Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run by the technological elite, for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet was distinctly different and inferior.
Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.
There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.
From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.
This "hinternet" is a cool concept, but there's something missing from
its account.
On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the military and
government - as rightful founders.
On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal
September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers and
grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers in the new
world.
The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the
aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a "woke"
narrative.
But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the actual real people.
The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between 1997 and
about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing money and power
moved into the internet, along with a handful of rugged
"entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around here).
The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and Charibdes,
and now they are corralled into ranches, all lovingly watched over...
The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we have not
solved many (indeed any) of the classical problems of freeloaders,
tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I think "Web 3.0 and
blockchain web" is dead (?)
A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is once
again public, high-quality and large might be looking more closely at
the history/narrative of the internet and who the real stakeholders
are.
The people have their Internet already. They like Netflix, they like Amazon Prime, they love TikTok, they like Instagram, they like Pinterest, they like their various chat apps, they like their online gaming, and so on.
That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking.
There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be. They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage, bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they love dearly of course).
No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor! The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art, and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the masses want at all. Not even remotely close.
They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can insult people without getting punched in the face, and they can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub, and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired at/from Gaza in another thread.
you misunderstood the concept, brought in your own windmills, and then successfully attacked them. I guess it generated an interesting subthread, even if it did derail my point into the tired "internet ain't what it used to be!" direction. god, I was hoping what I said was more subtle than that. other people in the thread have done better, even managed to use google to search the original posts on oblomovka so that they can reflect on the point, instead of just typing things.
but to your "people's internet" point, the real communism has clearly never been tried! it's not the people that want TikTok, it's the power structure. left to their own devices they built cathedrals!
I'm struggling to understand from your explanation what is this "hinternet".
The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I look at it.
How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?
By way of analogy, 90's internet was like exploring a town where you could wander around and check things out, and some open lots had billboards with ads on their property. Every property had a list of other properties that you might want to also check out.
Current internet (hinternet?) is like walking through the same town but now there are fences around everything and posts with security cameras at every property boundary. When visiting a property now you are required to show your face and maybe ID, and also have to sign up to get a rewards card. When visiting a property you also have people with clipboards following you around and taking notes which they pass to people with clipboards at other properties.
From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:
It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]
As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.
Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.
Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.
> How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?
The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy.
EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on benefit for the user (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet is that which comes from focusing on making money. Now, focusing on utility does not preclude commerce - in fact, the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange for something of value. Focus on value provided includes figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast, focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from making things good, as fraud and abuse have much better ROI.
From the context, I assume it is a pun on hinterland as borrowed into English. Here, it is mostly synonymous with backwoods. The hinterland may sound more literary than folksy, or may emphasize an unexplored or less navigable zone rather than merely natural or undeveloped.
I wonder what the original blogger really meant by it. The discussion here seems to be focusing on either an axis of academic vs commercial or high culture vs pop culture, or maybe conflating the two. This isn't really about the level of development nor navigability but some other more abstract quality or purpose.
The developed land could hold a grand cathedral, a brutalist housing block, or a luxurious department store. The hinterland could have a frontier mission, a rustic cabin, or a trading post.
think of it from a subjective experience of somebody who was "from the internet" in the early 2000s (because that's when Danny coined the term):
mIRC made irc easy, jabber was already a thing, you're have a bunch of bookmarks (in non-monetized, non-ad supported online services) to high quality content, you're posting on forums, you get your news from blogs of intelligent people, etc. etc. the internet you're interacting with is great!
alas you have technologically unsophisticated users joining in and what they are experiencing is "hinternet": banners everywhere (we had adblockers), spam all the time (we had spamassassin, and our host Paul graham just invented naive bayesian spam filtering, which at least early on worked spectacularly), phishing and trickery (the computer told me to put my credit card, or similar). it's a miserable broken experience, that potentially results in your information or money being stolen, and all kinds of other indignities.
I'm saying that modern internet is more like a hinternet of old than it is anything else, but we are all forced do t use it.
It’s basically what computer illiterates (which is growing, not declining because of mobile use) endure on windows desktop computers. At some time they’ve clicked the wrong link, managed to install a toolbar in their browser - and slowly it’s been infested with random dark patterns. I see it fairly frequently when relatives call me about computer issues.
You’re lucky if it works with an iPad and that it doesn’t make you sign your life away to Verizon or T-Mobile the ur-Carrier (sic).
I alway get voted down when I use words like “phonish” or “phonishness” but I feel that smartphones made life worse not better and made people serve computers than the other way around. Here’s to the next platform.
This is an interesting thing. Honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad or easy phishing thing. Like obv in your junk mail but thats literally the extent of my exposure to it, everything else is curated and "good" or probably aligns with your concept of the priveleged netizens/areas even though Im poor as hell. Knowledge wise I suppose I rich so there's that but there's also seems like a tradgedy of the commons type situation that depends on all the tech-illiterates to be the meat shields for advertising and paying for things like YouTube
This is the difference between building a website as an experiment for an untested audience and running a modern business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-responsive text content isn't worth much.
Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc.
You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns.
HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube.
Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months".
There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.
I'm curious about this type of response. it sort of implies that I don't know why things have changed the way they did. the causality is implicitly in the original also. we have a lot of mobile first websites, because most people use phones to access internet. and all the bad things happen on the internet have reasons behind them like that, because it's an emergent dynamic process. emails are to be collected, for they are a valuable tool in sales pipeline. things buzz and blink because it's easy to hack human attention system, which is also why casinos do it. but that's kind of, like, not what the comment is about.
The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen."
