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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

For me the worst isn't even that the UI composition/presentation is bad. It's that the performance of these interfaces is getting monotonically worse over time. No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day.

Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as every keypress or mouse click takes an extra 50-100ms to register. Microsoft even figured out a way to make things that didnt use to run like shit run like total shit. Of all the things, mspaint is now somehow a little bit slower and more annoying to work with. I don't know how they managed that one.

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The problems with reliance on a giant framework are many. Yes, a noticeable decay of performance is one of those.

The biggest problem I see though is lost imagination. Usability concerns seem all but completely and generally forgotten unless a given framework deliberately provides a dedicated convention for a specific usability concern.

Worse still is that many developers reliant upon a giant framework absolutely cannot imagine developing anything that is not the exact same SPA as their last SPA regardless of any usability concerns or business requirements. It’s like when you’re a hammer and everything is a nail mentality meets the most myopically crippled tunnel vision.

I used to have great disdain for large frameworks because they result in degraded application performance with limited capabilities and substantial bloat. Now I primarily loathe them because they are the primary excuse for weak under developed talent to self qualify progression as a lack of career maturity under the perfection of inept disdain. The weakness and lowered maturity is self evident because their response to any negative mention of their favorite framework is contrived hostility often expressed by calling the target of that hostility arrogant without any consideration for the technical concerns present.

Bad UI design has nothing to do with your coding framework of choice, it has everything to do with the design. Most programmers are not good designers. I cringed a bit at the background color of the OP's blog.

There's a reason that most people are unimaginative, because just like coding, design is hard. Design for multiple platforms (the whole point of using UI frameworks is easier multiplatform development) and multiple screen sizes is hard and takes a long time to both design and implement.

Creativity and originality have tremendous amounts to do with solving UI problems. Here is an example of developers literally lost without a framework to tell them what to build:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22470179

I wish I were making that up.

There are many aspects of design that are at first challenging. I just watched this video about inventing a new basketball backboard and it took a lot of work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653 There will always be some minimal thought work to creating and testing any creative or original concept, but with practice the effort involved reduces considerably. Even though some minimal effort is required (as with any task) is not an excuse to avoid effort in the entirety. At some point it is just mental laziness.

Again, your choice of JS front end framework has nothing to do with the design of your UI. You can code the same design with React, Angular, vanilla JS, QT, etc. From what I've seen, most programmers are awful designers who overestimate their ability to design "usable" software. In particular, we forget that the vast majority of the time, we are not creating software for programmers.

"Most programmers are not good designers." Unfortunately, most designers are not good designers, at least these days. I say that because from what I've heard, the UI abominations that are being rightly bemoaned on this thread are not things that the programmers decided to do--at least not at companies of any size--rather they're things the company's designers told the programmers to do.

No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day.

That's partly because the native development processes are so unnecessarily awkward, particularly on Apple platforms. It's also partly because most native development processes only give you software that runs on one platform at the end.

Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as every keypress or mouse click takes an extra 50-100ms to register.

Well, that's just bad programming. There's nothing about web technologies or Electron-based applications that requires such poor performance. Someone who has managed to design a system where the most simple interactions take 100ms to get a response would probably manage to create an uncomfortably laggy experience if they built native applications too.

> native development processes are so unnecessarily awkward, particularly on Apple platforms.

Can you elaborate? For me it's launch Xcode, new project, hit run and off we go to the races.

For example, getting a simple iOS app into the App Store means not only developing (or at least building) on Apple equipment but also jumping through Apple's hoops and paying Apple in multiple ways and still running the risk of being kicked out.

Writing a web app to do the same thing has exactly none of those downsides, and with relatively little effort it supports Android devices and users with larger screens on laptops or desktops running any major OS as well.

> monotonically worse over time

An orthogonal interrogation of course, but I pontificate: does specificity truly monotonically increase by specification of some gradient being monotonic, making the modifier "monotonically" not merely monotonically increasing with grandiloquence?

Okay, I was being annoying, but I would actually like to know what the difference between "monotonically worse" and "worse" is.

"monotonically worse" means it never gets better. "worse" without "monotonically" means it may get better for a bit, but overall it will be worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function

Ah, thanks a lot!

No one wants to learn how to develop a proper UI either. For all the heatmap and eye-tracking and logging tools available, no one seems to be doing anything useful with the data they get.

Do you know it takes 3 or more states for Google Maps to load and start navigation from within it's own app? Try it. Count how many times you have to interact with the screen just to use the actual main feature of the app.

Here's another one: In Outlook, I want you to count the number of interactions required to attach a file to an email. You're free to use the drag-and-drop features, but you have to count every single individual action required to complete the task, including clicking Start, opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, etc.

These are critical tasks and features. And they require more work than using tertiary features. So, not only are these interfaces getting less and less responsive, accessing critical functions for routine/repetitive tasks are more convoluted than features no one uses, like the go offline feature in Outlook.

I'm not disagreeing, but I have noticed that in the current version of Outlook, when I tell it I want to attach a file, it suggests the last few files I've edited in some program (I'm guessing it has to be an Office program), which are often exactly what I want--e.g. I'm sending some report I just finished in Word.

That said, the File Open process in Word has gotten considerably more cumbersome, with more decisions that have to be made before you can see a list of files to open.

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