Comment by NearAP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NearAP | Hacker News Reader

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This is not a 'software engineering' thing. If you look at it from a software development POV, then the issue is more of not having 'product managers' whose job it is to - understand the requirements, write the specs, basically champion the POV of the end user (after actually identifying the correct end user). Examples

a) The article talked about the software not working on Internet Explorer (IE). Older people still use IE. Software Engs with fewer years of experience tend to optimize for FF, Chrome and latest version of IE.

b) The article talked about 'wrong' placement of buttons (probably the software is not responsive or not optimized for phones or older phones)

c) Input fields seem to be rigid (older people will make mistakes)

d) Once you're registered, you can't switch from patient to staff. This should have been designed like a 2-sided marketplace with the ability of one person to sometimes play the 2 roles

If you don't have the right spec/requirements, the output of the engineers will still be bad

Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users.

That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough ask. No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent.

Idk, points a through c are basically already solved problems. I’d be disappointed to see problems like that if I was spending $20,000 let alone millions. Issue d though does feel like the sort of thing that you didn’t know was on the horizon up front, would be a pretty major rebuild to add in later on.

>>Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users.<<<

That thinking is exactly the reason why this system turned out to be problematic. Even if it wasn't for healthcare purposes, bottom line is - you have to know who your 'actual users' are. Elderly people (60s and above) are still heavy IE users and so are quite a few government offices. If these 2% of overall browser users are the majority of your users or your early users, then not supporting them becomes a problem.

Detect IE, redirect to a static site with a 1-800 number, have a call centre staffed with people running Chromebooks schedule an appointment over the phone.

Probably cheaper overall, and certainly a better user experience for the tech-challenged seniors.

Something to note about this strategy is that older versions of IE (10 and older) only support TLS 1.0 by default. Below 8 you're stuck with TLS 1.0 and can't even enable anything higher. So if "https://www.cdc.gov" is using modern web security IE users won't even get to request data from the server, so you can't detect their browser.

To add more info. TLS 1.0 is prohibited from usage by many regulations and it will be immediately flagged by any security audit/tools. The government contract most certainly includes clauses about security and following recommended practices.

In short, anything below IE 11 is de-facto out of the picture.

> No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent.

Why isn’t this just the site?

I love Spartan, ugly, functional sites. That’s what the government should build, always. They should have style guidelines that are basically “no style”.

You’re not competing with anyone, there’s no need to look good. Function, function, function.

There can be a medium. US Gov sites generally look awful. The UK Gov Digital team have done a way better just of standardizing things in ways that look nice.

Part of function is layout. It isn't any more difficult to grab Bootstrap or some other out of the box framework that'll give a good consistent look than it is to go "no style".

Or jquery, the original IE glue library.

One reason that comes to mind is that a lot of people browse on mobile devices. These days a site really ought to be responsive to mobile viewports and a lot of “basic bitch” government sites are not.

Plain old HTML is responsive. It stops being responsive when you start trying to make it look good.

I’m not convinced that’s true. Case in point: tabular data. I don’t think presenting something in a table is an attempt to make it look good, I think it’s the most logical and recognisable way of presenting certain kinds of information. But tables don’t scale well on a mobile viewport without extra work.

Reasonable tables work fine on a mobile viewport. It’s when you get into crazy ones that it breaks down.

Plain old HTML stops being responsive as soon as you try to do anything more than text. A plain HTML table would be horrible on mobile. If you want to reflow anything that isn't text you will need flexbox. There is literally no reason to not use CSS to make a site that works well on mobile and desktop.

It's a governmental website. It must be usable by everyone. Less than two percent is not zero percent -- it's over a million people.

2% of traffic doesn't mean that 2% of users only have access to IE6. It may limit which computing device they can use but not supporting IE6 isn't blocking millions from your site, it is blocking them from using your site on all of their devices.

Probably not true. It means blocking them from using the site because they only have 1 or 2 devices and those are running IE.

The article talks about the fact that a lot of the seniors get help with their online stuff from the libraries (which are currently closed). What is the probability that folks like these have multiple devices at home and/or they can use them?

Years ago, a lot of my bosses at work (in Tech) still used IE. Lots of our clients used government issued computers which were locked down to IE, sometimes several versions behind.

At the end of the day, it boils down to - know who the actual users are.

never mind all the accessibility rules you have to follow (keyboard navigable, alt text for screenreaders for images, minimum contrast for sight impaired, constrained color scheme for colorblind, etc). . . that greenfield SaaS app made by 5 22 year olds isn't going to cut it here.

The "basic bitches" version of the site should be the base, this is a gov website which will be used by the older demographic first.

This article got posted here recently: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven... even outside of a pandemic people need access to gov sites from whatever device they can get their hands on

> But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

> Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US

This is true but if you are a Government agency in a Country of 300M+ people, that 2% is still several hundred thousands users, who are calling your tech support etc. etc.

If this was a private app then it would be different, IMHO Government websites have accessibility concerns that the rest of us can ignore.

Exactly. Civil Engineering does this better, I think. In a civil engineering project such as a bridge, the requirements may be written down by the customer, but the engineering design of the bridge is entirely the responsibility of a single architect. You can pretty much bet that the city council who bought the bridge doesn't know a thing about physics or engineering, so if the bridge falls down it has to be the architect's fault (assuming that it was built according to the plan). This gives the architect the power to say "no" to the customer.

I agree with you on all those listed points, but I don't know if it's my experience as a software engineer, but all those things you point out in general are something I find developers are cogniciant of, but often the processes in place doesn't allow them to do what's best, instead they are forced to always seek approval and follow stringent specs and requirements even if they don't make sense.

If you let qualified engineers drive those instead, in my experience, the end result is always better.

alot of these issues can be solved by pushing code to UAT or QA environments and having a bug tracker that allows everyone to submit their bugs. It seems like either none of this happened, or it was rolled out too quickly.

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