511–520 of 870 posts
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in many places there is no bank that offers an alternative
I don't get why your parent was downvoted. If you live in the middle of nowhere without a cell phone, life is going to be tougher.
I think the issue is that it is becoming tougher than it was prior to the existence of smartphones for those without them.
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> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-to-end processing This is only really true with stable, high speed internet connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially not on mobile devices
So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take a hypothetical situation: Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it…
The obvious answer is because asynchronous workflows are brittle, and require intervention from the end user to correct if they break
Then most end users aren't going to care to fix it when it breaks, or be able to fix it when it breaks for a variety of reasons
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Make it so I can pay without using an app and a new login to keep track of and you'll get paid.
That’s not a condition you are entitled to create or enforce. If you want that to be enshrined in law, speak with your local representatives.
The main issue is that end-users not only accept crappy software, they pay for it (sometimes, quite a bit). They also recommend it to others, give it good reviews, and subcultures of "tech-macho" workarounds to bugs cause people to actually prefer crap. It's infuriating (to me, but not, perhaps, to many tech companies).
As long as that keeps happening, the quality of software is going to remain in the shitter. It doesn't make economic sense to write good software. Writing high-Quality software is a lot more expensive than writing crap.
My software tends to be pretty high-Quality, but that's mainly because it is free software, and I tend to work alone, so its scope is quite limited. I would not expect a commercial company to develop software the way that I do. It would just cost too much.
One thing not mentioned yet is what happens when you've got a cheaper phone filled with photos and videos. At various times I've had to spend a few minutes deleting things just to download some stupid 100 meg app that I need to use for a total of 5 minutes to complete some basic task.
For whatever reason. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it's being fixed. Maybe the battery is dead.
(Maybe you don't want to get a Google or Apple account. But that's not the only use case.)
All public services and essential services (government services, banks, car parks, etc) should respect this right. It's bizarre that people think it's such an outlandish request.
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The annoying part is that website can just be used as an app. For a booking app we don't need native performance; just a webpage-inside-an-app is fine. In most cases, it should be fairly straight-forward and cheap to make this work. What happens is they hire some contracting firm and they go "whole thing will have to be redone" so they get more work, and that's how you end up with a "solution" like this. Basically th…
What’s even more asinine is the website can be updated without publishing to an app store. You always have the latest version and all these apps are just a thin veneer on some CRUD endpoints anyway.
My doctor/'s office was just forced to switch to app-instead-of-website for patient interation. Ironically, the old and this new software came from same megacorp I work for (different department, same story). The old web interface was rather good and rather sensible-practical-sane. It was almost as if someone had asked a doctor what he actually needed for his patients, and then understood his answer and also managed…
I complained, they played dumb, but eventually they came up with "the website is a convenience". I stopped using it.
The app was much worse.
A couple years later, other people must have complained
https://www.classaction.org/news/kaiser-permanente-shares-we...
https://www.classaction.org/news/data-breach-lawsuit-says-ka...
I believe the same thing happens with apps and websites provided by other health care providers, but nobody investigates and nobody cares.
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I guess I am weird. I still do this. I just don't want to have to worry about my device being available during boarding nor do I want to have to stop at a kiosk. Just print at home, go through security and scan at the gate.
> I just don't want to have to worry about my device being available during boarding I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the airport from home, your battery is charged. And if your phone somehow breaks on the way, you print at a kiosk. It seems far more likely that I'd lose a random piece of paper on the way to the airport than lose my phone...
You're assuming the phone works and the internet connection works and the app works and the service behind it responsive. That's a lot of trust in thousands of moving parts.
Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it basically 100% fail-proof.
While I always use the paper boarding pass, I do also check the boarding pass on the app out of curiosity. Easily like half the time on the American Airlines app, when I'm at the gate about to board and click on show boarding pass, the app hangs for many minutes and never responds. I'm always glad I have the paper boarding pass in my pocket instead.
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Then it should give explicit status information like uploading to server (xx%)...OK waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes. Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing, because marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes.
> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks. But that’s a company cul…