I've sometimes wondered why it seems companies aren't measuring time wasted by slow applications.<p>I can't count the number of times I've called customer service and have to wait 2-3 minutes for the agent to bring up some screen as they apologize and explain "our systems are really slow". It regularly takes up a <i>majority</i> of the call's time.<p>Back in the early 1900's, time and motion studies [1] in factories were all the rage. And today Amazon certainly optimizes for the actions warehouse employees are required to do.<p>But when it comes to the actions people do with computers, I've never once seen a company actually measure wasted time waiting on slow applications. It seems like such an <i>obvious</i> thing to try to optimize. And it's not like it requires constant surveillance or anything -- it's just statistical sampling. Watch 10 randomly selected employees for two hours each or something, with their consent.<p>In many cases "good UX" is impossible to measure in any conventional sense. But when it comes to repeatable enterprise tasks, the time aspect actually <i>can</i> be measured.<p>Does anybody know why companies don't? It feels like such low-hanging fruit.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_motion_study</a>
Enterprise software is not going to ever be fixed until people start to realize that the people that actually do the work need to be heavily involved in the design process and the developers need to be embedded in the actual underlying job more thoroughly. The idea that some developers and process people can make high quality insurance claims software for instance, without actually knowing who’s to handle an insurance claim is preposterous to me.
Time to boot my laptop and open browser: 5-10 seconds<p>Time to load and login to slack: 120-180 seconds with about 7 clicks<p>... sometimes I even have to wait a while for it to catch up with my typing like i'm superman or something. At which point I usually revert to copy and pasting messages from VIM... that's how slow slack is on a 2 year old laptop.
And also inertia, I found a simple trick that gets me into a quasi-flow state zone, which is telling myself that I will just do it for ten minutes. Then I don't have to analyze and do the inner talking for another ten minutes.<p>Also, don't try to automate just now, try to do it few times, then write down the steps, and selectively automate them. It's actually a good way to train yourself to live with boredom. We tend to find hyper stimulus, that's how we were wired. And we waste a lot of energy not in doing the chores but worrying about them.<p>It occurrred to me that someone once said that learning math and other subjects in school is training yourself to do the mental chores. And patience is such a rare thing to have in this constantly attention-grabbing society.<p>A balance check is important, do give yourself something else to do when you leave the work.
This is my primary gripe with MS Teams, it might be free with Office 365 or whatever but I’m pretty sure the time lost due to its flakiness and rubbish UX costs more than Slack or similar.
It's not just work. Computers have bad UX for <i>everything</i>, and ordinary people don't know that things could be any better. I found this to be an enlightening read: -<p><a href="https://www.kilobitspersecond.com/2020/09/22/people-expect-technology-to-suck/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kilobitspersecond.com/2020/09/22/people-expect-t...</a>
I agree with this article that the UX of the software I have to use for work is terrible, and it's very frustrating and demotivating. But their proposed solution at the end- internally developed software, seems to be the worst offender. The worst software I have to use tends to be internally developed, poorly documented, supported, and designed copies of widely used software like bug trackers, project management tools, CI systems, etc. The justification for reimplementing these internally is often security, scalability, or integration requirements though, not UX.
I recall another recent story lamenting that software had not produced massive gains in productivity in essentially the 2000s.<p>Terminal/3270 screens may have been ugly, but they show about the same amount of information as a modern enterprise app does.<p>The sheer waste of modern CPU speed is why there isn't anything big coming out of the screenpusher labor economics. Why I have screen lag in a modern PC is mystifying. It should basically NEVER happen.
Bad UX absolutely hurts productivity, but the reason I’m not productive is still boredom and short attention span :)<p>Seriously, when I was more motivated I used to write code in garbage Xcode which was slow and crashed all the time. I just powered through. Now IntelliJ offers crazy code completion and instant refactoring/navigation, but I space out every time I have to wait 5 seconds for the app to build.
Internal tools also help get around the "9 babies can't make an engineer in a month" (or whatever it is) problem. Netflix (where I work, listed in the article) is maybe the best example. There's a limit to how many engineers you can have working on Netflix's <i>1</i> flagship service (it's a big limit). You can increase that limit by having other engineers come in and build tools for the whole company. I'm also surprised what percentage of engineering teams are directly "developer experience" at big orgs. It's probably < 1% but I think it should be more like 5% (probably an obscenely wrong opinion).
This post was in the back of my mind today when my #1 pet-peeve about Windows reared it's ugly UX right as I was starting to get into a rhythm of productivity.<p>Focus Stealing<p>I'm using many apps and portals over the internet on Tuesdays, and I would be so much more productive if I could start something in one app, then leave it to do something else and only return to that app when its done thinking.<p>If I could run all of my work's accounting apps in Linux, I'd be i3 all day long.
