Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.
I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files.
I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.
They're easier on the eyes, I've been looking to buy one but don't know anyone who tried them firsthand
https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_mon...
If that’s how we’re spinning it, forget the spinners and text editors altogether. Bring back the quill pen; surely it will restore many salaries!
But the writers and managers want clicky buttons and drop down menus, so here we all are. Article definitely hit a chord for me.
[1] Yes! Asciidoc is quite capable of acting like a CCMS . . if that's something you genuinely need. Component Content is another culty idea, something that really shouldn't be used for very much - if anything - but management acts like it's the second coming. And the effups it can (and probably will) introduce are colossal.
Yesterday I was testing generating audio files for glossary pages. It took an hour, because it's just another function called by the static dite generator. "For every word in this context, call the text to speech API". So elegant!
It's funny you should mention that. Year before last was the first year I decided to itemize every single expenditure. I did it using quickbooks, and it was a nightmare. It only took one time to decide never to do that again.
This year I itemized everything using beancount in emacs, and it's incredible how much easier it is to handle everything. Even having to download each bank period as a CSV and run it through a python script, I've just had a better time doing it and am able to more flexibly handle and analyze my finances.
I have yet to find out whether I can easily work with an accountant using ofx files exported from this setup though
This involves a lot of clicking around and a lot of network delays. They recently improved the UI but it's still slower than it should be.
The older I get, the more I understand graybeards and their command line workflows. Once it's committed to muscle memory, it's like a sharp knife in the hands of a chef.
So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.
People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.
Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.
But it needs to be rock-solid or it'll become a glorified unreliable voice control.
When you need to make a bunch peasants into soldiers on short notice, the equation is different.
So Costco is willing to accept a slower-ramp up period in exchange for longer term speed and efficiency, whereas companies which churn their employees care far more about initial discoverability and getting someone to be moderately capable very quickly.
My wife, a decade ago, worked at the transition of her pharmacy from when it was a local retail chain and then was purchased by one of the national chains. The local retail chain, which was a reasonably pleasant place to work for its employees, had a computer system that was an ancient DOS app like Costco uses, and when my wife would get a call from another employee on how to do something unusual in the system it was lots of "now hit tab three times, then Alt-F10 and select the glorbaldall from the drop-down and then two more tabs and then ctrl-shift-S and enter the frazzlematazz" and the new company was hellish towards their employees and had a slick new web interface with lots of menu options so you could eventually find what you needed without the keyboards, but you could never get to be as fast as my wife was on the older system.
The stupid self-checkout things... clunky, inaccurate, awful touchscreen calibrations, flag needlessly for "help" automatically. Whoever wrote those systems should feel bad for what they produced. I can't imagine that in the long term, they've helped the store save money or save anyone time.
As a young kid, I learned to use an AS/400 system and got fast at it quickly. I did a ton of data entry for my father's company. It felt so accurate and fast in comparison to the UI garbage today.
First, you need more POS stations, because customers are not as fast as trained/experienced cashiers/baggers. So you need more machines to serve the same volume. That cost might be worth the lower labor costs.
But those extra stations also consume space. Picture a Walmart that dedicates one entire edge of each store to a row of checkout lines. It's easy to imagine that 10% of their public floor space is devoted to that function. If it takes 50% longer to self-checkout, you might need 50% more floor space to handle the same volume of purchases. That's not completely accurate because stores don't convert all their checkout lines. But you get the point.
I have noticed that most places compensate for the space requirements by drastically compressing the space for a station. No more conveyor belts. No more funneling customers throught a gauntlet of magazines and chewing gum. They might replace 4 checkout registers with 10 self serve stations. In many ways this can be better for the customer but worse for the business. There's a lot of money to be made in all that merchandise immediately surrounding checkout stands. Even the endcaps on the aisles closest to the checkout lines are worth special attention for maximizing sales. Losing this hurts the business.
I'd be curious to see the results of rigorous studies. In the meantime, as a customer, I like the self checkout stations.