It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).
login.gov is the government's (quite fantastic) auth flow - id.me is a private one that the IRS contracted. I wish there were a rule that all online government services needed to use login.gov, but alas it's optional.
it's quite cyberpunk, in a dystopian sense, I don't think most people realize. it can of course be framed as benign and I'm sure there are protective policies in place. but you know, if you take a sweeping look from a distance, the fact that the login system for government website, which every single citizen might at any point be forced to interact with, has a profile option (enabled by default) to "receive emails featuring ID.me offers and discounts" seems quite insane to me.
> forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all
Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an opportunity to bash Apple?
Apparently most of HN is not aware that multiple Android manufacturers implemented hardware destruction features when a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?
I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing.
dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.
Over the years it's become clear to me that frontend is probably the hardest part of the stack. People think they can just shit out some bootstrap react app and it's perfect, but being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard. You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the supportive web apis. A good frontend engineer is incredibly rare, even at big tech. What's even more rare is a UX designer that also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.
Thanks for saying so. I was a front-end developer for many years, and felt both the difficulty and the persistent lack of appreciation for that difficulty. I ended up quitting and just becoming a designer, because if I'm not going to get any respect, at least I shouldn't have to keep running on the treadmill of new technologies. I have also done back-end development, and it is certainly difficult in its own way, but for the money I'd rather work on that than the front end.
Having done all three, I have a mental model with two axes: appreciation and meddling. It might be appropriate to sketch it here.
With design, the result of your work ends up being visual, so you get a lot of appreciation for it. Maybe too much, sometimes. On the other hand, everyone has an opinion about how you could do your job better, and they're happy to stick their fingers into your work (because it's so easy, you know?).
With back-end development, nobody is going to meddle in your work except other engineers: by meddle, I mean step in and tell you how to do it better. That's because they don't know what you do at all. The other side of that opaqueness, though, is that you rarely get credit for good work. Stuff just works the way it should.
Front-end development is in between the two. People will give you credit when things work the way they should, and when they look nice, and so on. But, half the time when an application is "snappy" and performant, they'll credit the designer for it (ha ha). At the same time, they'll also tell you how things "should" work, based on how other applications do it. Meanwhile, you're stuck between what the designer approved, and what the back-end supports, and you're just doing your best to make it all work.
You've outlined it so well! "you're stuck between... and you're just doing your best to make it all work."
Couple that with the fact that the whole front-end world has gone completely bonkers, reinventing the wheel so many times in the last 10 years I'm surprised my head hasn't separated from my body.
It's funny that things have come full-circle these days, going back to server-rendered views. My career literally witnessed the entire move from HTML -> SPA -> HTML again. It only took roughly 16 years.
I like the mental model and I have often witnessed the meddling you mentioned.
My favorite kind of meddling:
The current state of a software product is presented to C-Level. After listening (usually) for a few minutes one of the most senior people in the room starts expressing a strong opinion about how a certain color should be changed.
Now the color scheme discussion starts. The complexity of enabling an interaction of a user with the software through the interface is not discussed at all.
At least changing a color usually doesn't harm the usability too much.
Not only are good frontend engineers rare, but I've also noticed that it seems to be common for the best ones to migrate out of frontend work. They get tired of spending all day fighting with colleagues who have coding skills but not design acumen, and the same traits that make them a good frontend engineer also make it very easy to transition to a role that comes with a less psychologically costly work environment.
Personally, I love front end work. I love the crazy challenges and weird constraints. I love seeing a UI — something that a human interacts with — at the end of the process. Server side work can be interesting for a little while, but if I don’t see the results in the UI, it feels hollow.
Strangely, even though I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’ve never been better at it, in today’s bullshit interviewing environment, I can’t get a job because I can’t solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes. And so I’m sitting on the sidelines right now. It’s the most bizarre experience of my career.
Front end is how I got started programming, both as a hobby and professionally. It has a certain tangible quality to it that makes it both approachable and satisfying, but that often gets misconstrued as "easy". It's not easy!
I spent several years doing mostly-FE work and all the bikeshedding and meddling and "just make it do X why is it so hard?" burned that appreciation right out of me. It's also the first thing to get blamed for every bug and error, because it's what you see and interact with, which is just exhausting.
I took the technical skills I learned and transitioned to mostly backend where there's more "trust" (i.e., I don't understand what you do so I'll just let you do it) and autonomy. A small part of me misses the visually demonstrable part of front end, but the work culture around it I don't miss one iota.
Yeah I moved out of frontend work for the backend. Backend work is a series of black boxes. You can make a million mistakes and it won't necessarily be an issue. With the frontend your work is exposed for everyone to see and critique. Not only that, but it's very hard to actually compartmentalize changes. A component that looks fine in isolation might be completely out of place in a larger peice. I frequently found myself near panicking that I didn't mess something up before launch because it was nearly impossible to handle all cases that we cared about through tests. Of course we would hire people to run through the site once before launch. But what about after we fix all the bugs? Did we introduce new ones after fixing the old? Are all of our translations stoll appropriate? Where they ever?
While I don't do frontend work, I still push UX and management to minimize the surface area and complexity of the frontend. Keep to simple html elements, flowing top to bottom with minimal css, etc.
That, and you have to spend so much time justifying your value. Most people can appreciate when things look nice. However the bar is usually pretty low, set to above “barely working” in most cases. That, coupled with the things you mentioned above, makes the field difficult.
UI, in my mind, has always been the hardest part of the stack. It is even more true today. A front-end dev must:
- Deal with a subjective human (not an objective machine)
- Deal with designers and product managers
- Be constrained by the back-end engineer and infrastructure
- Make it work on multiple devices and browsers
- Use the framework someone else chose
- Not break anything
I don't mean to minimize the effort of FE as I agree it is under-appreciated. But if the BE folks don't work closely with PMs and designers then you're already fucked and no amount of FE lipstick will make up for it.
