"This article is for them, and we can only hope they will listen."
By my reckoning: everybody assumes that this article is for somebody else, and that's the problem. Assuming the problem is either developers who don't care or developers who don't have enough agency to act on it is easy because we can say "I care, and I have agency, so I'm not part of the problem."
Hanlon's razor applies here, but the related incompetence stems from competent people doing things outside their areas of expertise rather than being fundamentally incompetent. The developer discussion focusing almost exclusively on performance reinforces that. We favor our strongest mental models when reasoning about problems— when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But we often contribute to or create things outside our direct areas of expertise, (often reluctantly because we're the last people to touch the code before it hits production.) We might not even 'realize' how far outside they are, though. In my experience, this testing reveals far fewer performance problems than interface design and front-end implementation problems— i.e. touch targets are nearly impossible to use on burner smart phones, sidebars that clobber content or top menu bars that wrap between break points, weird behavior on non-widescreen landscape orientation devices, poor keyboard (and therefore screen reader) navigation, etc.
I believe this discussion illustrates the importance of thoughtful and skillfully-applied UX principles, where the data would ideally come from real users operating as they normally would... but maybe that's just the nail this particular hammer is hunting for! XD
By my reckoning: everybody assumes that this article is for somebody else, and that's the problem. Assuming the problem is either developers who don't care or developers who don't have enough agency to act on it is easy because we can say "I care, and I have agency, so I'm not part of the problem."
Hanlon's razor applies here, but the related incompetence stems from competent people doing things outside their areas of expertise rather than being fundamentally incompetent. The developer discussion focusing almost exclusively on performance reinforces that. We favor our strongest mental models when reasoning about problems— when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But we often contribute to or create things outside our direct areas of expertise, (often reluctantly because we're the last people to touch the code before it hits production.) We might not even 'realize' how far outside they are, though. In my experience, this testing reveals far fewer performance problems than interface design and front-end implementation problems— i.e. touch targets are nearly impossible to use on burner smart phones, sidebars that clobber content or top menu bars that wrap between break points, weird behavior on non-widescreen landscape orientation devices, poor keyboard (and therefore screen reader) navigation, etc.
I believe this discussion illustrates the importance of thoughtful and skillfully-applied UX principles, where the data would ideally come from real users operating as they normally would... but maybe that's just the nail this particular hammer is hunting for! XD