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Comment by throwaway_98554 | Hacker News Reader

Dear old lady shouting at clouds,

The web is not about me. But the websites I create are not for everyone. They are for my users.

My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard.

Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design. I make the best experience for THEM. Not for you, nor for all your friends using different hardware.

It doesn't mean I don't care about loading time or how things are displayed on the screen. It means I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded.

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As the article mentions, what you’re really saying here is that “my website is not for poor people, or disabled people, or even people who are trying to kill some time before their bus arrives”. Is discriminating against these people ok with you?

>> My users are professionals, on desktop, with a mouse and keyboard.

>> Knowing who are my users allows me to do better design.

>> I do so knowing in which environments it will happen. And yes, it might means you will be excluded.

Obviously the poster here is more than okay with this. They're explicitly stating it will happen, and it's part of the plan.

The problem is when it's not part of the plan.

Imagine the author is writing an internal web tool for a corporate enterprise environment.

Imagine all of those computers and devices are standardized, and the software will only run on these devices on an intranet.

The previous poster's point is valid here. We know the users, the users are professionals, we know who they are, and we know what environments we'll be deploying in.

Therefore, of course, beyond accessibility, of course the poster wouldn't care about people trying to kill time before the bus.

Exactly this. I would even hazard that the majority of developers are working on things for intranets in a narrow corporate context where, if it can run on non-standard gear, that’s an added liability with no significant business benefit. Businesses are only moving away from their decade old Flash and “IE only” web apps because the marginal security risk combined with maintenance burden has begun to outweigh the costs of new development.

And then there was the internal app I saw that had a fixed width of 1400 px. Because, hey, everyone is on a desktop with that size monitor.

> Imagine the author is writing an internal web tool for a corporate enterprise environment.

Let’s not, since this is not relevant to my experience on the web the slightest. I couldn’t care less what you did on your internal network, as long as it doesn’t affect me. If you use the same standard for your external websites, though, then we have a problem.

Dear Throwaway.

I am your potential user. A professional, on a desktop, with a mouse and keyboard.

I absolutely hate your slow, click-driven products. I have things to do, and I need the software to help me do them as fast as possible. I run a lot of software simultaneously, so your heavyweight resource hogs are actively preventing me from doing other things I need to get done. If I find a competitor that actually cares about providing value in exchange for money, be certain that I'll switch to them in a heartbeat.

It isn't slow, nor click-driven.

On the contrary, because I know my users are on a desktop, most actions can be done with keyboard shortcuts.

This means you haven't tried it. Which means you're talking about something you don't know.

Remedy?

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