At a previous job I did (not tech related) I had to use some internal web app, and that thing was absolutely full of these mistakes, everything has padding, the text has padding, the box around the text has padding, the table row cotaining that box has even more padding.
This led to an app that could fit like 4 table rows on a standard 1080p display, and every row of that table had very little actual info
On top of that, for some ungodly reason text size was defined by view width, and on some of the old 4:3 displays that were there, it was damn near unusable
I agree wholeheartedly that frontend work is very, very complex (and has only gotten more so in recent years), but I disagree it's the hardest part of the stack simply because you typically don't have to worry about scale.
Imagine a system processing billions of records per day/week/month, dealing with data caching, data warehousing, providing realtime notifications to users and external systems, managing queue workloads, handling inbound requests from various APIs, syncing data between backend systems, running multiple data stores and scaling across multiple regions, redundancy, and handling incidents that arise on the backend. This is typical for complex web software.
A frontend system that provides the interface to that backend system will usually not have issues arise in the middle of the night due to the automated processes happening on the backend, will not have to worry about how many users are using the system nor how much underlying data there is.
No matter how difficult it is to do the initial development of the frontend (or to keep that code updated when browsers change), at the end of the day once the development is done it's static code interfacing with a much more complex underlying system that requires constant attention as underlying data and business requirements evolve.
The frontend isn't done after the initial work. Requirements frequently change and update as management gets new ideas. Additionally, the frontend isn't spared from the concerns of scaling. You'll often be tasked with demands to decrease load from clients to help the backend keep up, which will involve lots of clever caching and tricks like debouncing. Finally, scaling on the backend isn't nearly as hard these days given all of the existing tech you can leverage like k8s and the cloud. Modern tech has only made the frontend harder as requirements have increased.
Let's see a show of hands: Who among us have had to worry about scale?
Last place I worked that struggled with "scale" tried All The Things except one: simplification. It was like being a little kid in a royal court filled with naked people complimenting each other's fashion choices.
I think UI's are an inherently hard problem and HTML/CSS/JS are the completely wrong tools for the job. Every time I'm doing front end webdev it feels like I'm trying to hammer square blocks into round holes.
> What's even more rare is a UX designer that also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.
Tell me about it. I've been struggling for years to get our designers to think of their designs as more than pixels on a screen. I'm really tired of having to be the accessibility police, or explain that small viewports and mobile devices aren't synonymous for the nth time.
Generally speaking, interfacing with users is the hardest part of almost any program. Even when writing simple CLI tools, 80-90% of the code is often UI-related, even though it barely qualifies as an 'interface'. Flags, documentation, sanitization, reasonable error messages, type-checking and sanity-checking the inputs...and then, generally, a handful of lines of actual, useful code.
Thanks for this, my peers thought I was insane to move in the front end about 10 years ago (after having been in the industry for 10 years already).
But it’s so important for SaaS type companies to do this correctly, I felt like I was treading water and stagnant with "backend code" that was mostly just piping the db data to the UI.
Frontend is complex. That's also why some people think the tech stack is "overly complicated". Deploying rich interactive user interfaces with the push of a button to the entire world is a marvel, why would people expect that to be easy anyway?
Yeah, but none of that's the hard part, the deploy to the entire world is the easy part. The hard part is that the entire UI system is designed around the premise of formatting XML based documents with modifier tags, even though that premise is completely wrong for most systems.
User interface developers have always been less numerous and undervalued.
Back in the day, Mitch Kapor (Lotus 1-2-3) was widely panned for claiming design is a skill set separate from programming, and should be valued equally.
Not much has changed since.
> frontend is probably the hardest part of the stack
Again, this has always been true. Especially in terms of fit & finish. It's really no comparison. And it gets harder over time.
The real bummer with UI work is when you nail it, almost no one will notice.
> You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the supportive web apis.
And this is just for working in the browser. Once you your product is big enough you just know there will be requests for a native app on mobile. Oh but also the mobile version of the website needs to keep working. So now you're adding in requirements of learning Swift, Java, and the platform specific UI frameworks/SDKs.
Yeah, agreed. Somehow CSS and a very general concern for UX have become my most valuable skills as a developer. I think the title of the article isn't correct. It should be "The Negative Impact of Responsive Design by People Who Aren't Good At It."
I'm mostly a backend engineer, but I occasionally have to make UIs. It's not only that it's the hardest part of the stack (I agree with that, but it can also be an interesting challenge), it's also that it's the part of the stack where everyone and his dog think they have a say. It's infuriating really.
I use flexbox exclusively. My personal opinion is that if you're using media queries for anything other than "screen" vs "print" you're absolutely doing it wrong, in particular, media queries for screen size are a red flag.
To me, the trick to using flexbox effectively is to use it to create fully reactive layouts the way that Gtk or Qt would design them. I create flexbox interfaces in terms of "VBox" and "HBox" containers, I use flex-grow to handle the concept of "box packing."
Once I started seeing it through this lens, and when CSS finally added calc() and other functions writing good and consistent frontend UIs that mimic precisely how almost all other desktop software behaves became incredibly simple.
The only real complaint I have is that after I have a finished product, going back and making changes is harder than what other techniques might afford, thankfully HTML added <template> and by incorporating that liberally into my designs I've regained some of the original careless flexibility I had before it.
There are nice technical solutions. Media queries + flex + grid (when you need it) give you all the tools you need. There's just a lot of ways to do it wrong.
I know we all generally just do what the boss tells us but:
> being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard
Why do we keep doing this? If you get rid of the animations, popups, and invasive ads, then with what's left you can probably do away with all of this crap.