I studied computer science with a minor in psychology. It's long ago, but at that time I some courses on the topic of ergonomic design of UIs. Shortly speaking every UI which stops the user from be interrupted in is workflow by waiting or searching is a microstressing event. (Interruptions are the most important of all stressors when working). Many microstressing events leads to stress and stress leads to bad productivity.<p>What can I say? The last 10 years UIs went ergonomically from bad to worse.<p>Loading time of screens are to long nowadays. While loading and rendering the browser typically keeps on moving screen elements around. Each of this movements interrupts the search for the relevant information for the eyes. Each of these movements enforces the eye movements, search for a new object to focus and accomodate its lenses.<p>Nowadays it is in many application not uncommon to have several of these movements in one loading of a page.(This problem comes is actually somehow connected that HTML is a sessionsless protocoll in connection with modern JS which makes increases loading times. Using microservices quite often lead to bad UI because of the uneven loading times).<p>Other problems are coming from opting into gimmicks like using "effects" or to scrolling instead of paging. While scrolling and paging is ok of websites (in most cases), in most business application you want to avoid this because it is coming with the same problems as slow loading and moving elements on the screen.<p>Another set of problems coming form bad choices from UX designers. Look at the example in [1]<p>- Wasting of precious screen real estate for white space leads to searching for information you need and again: scrolling, eyes movement, accommodation.<p>- Lack of optical guides like lines. Try to set all cells to white background in excel and start working then you see the effect.<p>- Lack of contrast: Dark grey text on light grey background (which MS Office does as well in their settings menu [4])<p>- For design purposes the chosen fonts are much to small to be readable in a convenient way<p>- Header and actual data (i.e. relevant information) are indistinguishable.<p>Finding Information in the "basic data" section in [1],[2] is a hide and seek game for the user. Assume you seeing this display 50 times a day during your work. You are guaranteed to come home with a headache<p>Another example of bad UI are the tiles in W10 start menu [6]. Instead of allowing the eye to scan the entry from top to bottom in one line, the eyes are forced in zig-zag of the tiles and they have transverse a bigger space on the screen because you have much less tiles on the same space as lines is the old menu structure.<p>Another example what causes stress and frustration with software is when the UI of one software does behave differently the others. Your software should generally be designed as what the user expects. An example of a bad UI for this case is MS-Outlook [3]. Some of the more often used navigation elements (switching between mail and calendar) are moved left bottom corner. This is against user expectation. Microsoft Outlook moves its navigation elements to somewhere where no one else put them. No one would design a car with gas an break pedals exchanged and putting the gear shift in the trunk. Microsoft Outlook does so with its navigation elements.<p>Another common problem is that to many screens in your application look to much alike. While it is desirable that the screen designs meets expectation, it is important that the user can spot immediately in which screen he is working. When for<p>Nested menus / hidden functionality is an typical issue in software as well [5]<p>Flat design is generally a stressor because is lacking optical help.<p>Examples of bad UI:<p>[1] <<a href="https://blogs.sap.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Object-Page-Customer-Example.png" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.sap.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Object-Page...</a>><p>[2] <<a href="https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/02/04-new-object-Page3.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://experience.sap.com/fiori-design-web/wp-content/uploa...</a>><p>[3] <<a href="https://topbestalternative.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/outlook-email-chat.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://topbestalternative.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ou...</a>><p>[4] <<a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/fe-storage/2020/09/85e03ded-excel-options-1.png" rel="nofollow">https://storage.googleapis.com/fe-storage/2020/09/85e03ded-e...</a>><p>[5] <<a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/test/media/new-test-plans-page/define-tab-context-menu.png?view=azure-devops" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/test/media/new...</a>><p>[6] <a href="https://filestore.community.support.microsoft.com/api/images/fc091333-4fc7-4085-8bbf-4193ff601f13" rel="nofollow">https://filestore.community.support.microsoft.com/api/images...</a><p>[7] Overloaded screens: <<a href="https://www.it-telesis.com/wp-content/uploads/Analytics.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.it-telesis.com/wp-content/uploads/Analytics.png</a>>
In my free time / personal projects, I've slowly been moving towards this mentality as well. Whenever I start some new, long, dreadful task, I always ask myself, "how can I make this as fun as possible", then start creating better and pseudo-GUIs (Trello or Jupyter usually being the first iteration!) to help me get the job done!
Fuck companies that have codebases with long compile times and code in a way that you have to search multiple hoops to get to the actual cod e that matters (modern c++ in case you're wondering)<p>Iteration times should be one of the major tenets in our programming books other than the stuff they recommend to derisk your software.
I spent 5 hours doing a 15 minute task this week. The program kept crashing, then you have to wait for five minutes since the program runs a net liscence that needs to time out before you can restart.<p>In the end I found a 40 minute work around.
A huge factor in moving on from my previous position was that I had to use Salesforce all the time, which has a terribly count clunky and slow UI and half-baked knowledge base and search stuff, ugh.
Google Cloud web UI. Navigating between different products/settings is super slow. I don't understand why it is loading that much. The CLI is good though
Worked on an app for a manufacturing company. Took literally 3 hours to run. Brought it down to under 3 seconds, for the exact same thing. 3 seconds made them very, very, <i>very</i> happy with the UX. At 3 hours run time, it really f-cked up the assembly line, like, a lot.<p>The speedup happened on the <i>exact</i> same computer - same CPU, same memory, same hard drive. So it had zero to do with hardware, and everything to do with coding. And if you threw faster, better hardware at the problem, it would not change anything for shit.<p>So never depend on the false hope hardware will solve shitty software design issues. The whole idea that it is cheaper to code fast to get something out fast is bogus. It just takes knowledge on how to do it correctly in the first place. I don't think the coding that I did took any longer than the original coding. The original person just sucked ass.<p>So, whatever language you code in, you should start watching videos or reading articles on how to maximize your application's speed. It usually is not that difficult, if you spend some time. Most of it you can copy and paste. Do searches on "Top 5 ways to speed up x language". So easy.<p>That really drilled the lesson home on the importance of the approach to making real fast systems on the design side and not on the hardware side.