Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

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At least in the enterprise space, users are well accustomed to terrible design and UX, because the people with the purchasing power aren't the users, and the users have no purchasing power. Think JIRA, or Epic EHR, or SAP - everyone loves to hate it, but it is the go-to solution because it does what the people paying for it want.

The bar is so obnoxiously low in that space that your app literally just needs to work, and people are happy with it.

Same goes with a lot of prosumer software. People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals".

I work in the enterprise software space and the last thing regular users want is a flash modern ui. They want familiarity, because enterprise software is like an extension of a user's mind and they want it to stay the same until they retire. I have seen first hand how a auto factory worker can capture data in a green screen terminal plastic covered keyboard faster than using a flash web UI and a mouse. Speed and familiarity are the orders of the day.

Indeed, it's akin to why some programmers like Vim and other terminal editors over GUI based ones. It's the exact same concept.

> People complain about missing features they need, because having a slick UI is very much a secondary concern, well after "is this actually doing everything I want it to do?" and "does it have all the features I want to accomplish my goals".

Well, yes, that is the point of software (and any technology in general), to accomplish the goal that the user wants to accomplish. I'm also not talking about prosumer apps per se, although I've made those too, but true consumer apps as well, no one has really complained about the UX, in fact they actually like that I'm able to make slick animations inside the app for quite a cheap computational cost. Since Flutter is basically a 2D game engine, it's optimized for those operations. I'm never gonna write 5 different apps for 5 different OSes anymore, it's a monumental waste of human labor.

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