Honestly that’s the reason I stayed in backend work. Frontend seemed to be too much like the English language- more exceptions than rules, only changing nearly constantly.
I’m grateful to those who have the patience and skill for it.
The problem sadly isn't even mobile-first vs. desktop, but rather designers who still haven't figured out that the web is dynamic content that should be allowed to flow according to the user's display device size and shape. It's not and never has been a static medium like paper. It's not limited to a specific size and shape like paper, and should not be treated as if it were. Web "designers" should not be trying to force the content into any specific size or pixel resolution, as there's just too many different resolutions of screens and width vs. height layouts of those screens to ever be able to cover them all appropriately without adapting to the idea that the content must be able to flow accordingly. It also severely harms accessibility for folks with vision issues who might scale up their fonts to compensate if doing so causes the content to break in horrible ways that make it unreadable.
Yeah, it's not really "easy to say stuff like this" because everyone who thinks they know better than actual real honest-to-goodness web designers will instantly want to argue with you to the bitter end why their fantasy web design has to be 100% "pixel perfect" layout exactly as they envision it on every single device or browser ever invented. It's a huge part of why I'm no longer a web designer. More of my time was wasted fixing literal one pixel differences in layout between browsers (and browser versions) than almost any other part of the process.
But that is the job. The job of developing on the web is developing for a platform where you do not know the size or format of the display or what the inputs are in advance.
The job of a UX designer on the web is to consider this kind of stuff and to build a design that's very reactive to evolving displays within the demographics and market segments that the client wants to support. If that's not happening, if the CSS people are just getting handed static designs and being told to figure it out -- the problem is not CSS or the developers, it's that the designers building those designs are not good at their jobs. And there are ways to make this easier: notably UX designers involving the CSS department in the design phase, and/or making a point to always lay out the contents of the page without styling in a hierarchical way before making decisions about how to present that content.
But a lot of programming is hard. It's hard for me to write maintainable Javascript that doesn't fall apart if a project goes over 100,000 lines of code. It's hard to document methods. It's hard for me to write code that does complicated things that can work on low-end machines. These are skills that programmers get better at over time with practice. Responsive design is the same; it's just another skill to learn.
Imagine trying to shoot a movie and having the cinematographer tell you that it's hard to frame everyone in the shot since they don't know exactly where the viewer will be looking, or the sound mixer telling you it's hard to balance dialog and sound effects so everyone is audible without it being noticeable that they're muting background audio. Or a recorder telling you that it's hard to master a pop song given that everyone has different speakers and sound profiles on their headphones. Imagine you're building a car and the designer tells you that it's hard to make sure the controls can be reached by people who are different heights and weights.
On one hand, yes it is; all of that stuff is very hard. On the other hand, yes, that is also the reason web UX designers and developers get paid money; because the job is hard and requires training and expertise, and designing a website interface requires more thought and intentionality and planning than is required to make a PDF.
It's literally 120 characters to make a website that flows on any (reasonable) screensize and adapts perfectly.
Modern webdev is just throwing frameworks at self-caused problems.
(I'm exagerrating of course. But most websites are just about showing text, maybe with some images every now and then (news sites, reddit, hackernews, google, come to mind). For those websites this is certainly true).
Some designers can use Figma's equivalent of grid and flexbox and some can't. What's hard is implementing all the shades of gray between two pixel-perfect designs because the designer didn't do this basic work.
>It's not and never has been a static medium like paper. It's not limited to a specific size and shape like paper, and should not be treated as if it were.
I often get "print first" page layouts, created from dynamic data that can have varying amounts of content. These pages also have to work in mobile and desktop browsers and look good on all of them. I don't find it to be that difficult. Sure it takes a little longer, but it's what the job requires. Media queries make it all possible, as well as a little bit of javascript.
I work with agencies coming from print and oh boy, don’t get me started.
At the same time it’s a freaking mess even for someone who’s been doing this for a long time.
My go to strategy is now to address concerns as much as possible by being involved in the design phase, as I have a design background, then implement and ship and then always have a “tell me everything that’s broken in obscure viewports only 1% of people use” and fix those live with CSS patches and viewport specific media queries during review phase or even live.
Designing good UI for such a varied platform as "the web frontend" is incredibly challenging. They might be at 300px wide, they might be at 1920px wide, they might have a mouse, or they might be using all touch. Or both. Or neither.
The designers probably know that, but it costs money to design for 2 platforms. So they pick the 2 biggest platforms for non-hackers... Android and iOS...
You're not designing for two (or more) platforms at all. You're designing for one platform. The Web. It's built on some pretty well defined standards that a ton of folks seem hellbent on breaking to force the web into a shape that it simply isn't.
I get why they are used on mobile. If you only have room for content, it makes sense to tuck actions away into a hamburger menu except for a small number that you assign to tiny little hieroglyphs. Fine. However, if you have space, this is a terrible way to use it. At best it adds steps, at worst it invites experimentation and disaster to figure out what the heiroglyphs do (which wouldn't be so bad if undo worked but we've apparently decided undo is fine to break too). Like the Apple HIGs used to say, on Desktop you should want to get the most common actions out of menus and onto labeled buttons so that users can answer "what can I do?" without playing hide and seek. Undo should be baked in from the very start (it's hard to retrofit) to reduce the consequences of experimentation.
Unfortunately mobile design has taken over so completely that even on apps which will be used almost entirely on desktop, even on apps with an internal advocate for Desktop design, UI designers go for the hamburgers and heiroglyphs and broken undo because it's standard these days. Sigh.
Oh, and modals are back with a vengeance, but I need to stop here or my blood pressure is going to get unhealthy.
