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Comment by mehuldesai | Hacker News Reader

Excuse me, but why all this energy on a millisecond type performance change. Why dont you guys focus on build apps that solve problems or are new companies. Your energies and brains are misplaced. Maybe its fun though.

Here's the deal. Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat probably never considered about the time it takes for an iphone generation X to perform. They didn't design for it, they designed what the user needed and wanted.

I would say millisecond snapness isnt perceived by lets say 98% of the users of these systems. Focus on the application. Whats missing in mobile ? Facebook and Twitter are missing the picture. Focus on that guys, you are smart, but put energy on the big problems and not some low level hardware/software layer.

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This is like saying that "so what if game runs at 15 FPS, it's still better than a worse game running at 60 FPS", this may hold true to certain kinds of games and be a huge deal breaker for others. E.g. Chess/board games vs. Counter-Strike/FPS games.

In the end it boils down to user preference, user experience and individual weighing of those. Some people don't care if the image stutters a bit at times, and for other's it's a major annoyance. Thus simplifying this all to "performance doesn't matter, good ideas do" absolutism is nonsense.

Besides some of us care about things like efficiency. I don't want to pay for a 1200 MHz processor when a 800 MHz would be equivalent given that programmer would have thought a bit more about how to implement things and not just ignorantly thought that "prematu... ALL optimization is root of all evil!", as it seems to be a common "wisdom" these days. That's nothing but sloppy culture, laziness and ignorance mixed together with a bit of cost analysis thrown in. User experience matters, and poor responsiveness is one of the most detrimental things when it comes to that in many applications.

Perhaps it stems from Steve Jobs's philosophy on quality:

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

As for Instagram, Pinterest or SnapChat: they won the lottery. They were in the right place at the right time, and when that happens, you could design a piece of junk and still experience massive success, a least temporarily, as long as you have the one feature that matters (re: MySpace, MS-DOS).

Quality should be there overall, but especially on those things that really matter. This may be features for an app like facebook, or performance in a highly responsive game. My point is blindly following performance is not achieving quality. Quality is in the eyes of the user and has different meanings depending on what the user perceives and is doing. We could say the web experience using browsers has extremely bad quality characteristics from an engineering point of view, yet it changed the world. So maybe Steve wasnt so spot on :)

On Instagram, have you read about its starting and also Pinterest. Instagram had a product about Bourbin or something that was not a widely used app, but did attach to a niche of presumably drinkers. What made Instagram is that they somehow recognized that people on the Bourbin site were really into the pics taken of their hobby. Instagrams next app was a buggy system apparently! However, I recall reading it was that they recognized the uptick by recognizing the users wanted to post pics (with the filter stuff). So here, there was no real quality, just a feature not exposed well in the social market. Pinterest also seemed to recognize that wedding dresses and women gained them traction. In my judgement its this recognition of opportunity and gaps in the social market combined with what you say, the right time and place. Right time and place can also mean partially that there is a need in the market for something thats not well done.

I'd say designing user experiences so it no longer feels like you are using a computer is one of the most important problems in technology today. Doing so alters the way the mind and brain deal with feedback and completely changes the way users end up using a tool.

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