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Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

mohkohn.co.uk

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Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#321

Post by andersmurphy »

concinds wrote: post #215
chao- wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a ne…

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

I've found what works really well on 3G an MPA with streaming HTML with brotli compression rendering the whole page on every change.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#322

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

breakwaterlabs wrote: post #160
motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

> Old people don't have that because they Aren't insane . When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around! If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application . It is rather the engineer's…

> When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works?

Just after the turn of the century, that was when there was a big shift in the industry to move all user interface design work to artists, and away from original user interface specialists. The whole profession of user interface designer (one who understood "form follows function") ceased to exist in the early 2000s, as all work was assigned to graphic designers (who only understand aesthetics).

This movement can be seen clearly in the evolution of widget toolkits for desktop applications, which peaked in usability in the late-90s/early-2000s, and have been losing usability while getting prettier with every iteration since.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#323

Post by foxglacier »

bearjaws wrote: post #233
motoboi wrote: post #132

Old people. They exist. Not even that old. 60 year people can't user your fancy site because then don't have an internal model of how a computer works. You know that when pressing a button a hidden engine runs in the backend (or something runs in the backend). You expect an answer and if the expectation do not match the result, the model in your mind creates an hypothesis about what maybe happened and iterate from th…

You are just describing a broken site? I've seen static sites with these same problems, 404 was invented decades before React...

I think he means the submit button is disabled because some field failed validation. It might have turned red or have a message appeared next to it - and it might be scrolled off the screen so you have no idea. Or just the common "I have read and agree to ..." checkbox you didn't tick. Possibly because you didn't read the T&C or because it won't let you tick it until you click the link to the T&C. Nobody else read them either but they've learned through trial and error that when the checkbox doesn't work, you have to click the link to fool the computer into thinking you read it.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#324

Post by devnull3 »

sjtgraham wrote: post #65

I built apps like these on GOV.UK over 10 years ago for the Ministry of Justice. We built our own form wizard library that let us validate long forms in steps and break them out into multiple pages because Ruby on Rails didn't support doing that out of the box. It was a very important principle back then that everyone should be able to make use of these digital services regardless of whatever users were using to acce…

I am actually impressed by the gov.uk websites. Its minimal and just about right for its purpose.

May I ask what tech is used for mobile apps? I am guessing not a full mobile app but it uses webview.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#325

Post by jessyco »

concinds wrote: post #215
chao- wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a ne…

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

In Canada you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have some kind of association behind it; the title holds meaning including partially accountability. Something that is lacking in the tech world. I'm not saying I want to live in that world but also I worked hard for the knowledge I have starting in the IE days of web dev; it was hard earned experience making things work across the web without loosing performance. The idea that we have developers out there now getting paid higher than me that are clueless on how auth works, how the browser works, why css and browsers maintain backwards comparability for a reason.. well it's sad; but good for them I guess?

The behaviours of developers as well being beholden to their managers rather than the craft; meaning not saying No we will not move forward without proper unit tests, or pushing back when business demands quick corner cutting solutions.

Anyway, decades of bitterness. I wish we had associations to uphold some level of accountability on developers as much as protect developers. I think things would be a lot more expensive and slow if we did that though.

Fundamentally I agree with your take, not just on dev side but just the web/dev/produce' a culture of not giving a shit.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#327

Post by [deleted] »

concinds wrote: post #215
chao- wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting a few years ago, I realized some junior and medior engineers never once considered the possibility of building a website (app, experience, etc.) in anything other than a heavy SPA framework. But they're not stupid people! If you directly asked "Can you build a website without React?" they know the answer is obviously "Yes." However, if you asked them to build a new website, they would unthinkingly start a ne…

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

[deleted]

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#328

Post by IshKebab »

brightball wrote: post #295
OskarS wrote: post #165

As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part: > There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.” Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form,…

This was the jQuery way. It was called Graceful Degradation. The entire approach went out of style with the advent of single page apps, React, Angular, VueJS, etc.

jQuery and graceful degradation are different things. The vast majority of sites in the jQuery era that used jQuery did not gracefully degrade.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#329

Post by apothegm »

OskarS wrote: post #165

As a non-web dev, I have a question about this part: > There was a sad coda; as is the way of contract work, I moved on. I explained what I had built to my replacement, that it always worked even without javascript. He was appalled and said, “but that’s a lot more work for us.” Why is it more work? The approach described in the article seems honestly reasonably simple: just write the standard components for the form,…

They don’t know how to compose and style elements without someone providing them with a prebuilt library of $framework components.

Re: Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

#330

Post by ozim »

goosejuice wrote: post #313
concinds wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are far too empathetic to them. They should not hold the jobs they have. These are the people writing React monstrosities for government benefit websites, and testing them on fast iPhones and fast 4G, without realizing that every page load for actual users will take 30 seconds on their old $200 Android on 3G, and users won’t complete the form. It’s a culture of not giving a shit, that’s the deeper issue.

Junior and midlevel devs aren't decision makers for government benefit websites. The culture of not giving a shit is real, but the responsibility goes far beyond these roles.

I am always baffled by people who blame developers. Like some mid dev or junior would calling shots what stack should be used for project.
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