I don't think there's any excuse for hieroglyphs. Even a low-end 5 year old phone like the moto e4 has a 1280x720 display; there's plenty of pixels available to label the icons. Hieroglyphs are a "we hate our users and want them to know it" first design.
Hamburger menus could also frequently be done away with when you look at how many options they have. Like Gmail's app has them when it could fit the icons across the screen as a bar. And it's hard to argue that real estate was important since they put in a bottom bar for chat, video, and spaces whatever that is.
Pixel density isn't the problem, physical size is. Phone screens are small and many people have poor vision. Some even scale up the contents of their browser 25% or 50% or even 100%.
The more text you have, the more difficult it is to ensure a usable UI on small screens, let alone a good one. Don't be upset about the use of symbols instead of text, but about the use of bad symbols. Nobody needs the "play" button on a video widget to say "play" - they know what the right-facing triangle means. (Ironic because I don't know if it makes geometric sense to even say the triangle has a facing, but as a symbol it's well understood.)
> Hamburger menus could also frequently be done away with when you look at how many options they have. Like Gmail's app has them when it could fit the icons across the screen as a bar.
Just cracked open Gmail to check this. In the hamburger side menu, there's 18 items not even counting labels. No shot you fit this across the screen as a bar.
I like having greater content area by default, and the text next to an icon in the Gmail Android app is nice too. (The spam button, with its explanation mark, could easily be mistaken for an important button otherwise.)
It's one of the reasons I prefer how Vim and VS Code look over Intellij and Visual Studio standard. Let me better see what I'm focusing on without distractions (the content) instead of shoving a gazillion buttons on your UI in the default view.
Edit: I was too harsh about Intellij I think. The old UI I was thinking of doesn't look bad in my opinion, but I still think I would have enjoyed my experience with Visual Studio more if it had a stronger focus on content (the code) visually.
I deal with some legacy web apps and ticketing system at work. They could use a hamburger menu or two. 10 buttons, 15 tabs, and a million inputs most people don’t use.
I built the nav bar at the top of my website[0] to be scrollable if the content doesn’t fit horizontally. I’m slightly concerned about users not realizing there are more options to scroll over, but I prefer it to a hamburger menu that has to open and cover the content since you can see every option and read the corresponding word. No need for any of that when visiting on a desktop however.
I agree hieroglyphs make discovery difficult. But I believe designers like them because they allow for consistent design across different languages. E.g. accommodating for German localisation can be difficult.
Yep. Real localisation is too expensive, English-labelled buttons will get you shouted at for being noninclusive (even though, speaking as an immigrant, a labelled button that I can translate with a browser plugin is much nicer than an inscrutable icon), so everyone is in this pit of awfulness.
Hieroglyphs sums it up so nicely. Lol. I'll also add hidden, context sensitive options to that list. I like having options that are disabled (aka greyed out) if they're unusable because at least I can see there's a possibility to do something if I get conditions right. Instead, modern designs will hide those options and, if you don't know the magic conditions needed to expose them, you'll never see them.
An example of this is Ubiquiti with their Unifi stuff. If you go to manage switch ports, the page they give for that doesn't have an option to "Select All" ports. You need to select at least one port first, and then the "Select All" option magically appears. So not only is it hidden, it gets the context wrong. Think of having it as a disabled checkbox. Everyone would immediately realize the context is wrong because having the "Select All" checkbox disabled when no ports are selected would be obviously dumb.
I think the biggest opponent to what you're advocating are new users, they are so easily intimidated by too many things on the screen. These are the people that dominate focus groups and so designers seem to have wrapped themselves around the axle over this one (terrible) rule.
This study doesn't make any practical sense. These pages weren't designed to convey the maximal amount of information in the least amount of space, they were designed to sell a product. It's impossible to claim if these designs have a negative impact due to content dispersion or not unless you are measuring them against the purpose they were designed for.
They explicitly studied ecommerce/product pages here. The relevant metrics are which page had a higher perceived product value? Which page had a higher conversion ratio? Which page resulted in a higher NPS? Which page created a more positive brand affinity?
You don't sell portable speakers using specs, you sell it with aspirational images of it being used on a beach. Of course expanding an accordion of product details then asking "On a scale from 1-7, How well do you feel you understood the offering communicated on the page?" results in a higher survey score. If you said the more dense page converted better, then I would be surprised.
It's like designing a study on the negative impact of hard F1 race car seats, adding a bunch of foam, testing which is more comfortable, then proclaiming one is better than the other because it was rated more comfortable, when the only metric they were designed for is lap time.
Thank you for saying this, was wondering this all along while reading the article.
They compared the information density of, what is essentially a marketing flyer or a billboard and then stated that it doesn’t convey everything: well that’s the point, an ad is meant to invoke the desire for a product in its viewer, instead of being a spec sheet.
Many websites will completely alter their UI based on resizing your window. Sometimes I want to set a browser to take up half of a monitor so that I can put something else next to it. This often fails on modern websites because the UI becomes unusable after the window is resized
This is the "responsive" part of "responsive design". When done well, it's great, but you're right that many websites are way too aggressive about it, as if they only really tested two size classes.
For some websites, once you reach a certain width in pixels, the designers assumed you are using a tablet or cellphone instead of a desktop, so they give you the pared down mobile website whether you want it or not.
Yes! I hate websites that put useful content in a thin column in the center.
What's worse, formerly normal websites start degrading. Typically, when a new manager is hired and decides to "reimagine" the product with the "mobile-first" vision. The recent Patreon is a good example.
And of course, in some cases normal websites go away entirely, and are replaced with crapps: Venmo, Amazon Alexa, Chamberlain, etc.
The thing that I truly find awkward is no nice touch equivalent to hover.
It's such a useful piece of the UX to have thrown away in the move to mobile first.
