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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#271

Post by Narishma »

rock_artist wrote: post #88

> You can run Linux from a Windows subsystem to run most development tooling. To be honest, this feels like the author never used "craptop". WSL even with quad-core hasewell laptop and 8GB is pushing it. It's better to RDP / develop on one machine and run on another. Having said that, It's important to test on low speced always. Even not for website (we test our cpp code on some 2009 machines)

I think it says more about your tooling than the hardware if it can't run well on 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#272

Post by Narishma »

bdcravens wrote: post #60
0xy wrote: post #29

Gmail has nearly 50mb of JavaScript that thrashes I/O so hard that clicking the search bar and typing too soon will cause it to skip letters (because the search bar is probably some Angular-powered abomination). It is and was a regression from the previous design which was fast even on 3G connections. It's driven by Google engineers running their bloatware on i9 MBPs with 64gb of RAM. Oh Gmail is slow? Have you tried…

They do still support the basic HTML version: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

They seem to have disabled the option to make that the default view. Or rather, the option is still there but it doesn't do anything, always opening the bloated interface.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#273

Post by jeabays »

LeonM wrote: post #132
watersb wrote: post #100

There are lots of good options for sub-$200 laptops at Wal Mart right now. ChromeBooks or little Windows machines. Every web dev should use one. I am fascinated by the low end options, you learn a lot about a system when it's pushed to its limits. Or maybe you learn even more about your pain threshold... I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. I don't rec…

> I've heard it said that it's more difficult to make a $10,000 car than it is to make a $1,000,000 car. It is, but probably for a different reason than you'd think. In automotive, the difficulty is not designing the car, but the facility to mass produce them. Elon found out the hard way. In his words: "it's trivial to design the machine, but it's hard to design the machine, that builds the machine". He is currently…

Elon (and other shareholder) didn't do shit, he just owns the facilities and the rights to reap the profits.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#274

Post by MattGaiser »

Mezzie wrote: post #247
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #105

It's not just developers, and it's not just about speed, it's also designers / UX bods who need to heed this. My decently powered work laptop from job 1 has a fairly rubbish screen, which means that a lot of the subtle hover effects, 1 pixel light grey on lighter grey divisions and skinny fonts either aren't visible or are incredibly difficult to see. A good trick if you're working on a large, hi res screen is to hav…

It's because to many, aesthetics > function. This drives me INSANE. If you make a UX that most people can't use for reasons a, b, and c, who CARES how pretty it looks? This is also true for accessibility, especially for older people who are more likely to have reading issues and presbyopia. Everything is designed for 22 year olds with perfect vision and the best hardware. It's often on the marketing and exec teams. I…

At least where I have worked, UX people are evaluated by whether the PM is happy when approving it. Even for myself as a dev, the part of my job people care about is the rate tickets move from "Selected for development" to "Done" while still passing tests.

You will need to change the minds of PMs.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#276

Post by pronlover723 »

l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

I agree what testing on crappy hardware is a good thing BUT...........

I think the industry has a problem selling underpowered computers in general. AFAIK it's the non-pros that need the a reasonably powerful computer. Maybe "powerful" is the wrong word but not the crappy $300 windows laptop running on a celeron or whatever the latest.

My dad got some ~$500 HP all in one desktop and it's so underpowered as to be unusable. It takes 4-5 minutes to boot while and launching any app takes what feels like half a minute. Just typing you can feel the machine struggle. You could argue if all software (and the OS) was optimized it might not be underpowered but there is no world where all software is optimized.

It see a similar problem all the time with people giving up an old computer. My friend had some like 2007 Mac and she was thinking of giving it to a friend for their kids. Maybe some hacker kid would find a use for it but for most non-geeks, an old PC won't run current software, the current OS, current browsers with vulnerabilities fixed or modern standards. Zoom, youtube, etc are probably not going to be good experiences on such a machine.

Basically it's my opinion that non-techies should always get a relatively new and reasonably powered machine but sadly they don't have the knowledge to know that so they get led to a crappy underpowered machine and then have a crappy and frustrating experience using it.

I don't have a solution. It's only an observation. In my own family, when they let me buy them a machine, on a scale of 1 to 10 I aim for ~7 in terms of power with say 8-16gig of ram and a reasonably powered processor, at least an i5? not an i3 or N or Celeron.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#277

Post by MaxBarraclough »

errcorrectcode wrote: post #227
l0b0 wrote: post #41

There are three kinds of web developers: - Those who don't care about performance, as long as it loads within a few seconds on their own beefed up system on the LAN. This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen. - Those who care about performance, and work for people who care. They are already doing great work (or are about to), producing those rare low-friction, high-speed, content-is-king sites w…

Unpopular opinion: Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free. OTOH, obsessing about performance to the exclusion of usability is equally insane. Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.

> Unpopular opinion

This is HackerNews. Hating bloated websites is a time-honoured tradition here.

> Most web developers don't have a grasp of computer science or assembly, and act like computing resources are free

It's worth separating these two. Plenty of web developers have computer science degrees, but if they're paid to quickly churn out bloated websites, that's what they'll do.

> Nuance, knowledge, and metrics are what's needed.

If the aim is to improve the performance of software/websites, what's needed is a userbase that's less forgiving of bloat.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#278

Post by eyegor »

MrFoof wrote: post #251
telesilla wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never…

Way back in the day I was a lone IT guy in a distributor/wholesaler, and part of that was creating line of business apps to do some real heavy lifting, extending existing ones, and creating utilities to tie other apps together. In a tiny company of maybe 40 people, where even an underpaid IT guy was still an extravagance (but was adding huge value). Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At some poi…

The number of hacks and workarounds that users will come up with without complaining to the dev team is always astounding. One time I shadowed someone who was using one of our internal tools that spit out pdfs, and at some point along the line he realized he wanted something extra included on them but didn't think to contact the dev team. As part of his daily work flow, he was taking data from one of the program's temp files and editing the pdf to add it. He had apparently been doing this for about a year. When I saw this, I spent 10 minutes updating the report template to add it and ended up receiving thank you emails from people I'd never talked to.

So yes, find a user and shadow them.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#279

Post by polishdude20 »

telesilla wrote: post #152
animal_spirits wrote: post #85

> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…

We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never…

What are some tactics you use to get these customers amped up?

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#280

Post by Mezzie »

MattGaiser wrote: post #274
Mezzie wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because to many, aesthetics > function. This drives me INSANE. If you make a UX that most people can't use for reasons a, b, and c, who CARES how pretty it looks? This is also true for accessibility, especially for older people who are more likely to have reading issues and presbyopia. Everything is designed for 22 year olds with perfect vision and the best hardware. It's often on the marketing and exec teams. I…

At least where I have worked, UX people are evaluated by whether the PM is happy when approving it. Even for myself as a dev, the part of my job people care about is the rate tickets move from "Selected for development" to "Done" while still passing tests. You will need to change the minds of PMs.

Luckily, I don't work in tech (I do tech work in a non-tech company/non tech team [I'm the only one with any coding or cs skills]), and this right here is why. I work in communications and own the marketing decisions for my department so I generally have strong decision rights when I do UI/UX/design work. Downside is I don't make nearly as much, but I definitely prefer the respect and autonomy.
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