As an example, I tried standardizing on <input type="date" /> across our product (hundreds of fields). Within 24 hours we logged >1,000 tickets with users saying they disliked the change. They preferred the fancy datepicker because it let them see a full calendar and that enabled a more fluid conversation with the customer (like "next Wednesday").
Yes, Chrome does offer a calendar for this field type, but Safari for desktop does not (just off the top of my head).
I'm a vim-writing, tmux-ing, bash-loving developer. If it were up to me, I'd do everything in the terminal and never open a browser.
I recognize that the world doesn't revolve around me and my skills, interests and tastes. If a large cohort of my customers tell me they don't want to improve their computer skills and want a fancy UI, who am I to tell them they're wrong? They're paying me. They get what they want.
Two, I'll grant you that you sometimes have to use a custom control, because web moves forward faster than browsers, and so you can't count on a browser-level or OS-level calendar widget being available. But then the issue is, how do you do it. Can the user type in the date directly into your custom field? Is the calendar widget operable by keyboard? Such functionality doesn't interfere with first-time use, but is important to enable users to develop mastery.
A lot of my dissatisfaction with modern UI/UX trends comes from that last point: very low ceiling for mastery. Power users aren't born, they're made. And they aren't made in school, but through repeated use that makes them seek out ways to alleviate their frustrations. A lot of software is being used hours a day, day in, day out by people in offices. Users of such software will be naturally driven towards improving efficiency of their work (if only to have more time to burn watching cat photos). If an application doesn't provide for such improvements, it wastes the time of everyone who's forced to interact with it regularly.
Better forms inputs could very well be useful, I agree.
The recent MSFT + GOOG snogfest announcing major improvements to HTML by ... improving form and input fields in their (GUI-only) browsers strikes me, in light of rather ominous icebergs looming on the HTML horizon, of rather gratuitious deckchair-rearanging. No matter how fine those arrangements might be.
Hold up, your position is that users that prefer something 'easy to use' as opposed to something 'powerful' are immoral? What am I missing here?
If I choose to offer predatory loans which I would never accept for my friends or family to a community that is not financially savvy, and someone calls me out on it, it doesn't fly to say "hey, what do you have against these people taking advantage of my easy to use service?".
Sometimes it feels like the web of yore was so simple to use and free of unnecessary bloat simply because that was as far as the technology had progressed at that point. React didn't exist and the browser was limited from a technical perspective so the best people could manage was some clever CSS hacks to cobble together something mildly attractive. It might have taken a while to render even those simple pages on computers of the time, so back then those pages might have hit a performance ceiling of some kind.
Maybe as more and more features get added to a piece of technology, there's some kind of default instinct that some people have to always fully exercise all of it even if it's not at all necessary. Simply because you can do more with it that you couldn't do years ago, there's some assumption that it's just better for some vague reason. It's easier to overcomplicate when everyone else is doing it also, so as to not get left behind.
Then everyone who doesn't have knowledge about web technologies in the like get used to it, and people's expectations change so this "new Web" becomes the new standard for them and start enjoying it in some Stockholm syndrome manner - or not, and the product managers mistakenly come to this conclusion from useless KPIs like "time spent on our website" which will obviously increase dramatically if it takes orders of magnitude more CPU cycles just to render the first few words of an article's headline.
I'm only speculating though.
Personally, as someone with a headless server running Docker, it pains me to no end I can't browse Docker Hub with elinks.
I suspect this is very true. It seems true in my experience. I think the reason may be just that our field is so young and dynamic, that everyone learns everything on the job. If you want to stay up to date, you have to gain experience with the new tools, and the best way to do it is to find a way to make using them a part of your job. It saves you time after work, and you even get paid for it.
It takes good judgement to experiment with new technologies on the job without compromising the product one's working on. I feel that for most developers, the concerns of end-users rarely enter the picture when making these calls.
Or: when seeking driving advice, would you reject a priori the opinions of professional drivers, just because they're not representative of the general population? You would be justified in rejecting their views when considering your marketing strategy. Which kind of makes me think that a lot of reasons for pushing the "devs are not representative users" thought aren't about how to best serve users.
Your technical insight doesn’t make your user experience any more or less valuable or important.
User interfaces are an acquired taste. A shiny-looking app built on newest design trends may look appealing at first. But once you're couple hours into using it, your outlook changes. It suddenly starts to matter whether the application is able to handle reasonable-sized workloads without slowing to a crawl (many web applications can't). It matters whether you can use the keyboard instead of clicking on everything. It matters whether the application is fast and responsive, and doesn't. lag. on. you. every. click.
What long experience with software - both as a creator and as a consumer - gives me is the language and ability to look past the shiny facade, and spot the issues that will matter long-term.
> I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important.
But then immediately dive into a long winded explanation of why your own personal opinions are superior. If you have some deeply academic reason for not likening something, but millions of user just absolutely love how shiny it is, then you can’t prove they’re wrong for doing so, nor that your opinion is in any way better or more valuable than theirs.
What I've seen though is that users almost never have any say in the matter. Software is generally forced upon users - mandated by their employers, being the only way to access a particular service or a social network, etc. Users have little say in how the software works.
Bloat because of inefficient design isn't delivering any value to regular people that a developer is oblivious to. It's just bad engineering. Similarly for distractions, abandoning all UI features provided by default for the sake of making a control have rounded corners, setting the proficiency ceiling so low that no user can improve their skill in using a product over time, etc.