Other than that I probably fall in the "it's not that hard" camp. Of all the problems you have to solve, getting it to look reasonable on a few different screen sizes is pretty far down the list in terms of time and complexity.
Long press is already an engrained mobile OS behavior (begin text selection). And it doesn't solve the problem because the hover state is largely non-visible beneath the user's finger.
Readit News
Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.
There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.
From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.
On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the military and government - as rightful founders.
On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers and grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers in the new world.
The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a "woke" narrative.
But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the actual real people.
The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between 1997 and about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing money and power moved into the internet, along with a handful of rugged "entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around here).
The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and Charibdes, and now they are corralled into ranches, all lovingly watched over...
The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we have not solved many (indeed any) of the classical problems of freeloaders, tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I think "Web 3.0 and blockchain web" is dead (?)
A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is once again public, high-quality and large might be looking more closely at the history/narrative of the internet and who the real stakeholders are.
That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking.
There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be. They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage, bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they love dearly of course).
No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor! The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art, and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the masses want at all. Not even remotely close.
They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can insult people without getting punched in the face, and they can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub, and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired at/from Gaza in another thread.
The peoples Internet is already here.
Who exactly is this prerogative "freeloader" you throw around so casually? Is there some service or good denied others involved?
but to your "people's internet" point, the real communism has clearly never been tried! it's not the people that want TikTok, it's the power structure. left to their own devices they built cathedrals!
The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I look at it.
How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?
Current internet (hinternet?) is like walking through the same town but now there are fences around everything and posts with security cameras at every property boundary. When visiting a property now you are required to show your face and maybe ID, and also have to sign up to get a rewards card. When visiting a property you also have people with clipboards following you around and taking notes which they pass to people with clipboards at other properties.
It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]
As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.
Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.
Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.
1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/
2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb
X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html
The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy.
EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on benefit for the user (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet is that which comes from focusing on making money. Now, focusing on utility does not preclude commerce - in fact, the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange for something of value. Focus on value provided includes figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast, focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from making things good, as fraud and abuse have much better ROI.
I wonder what the original blogger really meant by it. The discussion here seems to be focusing on either an axis of academic vs commercial or high culture vs pop culture, or maybe conflating the two. This isn't really about the level of development nor navigability but some other more abstract quality or purpose.
The developed land could hold a grand cathedral, a brutalist housing block, or a luxurious department store. The hinterland could have a frontier mission, a rustic cabin, or a trading post.
That wasn't at all the internet I had in the 90s. I know that part of it existed, but there were really great parts, too.
mIRC made irc easy, jabber was already a thing, you're have a bunch of bookmarks (in non-monetized, non-ad supported online services) to high quality content, you're posting on forums, you get your news from blogs of intelligent people, etc. etc. the internet you're interacting with is great!
alas you have technologically unsophisticated users joining in and what they are experiencing is "hinternet": banners everywhere (we had adblockers), spam all the time (we had spamassassin, and our host Paul graham just invented naive bayesian spam filtering, which at least early on worked spectacularly), phishing and trickery (the computer told me to put my credit card, or similar). it's a miserable broken experience, that potentially results in your information or money being stolen, and all kinds of other indignities.
I'm saying that modern internet is more like a hinternet of old than it is anything else, but we are all forced do t use it.
I alway get voted down when I use words like “phonish” or “phonishness” but I feel that smartphones made life worse not better and made people serve computers than the other way around. Here’s to the next platform.
Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc.
You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns.
HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube.
Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months".
There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.
Mastodon comes to mind, whose openness allows me to browse it from emacs with mastodon.el.
Removing full or even useful content from both RSS and notification emails comes to mind as well.
(It was both strangely broken in my WP database, and also I think my website was down when OP write this. Sorry!)
Wow, I just assumed it was some kind of auth flow the government runs themselves and never did any research
It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).
Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an opportunity to bash Apple?
Apparently most of HN is not aware that multiple Android manufacturers implemented hardware destruction features when a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?
dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.
Dead Comment
Having done all three, I have a mental model with two axes: appreciation and meddling. It might be appropriate to sketch it here.
With design, the result of your work ends up being visual, so you get a lot of appreciation for it. Maybe too much, sometimes. On the other hand, everyone has an opinion about how you could do your job better, and they're happy to stick their fingers into your work (because it's so easy, you know?).
With back-end development, nobody is going to meddle in your work except other engineers: by meddle, I mean step in and tell you how to do it better. That's because they don't know what you do at all. The other side of that opaqueness, though, is that you rarely get credit for good work. Stuff just works the way it should.
Front-end development is in between the two. People will give you credit when things work the way they should, and when they look nice, and so on. But, half the time when an application is "snappy" and performant, they'll credit the designer for it (ha ha). At the same time, they'll also tell you how things "should" work, based on how other applications do it. Meanwhile, you're stuck between what the designer approved, and what the back-end supports, and you're just doing your best to make it all work.
Couple that with the fact that the whole front-end world has gone completely bonkers, reinventing the wheel so many times in the last 10 years I'm surprised my head hasn't separated from my body.
It's funny that things have come full-circle these days, going back to server-rendered views. My career literally witnessed the entire move from HTML -> SPA -> HTML again. It only took roughly 16 years.
Strangely, even though I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’ve never been better at it, in today’s bullshit interviewing environment, I can’t get a job because I can’t solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes. And so I’m sitting on the sidelines right now. It’s the most bizarre experience of my career.
Front end is how I got started programming, both as a hobby and professionally. It has a certain tangible quality to it that makes it both approachable and satisfying, but that often gets misconstrued as "easy". It's not easy!
