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popular scenario: recently i have tried to order airline from travel website sponsored by my employer. 4-5 attemps done and all results in a frozen web page, or HTTP error. I send them email and had to order from another travel site. Then I got reply like try this, use this browser etc., I replied saying like what is wrong with you, I am not doing the QA job for you guys at free of charge, you are guys supposed to test it yourselves not the customers, which is a bit cranky reply but sick and tired of companies "outsourcing" their QA tasks to customers who often does it for free. And broken web page/apps are all too often.

This is like one example, but i think it is a common across industry. Hey we got new release please try out and give us a feedback and just throw in anything they want.

I think they're trying to say "try using this browser because the one that you're using might not be compatible with our website" (translation: "try using Internet Explorer because we're too lazy to write a standards-compliant website"). If that doesn't work, try turning it off and on again. If it still doesn't work, make sure that you're running a fully up-to-date installation of Windows 10. If that doesn't work, try reinstalling Windows 10. If it still doesn't work, it might be because part of the codebase hasn't been upgraded for Windows 10 so you need to downgrade to Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 (if you're still running XP, we can put you through to the senior tech support staff who can guide you through the process of buying a new computer).

yes it is another cost saving, very subtle but strategy to save in test efforts. Pulling in customers to do their work. i mean it can never be bug-free but sometimes the extent they are involving the end-user is just palpable.

ggodw000 wrote:This is like one example, but i think it is a common across industry. Hey we got new release please try out and give us a feedback and just throw in anything they want.

May be the majority of users are ready to spend some extra effort for using a flashy new site? It's often just an extra seconds or a minute to find a work around a nasty thing. But it's always very annoying. And I still wonder why the majority of people prefer to find a way around a problem instead of finding another solution, like another site with a similar functionality. Also there is a trend of copying all those flashy features until they spread across the whole internet and then there's no more place to hide from it, you just can't find another solution (with similar functionality). Is it just because the majority of people are ready to look for a workaround? Or they think another site will be worse? Or they just can't remember that there are many ways to get what they want? It looks like first impression makes them unable to think and bounds them to the flashy solution forever (like some magic enchants them).

Or there's no problem with the people and eventually all bad things will die?

embryo2 wrote:May be the majority of users are ready to spend some extra effort for using a flashy new site? It's often just an extra seconds or a minute to find a work around a nasty thing. But it's always very annoying. And I still wonder why the majority of people prefer to find a way around a problem instead of finding another solution, like another site with a similar functionality. Also there is a trend of copying all those flashy features until they spread across the whole internet and then there's no more place to hide from it, you just can't find another solution (with similar functionality). Is it just because the majority of people are ready to look for a workaround? Or they think another site will be worse? Or they just can't remember that there are many ways to get what they want? It looks like first impression makes them unable to think and bounds them to the flashy solution forever (like some magic enchants them).

Or there's no problem with the people and eventually all bad things will die?

No, the problem's with the people. If there's one single flaw in people, it's their tendency to "follow the crowd" instead of thinking for themselves. One website gets a new interface, so they expect all websites to have that interface. All the websites that their friends use have a particular kind of interface, so they look for websites themselves that have a similar interface. Another flaw is how gullible people are: if one website offers a better service but another website has a fancier interface (more animations, colours, glossy drop-shadow effects, and so on), the latter website gets their business. Possibly unrelated, but another major problem with people is their stupidity: when most people don't know the difference between an operating system and a browser, or the difference between a button rendered by a website's javascript code and a button rendered by their operating system's GUI toolkit, or the difference between notepad and wordpad, or the difference between a URL and a Google search, and so many other examples, you can kind of understand why they're forever following the latest trends and falling for stupid marketing tactics (which wouldn't be necessary, if people were less stupid).

onlyonemac wrote:Possibly unrelated, but another major problem with people is their stupidity: when most people don't know the difference between an operating system and a browser, or the difference between a button rendered by a website's javascript code and a button rendered by their operating system's GUI toolkit, or the difference between notepad and wordpad, or the difference between a URL and a Google search

Your statement is stupid, not the people. This has nothing to do with stupidity, but with experience. If you don't use computers a lot, you just don't learn very fast about this stuff.

