are great product designers. Now I just have to go and find them :)

Performance is UX.

For iOS, we have a product that automatically makes many improvements to load times and latency to allow engineers to focus on UX/UI rather than low level perf like so many do

http://createwithcaffeine.com

why not just let the designers focus on that.

They totally can. Main point is that we free up all engineering hours otherwise spent on optimizing performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com