mhoye3d ago

I get the snark, but "page has to load in x time on expensive device in expensive city"... where is the human? Your audience isn't a phone.

I know I've said this a lot, but I think about the NHS digital design standards all the time, about that presentation where their lead designer talked about finding agent strings for devices like the Playstation Vita and Opera for the Nintendo DS in their logs. About how the NHS site had to work for those people too, no matter what.

https://wandering.shop/@fugueish/116695409129543894

Show threadmhoye3d ago
"Your use case is, there's a fourteen year old in an emergency room at 3 AM. English is their second or maybe fourth language. They have a battered school Chromebook or a hand-me-down Android device that was the cheapest thing on the market six years ago or a PS Vita their parents don't even realize has a web browser, and they're trying to educate themselves in the middle of the single most terrifying night they've ever experienced. Your site needs to work for that person at that moment."
Show threadAlexander The 1st3d ago

@mhoye I'm reminded of a StackExchange question where someone was asking why USB 1.0 caught on so popularly when it was slower than a lot of cables at the time?

My comment in a thread back then was essentially "It reduced the amount of time someone was looking for the right cable to start the process, which meant they could take longer waiting on the end result, because they knew the cable and cable port would work.".

Show threadDNA schedule2d ago
@AT1ST @mhoye this is the past through rose colored glasses. It was never all so simple back then. For the first maybe ten years, the normal thing you'd expect when you plugged a USB device into a Windows computer was that it would bring up a wizard to find the appropriate driver, which would fail, and you'd have to search the internet for "[name and brand of thing] USB driver," download and run an exe file, and pray.
Show threadAlexander The 1st

@ryanprior @mhoye Oh, I know that is what was necessary - my point, however, is that you reduced the amount of time one spent trying to find the right port, or the right adapter, for a given cable to connect a device *to* the PC.

Especially as the number of USB ports on a given motherboard increased, and you no longer had to play "How do I get this cable to *this specific port*", and can now focus on "How do I get my computer to recognize the thing that is connected by the port?".

Jun 6 at 3:41amWeb
Show threadAlexander The 1st2d ago

@ryanprior @mhoye Like, to be specific, the thing you mentioned happens the first time.

The thing I mentioned...happens *every* time you use the same device.

See, for example, having to accommodate a USB-Micro-B or USB-Mini-B port for a charger, or an iPhone charging port; those are always more harder than "I think I need to flip the USB-A connector twice, maybe thrice, before it'll fit in.".