Sure a page with a better interface is used more and makes more business; because the people want to be visually appealed by the page and guided by the hand through the process. The only stupid one is the one who created the website and did not make it easy enough for their target group

I have mixed feelings about UI design and development. Professionally, I'm primarily a server side web developer, so I use almost exclusively C# and ASP.NET. Over the past 10 years or so, the front end JavaScript developers have been trying to find a platform that is stable enough to use as a core framework to build feature rich client side applications, which moves almost all of the business logic from the web server to the clients browser.

This has several problems, which you have already discovered. But it has one major advantage over server side business logic: Scalability.

It reduces the cost of the hardware and reduces the amount of network traffic, saving the company big money in the long run. It also improves the end user experience, because a lot of the application is actually stored locally, and cached so that most of the site only needs to be loaded once. It's almost as good as inserting a CD and installing your application on their machine.

But multiple browsers and browser versions make development more difficult. It would be nearly impossible for a company to write any sort of client side application in classic JavaScript. So they end up having to bring in 3rd party tools and frameworks to try to abstract away the browser specifics, and for the most part, it works. But now the problem is that the industry has chosen to go completely open source on this front, meaning that there will never be one or two 3rd party options -- there will be one or two new options introduced every week. So you will never be able to choose a platform, and then hire experts in that platform 2 years later, because the industry has migrated to a new platform 4 times since you started your project.

It's a huge mess, and the big players, who usually promote a single solution, seem to have given up on fighting this battle, and have chosen to let the industry work it out on its own. I don't see that happening, by the way.

So I try to stay out of it as much as possible, whenever possible. I use IE 11, and my iPhone for everything web related, and if those don't work, I just don't use that site.

Hopefully, the industry will settle down and its developers will learn to work together, but I'm not holding my breath.

max wrote:Sure a page with a better interface is used more and makes more business; because the people want to be visually appealed by the page and guided by the hand through the process.

The thing is, though, that isn't the case. If one interface is more usable, and another is more visually appealing, then people are more likely to use the latter. All that people care about is visual appeal, not efficiency/ease-of-use. Therefore people are stupid.

There are three things: failure and resolve, and CS.

1. Failure. When it comes to web site, there are infinite browsers and platforms, it depends on how many "tested platform" the company has QA. Professionals make sure it works with popular browsers, but there are still corner cases and due to budget they make not run a full regression test upon every minor release. So, some failure is acceptable.

2. Resolve. If the company not even try to reproduce a reported failure and ask the customer to "try this and that", they are unprofessional.

3. CS. Sometime the company may tell you a standard way to use their product, they are doing CS and not putting you to test pilot as (2).

SpyderTL wrote:Over the past 10 years or so, the front end JavaScript developers have been trying to find a platform that is stable enough to use as a core framework to build feature rich client side applications, which moves almost all of the business logic from the web server to the clients browser.

In fact the goal was very different. May be there even was no goal at all. First there was an option to change some UI elements without page reloading. It's really nice feature, because the reload bound blinking is annoying. Next there were some calculations and validations on the client side, which is also the same reload efficient approach. Also the communication option was shifted from reload time to the page interaction period. But after it all the fancy stuff was introduced. The flying captions, buttons, images, all those fading in and out elements and so on. For the fancy stuff to be easily programmable it is a wise decision to have a library for it. So, now there are a lot of libraries with fancy stuff support and a small part related to the validation and calculation. Communication option also has evolved into a nightmare of different formats and libraries with a lot of different names and often very different architectures. But server side hasn't stopped and keeps going further in this race to nowhere. First there was CGI, next Java and ASP, next all those PHPs, pythons, rubies, perls, scalas, Cold Fusions, server side Java Scripts and even Go. But every language should be efficient enough to be useful and now there are a lot of libraries for EVERY language and all the libraries are pretending they make programmer's life easier. So, we have tenths of languages multiplied by hundreds libraries, frameworks, widget collections and many more.

