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