I spent several years doing mostly-FE work and all the bikeshedding and meddling and "just make it do X why is it so hard?" burned that appreciation right out of me. It's also the first thing to get blamed for every bug and error, because it's what you see and interact with, which is just exhausting.
I took the technical skills I learned and transitioned to mostly backend where there's more "trust" (i.e., I don't understand what you do so I'll just let you do it) and autonomy. A small part of me misses the visually demonstrable part of front end, but the work culture around it I don't miss one iota.
While I don't do frontend work, I still push UX and management to minimize the surface area and complexity of the frontend. Keep to simple html elements, flowing top to bottom with minimal css, etc.
1. I'm the only FE dev, with a strict separation between BE and FE work (and a BE team that's happy with this arrangement).
2. I'm given the keys to the castles in terms of technology and architecture for the FE.
This lets me maximize time spent understanding our product, our users, and iterating with PM/Design.
Kudos to all front-end devs out there!
This led to an app that could fit like 4 table rows on a standard 1080p display, and every row of that table had very little actual info
On top of that, for some ungodly reason text size was defined by view width, and on some of the old 4:3 displays that were there, it was damn near unusable
Imagine a system processing billions of records per day/week/month, dealing with data caching, data warehousing, providing realtime notifications to users and external systems, managing queue workloads, handling inbound requests from various APIs, syncing data between backend systems, running multiple data stores and scaling across multiple regions, redundancy, and handling incidents that arise on the backend. This is typical for complex web software.
A frontend system that provides the interface to that backend system will usually not have issues arise in the middle of the night due to the automated processes happening on the backend, will not have to worry about how many users are using the system nor how much underlying data there is.
No matter how difficult it is to do the initial development of the frontend (or to keep that code updated when browsers change), at the end of the day once the development is done it's static code interfacing with a much more complex underlying system that requires constant attention as underlying data and business requirements evolve.
Last place I worked that struggled with "scale" tried All The Things except one: simplification. It was like being a little kid in a royal court filled with naked people complimenting each other's fashion choices.
Tell me about it. I've been struggling for years to get our designers to think of their designs as more than pixels on a screen. I'm really tired of having to be the accessibility police, or explain that small viewports and mobile devices aren't synonymous for the nth time.
But it’s so important for SaaS type companies to do this correctly, I felt like I was treading water and stagnant with "backend code" that was mostly just piping the db data to the UI.
Back in the day, Mitch Kapor (Lotus 1-2-3) was widely panned for claiming design is a skill set separate from programming, and should be valued equally.
Not much has changed since.
> frontend is probably the hardest part of the stack
Again, this has always been true. Especially in terms of fit & finish. It's really no comparison. And it gets harder over time.
The real bummer with UI work is when you nail it, almost no one will notice.
And this is just for working in the browser. Once you your product is big enough you just know there will be requests for a native app on mobile. Oh but also the mobile version of the website needs to keep working. So now you're adding in requirements of learning Swift, Java, and the platform specific UI frameworks/SDKs.
I learned how hard frontend is when developing a browser-based game.
The backend code was simple and easy to test with unit tests.
Frontend though is a slog to write, and even greater slog to test.
I wonder how much better frontend would be if JavaScript wasn't the chosen language. It's just such a bad language in so many ways.
Has flex+grid eased the situation somewhat? With media + container queries?
If not, why not? Are these models too complex or the browsers still are buggy/inconsistent in their implementation of these layout algorithms?
To me, the trick to using flexbox effectively is to use it to create fully reactive layouts the way that Gtk or Qt would design them. I create flexbox interfaces in terms of "VBox" and "HBox" containers, I use flex-grow to handle the concept of "box packing."
Once I started seeing it through this lens, and when CSS finally added calc() and other functions writing good and consistent frontend UIs that mimic precisely how almost all other desktop software behaves became incredibly simple.
The only real complaint I have is that after I have a finished product, going back and making changes is harder than what other techniques might afford, thankfully HTML added <template> and by incorporating that liberally into my designs I've regained some of the original careless flexibility I had before it.
> being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard
Why do we keep doing this? If you get rid of the animations, popups, and invasive ads, then with what's left you can probably do away with all of this crap.
I’m grateful to those who have the patience and skill for it.
The job of a UX designer on the web is to consider this kind of stuff and to build a design that's very reactive to evolving displays within the demographics and market segments that the client wants to support. If that's not happening, if the CSS people are just getting handed static designs and being told to figure it out -- the problem is not CSS or the developers, it's that the designers building those designs are not good at their jobs. And there are ways to make this easier: notably UX designers involving the CSS department in the design phase, and/or making a point to always lay out the contents of the page without styling in a hierarchical way before making decisions about how to present that content.
But a lot of programming is hard. It's hard for me to write maintainable Javascript that doesn't fall apart if a project goes over 100,000 lines of code. It's hard to document methods. It's hard for me to write code that does complicated things that can work on low-end machines. These are skills that programmers get better at over time with practice. Responsive design is the same; it's just another skill to learn.
Imagine trying to shoot a movie and having the cinematographer tell you that it's hard to frame everyone in the shot since they don't know exactly where the viewer will be looking, or the sound mixer telling you it's hard to balance dialog and sound effects so everyone is audible without it being noticeable that they're muting background audio. Or a recorder telling you that it's hard to master a pop song given that everyone has different speakers and sound profiles on their headphones. Imagine you're building a car and the designer tells you that it's hard to make sure the controls can be reached by people who are different heights and weights.
On one hand, yes it is; all of that stuff is very hard. On the other hand, yes, that is also the reason web UX designers and developers get paid money; because the job is hard and requires training and expertise, and designing a website interface requires more thought and intentionality and planning than is required to make a PDF.
Here you go:
main { display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex-wrap: wrap; }
..and set reasonable width/margin constraints on your primary content blocks.