What a mess we have now!

And of course, there are no serious developers who even try to use all the mess from above. No serious developers means there's no serious projects. No quality. But a lot of user level testing.

People invent their OSes just for fun, but some other people invent all those languages and frameworks just for fun and next they manage to get some profit from it. And of course, the profit is mostly going to the IT stuff while the business usually has a heaviest ever seen credit to profit ratio. All those facebooks claim their cost is hundreds of billions while profit is a few hundreds of millions per year. So, some "investors" have spent hundreds of billions buying facebook's shares and they can return their money just after a few hundred years.

Really, what a mess we have!

SpyderTL wrote:But it has one major advantage over server side business logic: Scalability.

Disagree.

Would the server side used for the fancy stuff generation (page reload approach) then yes, it's a huge waste of processor's power. But the business logic is very different. First it requires only trivial calculations. And second - the cost of storing and retrieving data from disks is much more viable here. However, all the XML related mess with the same hundreds of frameworks, but now on the server side, works at it's best speed for the servers to be loaded with endless calculations like parsing and marshalling of the XML and many similar tasks.

It means there's a simple architectural issue on the server and client sides. It can be resolved, but the need for fancy stuff and experimenting with all those frameworks makes both sides suck in the game of efficiency.

SpyderTL wrote:But now the problem is that the industry has chosen to go completely open source on this front

No. It's just a freedom to experiment with frameworks. Would all the frameworks cost money, then businesses never allowed to developers to try "something new". But because the frameworks are "free", the business people just don't understand the consequence - the costs are just moved in the future. And businesses are ready to let the developers play with another framework in another language, because it's free! Why not? If you don't see the cost then there's no cost, right?

SpyderTL wrote:So I try to stay out of it as much as possible, whenever possible. I use IE 11, and my iPhone for everything web related, and if those don't work, I just don't use that site.

It's better to pay some attention to the new "technologies". Just to be more competitive on the market. But it's hard because it's a mess.

onlyonemac wrote:If one interface is more usable, and another is more visually appealing, then people are more likely to use the latter. All that people care about is visual appeal, not efficiency/ease-of-use. Therefore people are stupid.

If there are hundreds similar sites then how a person can decide which is better? A short glance at it and you have an impression. You still don't know how rich the functionality is, but there are hundreds of similar sites! So, can you pay more attention to the quality than just a glance and impression driven behavior? A person should be very scrutinous to make a conscious decision. However, for the repeating tasks it worth to be as scrupulous as possible. But people want more fun. Is the scrutiny a funny thing?

It's not a stupidity, it's laziness and a need for more fun.

embryo2 wrote:

onlyonemac wrote:If one interface is more usable, and another is more visually appealing, then people are more likely to use the latter. All that people care about is visual appeal, not efficiency/ease-of-use. Therefore people are stupid.

If there are hundreds similar sites then how a person can decide which is better? A short glance at it and you have an impression. You still don't know how rich the functionality is, but there are hundreds of similar sites! So, can you pay more attention to the quality than just a glance and impression driven behavior? A person should be very scrutinous to make a conscious decision. However, for the repeating tasks it worth to be as scrupulous as possible. But people want more fun. Is the scrutiny a funny thing?

It's not a stupidity, it's laziness and a need for more fun.

I'm sorry, but I don't find a website that looks fancy, but is inefficient to use, "fun". And if I'm lazy, I'll be too lazy to spend time using an inefficient website and will look for an alternative.

1. Failure. When it comes to web site, there are infinite browsers and platforms, it depends on how many "tested platform" the company has QA. Professionals make sure it works with popular browsers, but there are still corner cases and due to budget they make not run a full regression test upon every minor release. So, some failure is acceptable.

