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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

The same reason the software is ass at the car mechanic when they want to order parts: Legacy systems running on old VAXes, with UX upgrades consisting of screen scraping and fields you have to tab between.

And if you miss one: You gotta tab all the way until it wraps around and back to where you were.

The systems are often blazing fast underneath, but these crazy tab-forcing-90s-looking-UIs are stupidly common in airlines, car renrals, part ordering, smaller banks and anything else that started using centralized computer systems early but didn't expose those systems to end users.

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I can hit the tab key 10 times in the time it takes my hand to reach the mouse and start to move it. And shift-Tab moves the other way, so if you miss a field you can go back with one keystroke.

I hate web forms that don't support tab key navigation between fields.

Do most people prefer to work that way, and are you representative of most people?

If many people have an issue with the UX paradigm, which is more likely, that they all are wrong, or that the one thing in common is the thing that's suboptimal?

Folks whose main job is to fill in a specific UI ought to be(come, swiftly) much, much better at using that UI than Joe Average User.

Sort of like how prior to barcode scanners in cash registers at supermarkets, the person working the till would become familiar using a numeric keypad fast, as well as with the prices of often-bought items.

I’ve worked with “most people”. Ran Workstream (AS 400 based) manufacturing (MRP) system with 200 operators. Every single operator preferred keyboard and DOS-like interface. Management tried to implement a browser based UI and it sucked so much.

There is a time and place for good ol keyboard driven UI. Don’t throw the baby with the whole bathtub.

I’d argue that most modern UI/UX sucks but that’s debatable. But legacy UI is fricking amazing in some cases.

Also: Shift + Tab can be implemented and it would solve your gripe.

WCAG compliant UI can both be intuitive for visual people and support tabbing.

Most modern UI/UX sucks because frontend has no discipline, in that a third the people seem to be random students pulled off the street getting drafted in and another third are backend people getting drafted in, and it's debatable IMO which is worse.

Same here, can't stand a website that isn't aware of tab navigation. How else are you supposed to quickly navigate any UI without the rat ?

> How else

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25528706

Then you would love the systems I refer to!

You'll have plenty of fun with 500-900ms delay added by a crappy Java front-end and even if it's on the shorter end consistently you'll love the odd 900ms bump for the screen scraper refresh making you hit twice since the crappy rubber dome keyboard doesn't register way too often.

Then back to tabbing through 20 fields until you stop at the right one again!

We're not talking quick modern UIs here, but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching, all developed by some consultancy who went bankrupt in 2000, and because of how much depends on the legacy system noone dares to fix what's technically working.

It's a humbling environment to end up in as a young dev for sure. You'll be very disappointed that one guy in 1999 didn't think reversing would be needed.

Yeah. I see, but from a point this sounds like a bunch of excuses

If I can book it through the web (hence, they have a web frontend) they could have though of something better in the last 10 years

Or, you know. Make shift-tab work. And use a faster terminal emulator

It's all about pretty short term returns of course.

You can build a web interface separately (external contract ofc) and that will work in parallell, but aside from very basic services there are tons of edge cases, bad documentation, business customers with systems built with yours as a dependency. It's a little like any bank old enough still having paper file storage and the planned end of life is the literal death of all paper holding customers.

So the old system sticks around and as long as it does noone wants to buy a new set of computers to run in parallell with the old ones.

There are companies who try hard and end up sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into replacing old systems that only cost a server blade, ten devs and five people in operations to run.

With no clear benefit visible to the shareholders far from all of them have even started that move.

>but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching

Uh, but why? If there's old virtual terminal just connect to it with SSH, why bother with screen scraping that only makes it worse?

Funny that you single out VAX (and implicitly VMS).

DECForms actually allowed for the programing of very spiffy user interfaces, which worked very well on VT terminals. Input could be handled extremely fast and efficient by a (semi-) experienced user.

You probably meant Mainframe terminals, which had no ability to handle asynchronous key input, but where you could only send complete pages to the mainframe.

Source: I worked with both. Moving from Unisys 1100 mainframes (and all their horrible utilities) to VAX and VMS was an epiphany.

I'd still argue that a lot of VMS software was actually better and handled better than the bloat we have to deal with nowadays.

Oh I connect to a VMS-system for work daily until new year (then we're getting replaced and I'm off to find something more modern, I guess)! VMS is a delight. So much more pleasant for the user than the IBM-boxes, but I do have very specific VAX-based systems in mind! Though, the example is a mish mash of that and what I've seen lately from customers running AS/400s.

But in both cases it's "awesome cool new user interfaces" made some time in the past to try to make the terminals easier to use for staff at sales locations.

Very hyped about OpenVMS 9, but will probably migrate myself over to being a more generic developer =)

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