I'd be super curious to see things completely flipped on their head. I'd like to see a grocery store where you walk through aisles that have only one item per SKU on the shelves and you point your phone at the qr code to "buy" one. The store app lets you indicate how many of that item you want. In the back room you have robots feeding your items up to a boxing station. In the time it takes you to walk to your car after pushing "Finalize and Pay" your order is waiting at the will call loading dock as you drive through.
No shoplifting losses, dramatically lower security costs, better and cheaper inventory management... A long list of benefits. And of course an offsetting list of increased costs. For example: smaller sales floor requirements, huge loading dock requirements.
I mean, this is HN, why do people still go to the grocery store instead of using a delivery app? Price? Browsing an app is slow? Item availability? Time? The app sucks? Orders always come wrong?
The grocery store offers an old fashioned produce section so I can hand pick a pear that isn't bruised by a robot.
And all the reasons you list.
Part of the beauty, though, is that it becomes obvious to offer both. Developing in-store system puts you 90% of the way to having shop-from-anywhere abilities. Developing shop-from-anywhere puts you 85% of the way to having in-store shopping without shopping carts.
In the US, there used to be a store like this back in the 80s-90s called Service Merchandise
They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to divert money away from checkout staff and towards the company making and servicing the terminals.
(Is my cynical streak showing? ;) )
modern self-checkout machines and touchscreen POSes are perfect examples of heaping more layers of abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction on top of a simple underlying system that really didn't need all those abstractions, but they sure look fancier and apparently that's all that matters, productivity be damned.
*That being said, I just realized I sound like the professor in my AutoCAD class who insisted that the way he learned AutoCAD (all keyboard commands) was better as we all happily clicked around.
Their design consultant whined about how the lack of white space made the interface "unreadable and, hence, unusable" but, when I left, the ops team took me out to a bar for all I could drink and their manager drove me home.
These all need to be designed and built differently.
Sure, of course you can.
Then they "upgraded" to an all-new, all-shiny Java enterprise app. And she was completely at sixes and sevens.
One of the things I learned about the corporate world was this: Management reserves the right to give you conflicting goals which must all be fulfilled as a condition of employment. It is the duty of the line worker, to resolve the conflict to the business's satisfaction.
In my mom's case the conflicting goals were "find the time to train on the new app" and "do NOT, under pain of termination, log into the system before hours, after hours, or during lunch or breaks".
It was only a few months after her retirement that the dementia started setting in. I blame that stupid insurance company, their stupid app, and their stupid policies for breaking my mom's brain. She spent the last few years of her career feeling like an incompetent idiot for not being able to do an immiserating job which, for all its warts, she could do just fine before. And once that was over and her pension was on lock, her brain just said "that's it. I'm done."
I don't have empirical evidence to know that this is the case. But it feels that way. And this is why I get assmad every time some BigTechCo completely flips the table and changes the UI on some app of theirs, "just 'cause".
(Fuck Instagram and their little popups: "We've moved/hidden that feature behind another menu. Check out the features we want you to use this month, because fuck what you want to do, we have KPIs to hit!")
Great games have amazing interfaces -- they let you do very complex tasks very quickly. They often take longer to learn than the standard GUI app, but so does the Costco text app, and it's a trade off worth making. Can that trickle down to the 8-hour-a-day type apps like the Costco screenshot?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
They were in the process of replacing it with a web application when I left. Nobody I talked to could explain why.
And it would probably take less than half of the development time for desktop than for the original terminal app, although the web version would probably take longer. And it would automatically come with a lot modern goodies like real databases and networks that don't fail.
People just don't do it.
It's far, far, far from just ERP either. In publications standards, we see this all the time, and as a proportion of cost/value[1], it's even worse than the ERP disasters.
[1] Of course, that might be because no one really has a way to quantify how much documentation is actually worth.
Today, "modern" means slow, with large attack surface; often broken on arrival and thus requiring constant "updates"
Slowness of the interface aside, you just have to do the whole ceremony for some simple don't forget/think of it later note.
People who judge software by the chrome and how recently 1.0 was released are the epitome of fools.
Anyone who thinks the world hasn’t progressed since the 1970’s and they personally have the secret for success are either delusional or grifting you.
[1] https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-jour...