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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back.

Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.

It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.

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I'm discussing UI/UX, not the stack. The back button is... something else here.

I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.

UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation.

The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.

Performance is part of design in software, much like how button feel is part of industrial design, or fabric qualities are part of fashion design. But I also see what you mean, you were talking about visual design.

Thank you for somehow being the only person in this complaint thread to grasp that, lol

Loading and performance behind loading states are UI concerns, especially on a big distributed system like the modern web. Perhaps you allow native browser elements to provide that UI, perhaps customize it somehow, but a UI designer must consider how the page fills as data arrives. Do you do the ‘spinner hell’ thing? Keep it blank? FOUC? Show cache and update? These are primary UI concerns.

That load even affects the back button is very much part of the User Experience (UX) and immediately broke the illusion of being back in 1998.

Isn't responsiveness on input definitely a UX concern, and doubly so when it changes the feel of a common operation in a specific context?

I would say responsiveness is the number 1 most important UI property. At least for me.

The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.

yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.

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