Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

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People absolutely LOVE slow animations for general OS use.

Personally, I want for what I asked to happen to actually happen when I press a button, but I am far and away the minority.

What’s even worse, is that developers today have taken this “people love animations” stance and decided “hey, we can get away with utterly shit tier performance by just making an animation!” And so 15 second page loads are now the norm because you are rewarded with a few fade effects now and again.

And now the “fuck performance” has invaded literally everything.

We now even have technology being built for the express purpose of letting developers off the hook for performance characteristics (Look hard at you DLSS). Somehow, the general public has decided that DLSS is an optimization, and not actually just a way to not optimize at all. In the conversation of Starfields utterly dogshit optimization, the first “optimization” always brought up is DLSS.

Our industry is completely fucking sideways.

Every application developer or UI designer should be forced to sit next to a non-technical person for a couple of hours who uses a slow machine (partly because it's infested by programs and services that they absolutely don't need), while browsing the web or using common applications.

It breaks my heart how much precious time and nerves of these users we're wasting.

They use outdated devices, that still should work perfectly fine, but are grinded down by extremely slow programs.

They don't understand many of the fancy UI patterns _at all_. UI elements without text are the worst offender. Animations and hover effects routinely and reliably get in their way.

They get confused all the time because their UI changes: "I could always click the frobniz here, but now it's gone and everything looks different."

Their system is basically stuck in "dark patterns".

Their internet connections are often relatively slow and unreliable, but common software assume that it's always available going full blast.

To do even basic tasks, they are nudged into registering to this or that, when often a simpler, less invasive solution exists.

They spend ungodly amounts of time navigating stuff, while getting distracted by notifications, misleading information and so on. Often giving up in complete frustration.

>UI elements without text are the worst offender.

Those are only second worst. What's worst is when there's also no border or any other indication that it's interactable rather than just an icon. Actually, that's only second worst: I've seen radio buttons used for multiselection. That goes beyond merely unhelpful to outright trickery.

Honestly, yes. There is an insane amount of computer literacy that is required to use a lot of programs. You have a to understand symbols that have actually no clear meaning apart from the instinct that you get from constantly using a computer. Things that disappear suddenly like the scroll bars are totally baffling and disorienting for older users. I mean, even as a technical user I am confused as to why so often you have to dig so hard to find basic settings or why there is always seemingly 3 different ways to get to settings for something on windows. And yeah, there should be no reason that every day to day program should not be able to run on a machine from several years ago at this point.

My new favorite punching bag for this is Discourse. It's literally just a forum. Some text and maybe a few images. Nothing crazy. But their "new and improved" system has a stupid lazy-load design that takes 7 _seconds_ to load. The root document https transfer completes in 500 ms. What the flying fuck is going on in that remaining 6500 ms?

And it's not just the first time. Every time you refresh the page, 7 seconds. And they have the audacity to call this towering pile of javascript nonsense "simple": https://www.discourse.org/about

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