Corner cases can be understandable but I continually run into problems when using the "basic" and "fundamental" function, this is not just related to web page, portal but in general more seems problematic with web, apps in general:
scenario 1:
- purchase 800$ massively priced elegant sonos wireless speaker and used to play spotify. then there is system update notification on smartphone. i updated, and then music play hiccups and skips track.
called them after lot of sweat and eventually did something to fix. Next time down the road in few weeks, another update notificatoin, i refuse to update. But update pressure gets stronger to a point, i can no longer launch the app wihtout suppressing the notification manually. Eventually one day, it is no longer possible to use the app without updating. Then I go ahead and update and system stops working. Wtf? is it corner case? updating the app and continue playing the song? I thought not. In this type thing, sonos wireless speaker was one of the worst i have ever owned. so expensive but ball droppings almost everytime it is updated. i filed BBB complaint and they wont even respond. I have attempted to return their product but they wont, so best i can do is leave bad review for 'em everywhere i can.

- as posted in OP, i purchased the airplane ticket in a most usual way. register on web, search for plane route, purchase and enter CC info and hit submit and it fails. Is it corner case? definitely not.

Probably other folks run into this problem countless times, but in each of the scenario, they try to engage customers to do their troubleshooting which I refuse.

max wrote:

onlyonemac wrote:Possibly unrelated, but another major problem with people is their stupidity: when most people don't know the difference between an operating system and a browser, or the difference between a button rendered by a website's javascript code and a button rendered by their operating system's GUI toolkit, or the difference between notepad and wordpad, or the difference between a URL and a Google search

Your statement is stupid, not the people. This has nothing to do with stupidity, but with experience. If you don't use computers a lot, you just don't learn very fast about this stuff.

Sure a page with a better interface is used more and makes more business; because the people want to be visually appealed by the page and guided by the hand through the process. The only stupid one is the one who created the website and did not make it easy enough for their target group

i dont think at all it is people's stupidity. Actually most people are nice enough that their waste their time helping to debug issues. There is nothing wrong with people who wanting to use their app and web the same way. redesign with flashier interface might be ok such that it is reminiscent of doing the old way. if new re-design trashes everything around such that people are no longer use it the same way they used to use in the new of "re-design, better-expeirence, innovation" then it is a problem.

ggodw000 wrote:Corner cases can be understandable but I continually run into problems when using the "basic" and "fundamental" function, this is not just related to web page, portal but in general more seems problematic with web, apps in general:

...Next time down the road in few weeks, another update notificatoin, i refuse to update. But update pressure gets stronger to a point, i can no longer launch the app wihtout suppressing the notification manually. Eventually one day, it is no longer possible to use the app without updating.
Probably other folks run into this problem.

I love my iPhone, and Apple is one of the best companies in the world when it comes to making complex technologies simple for people to use. But even they introduce bugs and major performance issues with every single iPhone update. And if they can't update their own software running on their own hardware without introducing bugs every single time, then you can pretty much forget any other company pulling it off.

If you've ever seen the movie Idiocracy, I truly feel like we have reached the point where improving technology and the decrease in intelligence have reached a crossing point, where going forward, people are not going to be able to understand how technology that the previous generation used works.

I run into the same situation at work over and over, where someone will decide to use some library or tool, without any clue how to use it properly, and will wind up using it wrong, and then complain about how the thing they chose to use is garbage, and they will never use it again.

And, of course, there are other people who come up with the most complex way to solve even simple tasks, and then brag about how clever they are. Then another guy comes along and tries to modify the same code, can't figure out how it works, so they write all new code, from scratch.

There are one or two easy ways to solve a problem, and a hundred complex ways. I don't understand why people always choose the most complex way, and then, after 2 years, the same people complain that the system is old, and slow, and impossible to maintain.