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Comment by pjkundert | Hacker News Reader

Software can be bad in arbitrary way, and still be useful and not too agonizing.

But, software that ignores, delays or discards user inputs? Absolutely F*$#ing Unacceptable.

Unfortunately, most user-interface software (including the ePCR software described in this article) commits this "Unpardonable Sin" of UI software. So, the EMTs, being insulted by the software developer, just don't use it.

If you write UI software, you have one job. To utterly cherish user input, painstakingly preserve it, and lovingly and promptly provide user output. That's it. Almost anything else is optional, and can be forgiven.

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Almost all software that has a login seems to throw away input. It's at the "forgot my password" prompt. I type in my email to login. I type a password. It doesn't work. I click "forgot my password" and I have to type my email again. On desktop it's not too annoying but on mobile I find it super frustrating.

Unfortunately Firefox is guilty of that Unpardonable Sin. Often I will open a new window to search for something and start typing my request right away, since the address/search bar should be focused on new windows. If the window takes a little bit of time to appear for some reason, the first few characters will be dropped. Frustrating. Chrome on the other hand does not exhibit this defect, even if I start typing before the window actually appears, my input is preserved.

MS Teams. Be in a call with a person and write something long in the chat message box, without sending it yet. This disappears when the call ends, even if it could just be transfered to the message box in the chat view with that person.

So it does. Not if you open a new tab, but for a new window (just tried it on palemoon, an FX fork). As I never open a new window, never hit it.

Do a bug report I suggest.

I find the autocomplete in jira constantly doing absolutely preposterous things - e.g. I'll be typing out a query like "project != TheirProject" and, when I've finished typing "TheirProject" and hit enter, jira has just barely managed to raise an autocomplete prompt such that "TheirProject", which is correctly spelled, gets "autocompleted" to something like "!=" making my entire query "project != !=". I have no idea what's happening in this case as autocomplete seems to take a completed correct term and turn it to something that isn't even semantically valid. It happens to me in some variety at least once a day.

Firefox has too many abstraction layers. The other day I've managed to break the multi-account containers, because I pressed Enter (to confirm opening a site in a different container) faster than the confirmation page finished loading, which yielded a) an empty tab with no site, and b) a confirmation page with no URL in it, that did nothing.

Software should never break because flesh-and-bone human user is "too fast" for it.

I used to work on drivers and firmware for consumer electronics remote controls, and the empirical threshold we used at the time, was that an average human cannot press a button two times in a row much faster than with a 200 ms delay. (So, if the driver was getting same key presses spaced by less than that, it could safely assume those come from auto-repeat in the RC.)

200ms sounds surprisingly high. I can imagine it being hard to press a button two times in a row in <200ms with a cold start, but if you already have a controller in your hand and it's even minimally ergonomic, pressing the same button 5 times with average <200ms delay between each should be relatively easy for most kids and adults.

My guess is, whoever came up with that threshold has never played any console game.

As a front-end developer my professional experience tells me that in practice the ONLY (cannot stress this enough) thing that matters is developer convenience in the code. Everything else be damned.

That said if this UI failure was easier for the developers to code, such as no code and download from NPM, then it is most correct even if both the business and end user are both catastrophically harmed immediately.

There were solid good practices from the way back when Struts was a thing. Even when a server side validation fails, you can redirect the user to a page and the form can prefill the inputs (except password). This was across page refreshes. What happened to all those hard learned lessons?

These days you don't even get that on most occasions even in a "forgot password" flow. You still have you key in your email address or username again pretty much everywhere.

This heavily depends on field, I believe.

Make animation optional at least! Just clicking into an input field can cause a system hangup.

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