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Test your product on a crappy laptop

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Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#181

Post by donkeybeer »

Orphis wrote: post #38

At the beginning of the pandemic, my team worked on optimizations as priority number 1 as we got a lot of new users with terrible configurations who wanted to do a lot more that what ever intended for that same hardware. I managed to find a crappy laptop to do some testing and work on optimizations, and it wasn't pretty. No development tool would work on it. My recommendation is thus: aim low, but not the lowest. You…

Dev laptop need not be your test laptop. You should still test on that machine even if you can't develop on it. And I have a feeling this test also indicates a lack of optimization in the dev tools as well.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#182

Post by ghusbands »

l0b0 wrote: post #143
taeric wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain Gmail.

I don't understand this comment. Google clearly cares about the performance of that product, since it's the fastest webmail I've used by a long shot. Or maybe you care more about performance than almost everyone, and use Mutt or something else which can be configured to be faster with a few days' worth of effort.

That hasn't been true for a long time, now. Gmail used to be fast. Nowadays, it takes a long time to load (loading megabytes of JS before even displaying anything other than a big logo), a long time to search and a noticeable amount of time to even display an email after you click on it. I think you might relying on some older memories.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#183

Post by telesilla »

selestify wrote: post #167
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…

Did those users actually report different issues altogether from the original ones, or did they just report more of the same kinds of issues?

Yes there is a large set of venn diagrams we weren't connecting that it gives us pretty easy access to greater coverage. The harder part becomes messaging and marketing as we target more use cases.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#184

Post by telesilla »

mkl wrote: post #178
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…

What mechanisms did you use to get users providing feedback? Popups asking or something?

Good old email segmenting. It's become a real powerhouse for us. Figure out what groups of people you have, talk with a few to figure out what they want, build it and target those who match. We're not a startup however so this is more of a scale up strategy or if you already have access to a large number of users who trust you and want just send your emails to spam.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#185

Post by hypeatei »

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…

While I agree with the premise, I've seen this mindset get out of hand and stress people out. My anecdote involves a co-worker looking at our Azure metrics at all times of the day and having a mini panic attack when requests drop off or we get a an uptick of a few hundred milliseconds of response time. Most of this is due to scaling out and resolves itself in a short amount of time. Regardless, he's convinced something else is causing it and taking measures that actively make our code worse and less understandable all in the name of "performance".

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#186

Post by mmcnl »

hypeatei wrote: post #185
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…

While I agree with the premise, I've seen this mindset get out of hand and stress people out. My anecdote involves a co-worker looking at our Azure metrics at all times of the day and having a mini panic attack when requests drop off or we get a an uptick of a few hundred milliseconds of response time. Most of this is due to scaling out and resolves itself in a short amount of time. Regardless, he's convinced somethi…

Don't act on assumptions, verify.

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#189

Post by [deleted] »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #123
mwcremer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking of Abraham Wald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald

Note that the Wald story may not have actually happened: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06 (But yes, Abraham Wald is the statistician that the story is about.)

[deleted]

Re: Test your product on a crappy laptop

#190

Post by foxfluff »

nirui wrote: post #91

However, there maybe another darkside of the story. Almost a decades back I talked a game dev, asking him why the game that they released demands such high hardware requirements. The two reasons that he offered was: 1) It costs money to produce & maintain content such as Level of Detail assets to enable support for low end devices, and 2) People cannot afford good computer usually also cannot afford to pay for the ga…

Yea, the way this worked out for me as a kid was that I needed all the money I got to upgrade my PC and wouldn't have any left over for buying games so I just pirated these games.

Anyway, without numbers that's just a theory and might not hold. Anecdotally a lot of people are worrying about whether they can play games on their budget build. And they would rather buy games than spend a ton on a faster PC. And I believe consoles sell for a similar reason: they are cheap. It's the actual games that console gamers pay decent money for.

(Of course the PC game market is now extremely saturated and there are deep discounts & giveaways constantly somewhere)

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