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98% isn't much

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Re: 98% isn't much

#191

Post by anoneng »

ryandrake wrote: post #186
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when I read the article I thought "Great, more paternalistic advice that pretends we have infinite resources/time/money." Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers…

Respectfully: To me these just sound like excuses. I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much of anything, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you choosing…

This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.

Re: 98% isn't much

#192

Post by sebastianconcpt »

That framing is setting the question so you immediately are forced to compare pears to apples.

Of course 98% of sterilization is not enough for surgery or for precision in calculating your account balance but the category of landing page conversion a 98% would be astronomically high.

Re: 98% isn't much

#193

Post by MatekCopatek »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #135
MatekCopatek wrote: post #32

While I agree with the general sentiment, the problem here isn't developers not being familiar with statistics, it's the simple fact all of this is profit driven most of the time. I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver…

I think when you say “profit motivated” the underlying principle is actually utilitarianism; doing the most good for the most people, for which profit Is merely an imperfect proxy.

This might be a cynical take, but I doubt Ticketmaster (and most of these other examples) are motivated by doing the most good. Their underlying principle is extracting the most value for shareholders at any cost.

Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.

Re: 98% isn't much

#194

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #179
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when I read the article I thought "Great, more paternalistic advice that pretends we have infinite resources/time/money." Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers…

He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.

Except there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are. But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.

Re: 98% isn't much

#195

Post by cafebabbe »

You can make it so those 2% are dealing with ugly -but functional- layouts

it that reduces development/maintenance cost by a lot, that's not a terrible deal.

Re: 98% isn't much

#196

Post by groundzeros2015 »

MatekCopatek wrote: post #193
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when you say “profit motivated” the underlying principle is actually utilitarianism; doing the most good for the most people, for which profit Is merely an imperfect proxy.

This might be a cynical take, but I doubt Ticketmaster (and most of these other examples) are motivated by doing the most good. Their underlying principle is extracting the most value for shareholders at any cost. Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.

There is a limited amount of engineering resources. Don’t you agree they should try to use them for the benefit of the most people? That’s not to say they should exclude groups. But a small minority path probably gets less work than a main path. Would you agree these prudent or not?

Re: 98% isn't much

#197

Post by andai »

On the other hand, if you design something to include 100% of people, you will fail, and you will not give your core audience as good of an experience as they could have gotten.

So I like the opposite approach. If there's literally one guy on the planet, and this article/app/idea changes his life... what would that look like?

Re: 98% isn't much

#198

Post by k6hkUZtLUM »

Serving a website is different than serving food or providing safety features. Web design can use progressive enhancement and detect available features to use as they are available.

With a website, you can have the "real" layout, but when someone is blocking your JS, you can fallback and still provide content.

We won't get every mobile application working on old browsers, but we can offer something to the end user. Even a page that lets them know they are missing out.

But CSS Nesting? We can have that and a fallback.

Re: 98% isn't much

#199

Post by __alexs »

zero-sharp wrote: post #39
wccrawford wrote: post #25

Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…

I like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?

The same way people generally equate luddism with anything. By entirely misunderstanding what it was to make a point that sounds snappy without all of that boring understanding history stuff.

Re: 98% isn't much

#200

Post by blitzar »

trjordan wrote: post #51

I was heading to dinner with a friend who worked in infra. Google maps said we could bike across town in 20 minutes. He suggested we leave 40 minutes ahead of time and grab a drink at the bar if we got there early. When I raised an eyebrow, he goes: "What, do you not live your life based on 99th percentiles?" I tend to think of work as upside-based on downside-based. Most feature work is upside. 10% lift on conversio…

I live my life a 1/4 of a percentile at a time ... For those ten seconds or less, I'm free.
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