Linear, scrollable flow on small/vertical displays, and a denser "grid" on large/horizontal displays.
It's literally 120 characters to make a website that flows on any (reasonable) screensize and adapts perfectly.
Modern webdev is just throwing frameworks at self-caused problems.
(I'm exagerrating of course. But most websites are just about showing text, maybe with some images every now and then (news sites, reddit, hackernews, google, come to mind). For those websites this is certainly true).
I often get "print first" page layouts, created from dynamic data that can have varying amounts of content. These pages also have to work in mobile and desktop browsers and look good on all of them. I don't find it to be that difficult. Sure it takes a little longer, but it's what the job requires. Media queries make it all possible, as well as a little bit of javascript.
I can't imagine you are talking about the same thing here. (Or if you are, then you are making OP's point.)
I get why they are used on mobile. If you only have room for content, it makes sense to tuck actions away into a hamburger menu except for a small number that you assign to tiny little hieroglyphs. Fine. However, if you have space, this is a terrible way to use it. At best it adds steps, at worst it invites experimentation and disaster to figure out what the heiroglyphs do (which wouldn't be so bad if undo worked but we've apparently decided undo is fine to break too). Like the Apple HIGs used to say, on Desktop you should want to get the most common actions out of menus and onto labeled buttons so that users can answer "what can I do?" without playing hide and seek. Undo should be baked in from the very start (it's hard to retrofit) to reduce the consequences of experimentation.
Unfortunately mobile design has taken over so completely that even on apps which will be used almost entirely on desktop, even on apps with an internal advocate for Desktop design, UI designers go for the hamburgers and heiroglyphs and broken undo because it's standard these days. Sigh.
Oh, and modals are back with a vengeance, but I need to stop here or my blood pressure is going to get unhealthy.
Hamburger menus could also frequently be done away with when you look at how many options they have. Like Gmail's app has them when it could fit the icons across the screen as a bar. And it's hard to argue that real estate was important since they put in a bottom bar for chat, video, and spaces whatever that is.
The more text you have, the more difficult it is to ensure a usable UI on small screens, let alone a good one. Don't be upset about the use of symbols instead of text, but about the use of bad symbols. Nobody needs the "play" button on a video widget to say "play" - they know what the right-facing triangle means. (Ironic because I don't know if it makes geometric sense to even say the triangle has a facing, but as a symbol it's well understood.)
Just cracked open Gmail to check this. In the hamburger side menu, there's 18 items not even counting labels. No shot you fit this across the screen as a bar.
screen resolution vs browser resolution
the most common mobile browser resolution is 800x360
also, 5 years is not that old
It's one of the reasons I prefer how Vim and VS Code look over Intellij and Visual Studio standard. Let me better see what I'm focusing on without distractions (the content) instead of shoving a gazillion buttons on your UI in the default view.
Edit: I was too harsh about Intellij I think. The old UI I was thinking of doesn't look bad in my opinion, but I still think I would have enjoyed my experience with Visual Studio more if it had a stronger focus on content (the code) visually.
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On the other hand, hamburger menus typically have a lot more entries than this, enough that a horizontal menu wouldn't look good even on desktop.
Hieroglyphs sums it up so nicely. Lol. I'll also add hidden, context sensitive options to that list. I like having options that are disabled (aka greyed out) if they're unusable because at least I can see there's a possibility to do something if I get conditions right. Instead, modern designs will hide those options and, if you don't know the magic conditions needed to expose them, you'll never see them.
An example of this is Ubiquiti with their Unifi stuff. If you go to manage switch ports, the page they give for that doesn't have an option to "Select All" ports. You need to select at least one port first, and then the "Select All" option magically appears. So not only is it hidden, it gets the context wrong. Think of having it as a disabled checkbox. Everyone would immediately realize the context is wrong because having the "Select All" checkbox disabled when no ports are selected would be obviously dumb.
They explicitly studied ecommerce/product pages here. The relevant metrics are which page had a higher perceived product value? Which page had a higher conversion ratio? Which page resulted in a higher NPS? Which page created a more positive brand affinity?
You don't sell portable speakers using specs, you sell it with aspirational images of it being used on a beach. Of course expanding an accordion of product details then asking "On a scale from 1-7, How well do you feel you understood the offering communicated on the page?" results in a higher survey score. If you said the more dense page converted better, then I would be surprised.
It's like designing a study on the negative impact of hard F1 race car seats, adding a bunch of foam, testing which is more comfortable, then proclaiming one is better than the other because it was rated more comfortable, when the only metric they were designed for is lap time.
Actually websites looked like that in the late 2000's, before responsive design became ubiquitous.
e.g. Apple https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/apple-website
They compared the information density of, what is essentially a marketing flyer or a billboard and then stated that it doesn’t convey everything: well that’s the point, an ad is meant to invoke the desire for a product in its viewer, instead of being a spec sheet.
I guess that works for some audiences. For me, this can be a strong signal of low quality bs.
I even had juniors maximizing terminals.
E.g.:
https://www.nytimes.com/
What's worse, formerly normal websites start degrading. Typically, when a new manager is hired and decides to "reimagine" the product with the "mobile-first" vision. The recent Patreon is a good example.
And of course, in some cases normal websites go away entirely, and are replaced with crapps: Venmo, Amazon Alexa, Chamberlain, etc.
It's such a useful piece of the UX to have thrown away in the move to mobile first.
Other than that I probably fall in the "it's not that hard" camp. Of all the problems you have to solve, getting it to look reasonable on a few different screen sizes is pretty far down the list in terms of time and complexity.
Actual hover detection would be possible, but I imagine that UX would suck unless you were using a stylus.