| Developing better HCI and UX is not a "hangup". Accessibility (in the broader sense) is incredibly lacking in technical spaces. Also, your example is a poor one, because in your example, both a visual method and a quicker keyboard method exist. Very often, the visual method doesn't even exist. In your analogy, its more like there is no way to move text from one app to another except for ctrl-c / ctrl+v, so the guy trying to do this just gives up and can't do it because they only know how to use file - paste. It's not even about shaving off .5 seconds, its about not even accomplishing the thing they want to do. Finally, no, there's no such thing as one method being "objectively" wrong. You're making the mistake to think that efficiency between navigating screens and work is all about being fast. It's not. There's a lot of people (actually the majority) who don't give a shit about being faster at keyboard shortcuts and shaving 2 seconds off whatever. If you're a copy-writer, you might copy-paste once or twice and then the rest literally never leave a word editor and email. This attitude is one of the biggest problems in HCI and development today. The tinkerers and developers like ourselves who love doing this stuff are unable to understand how actual users and clients work with systems, and when told that our designs suck and are inaccessible we scoff and say "lol just learn linux". Finally, I have no idea whether or not there's an audience for this, but I will actually say that I'm probably one of the audiences for it. HTML, CSS and even JS isn't actually all that complex. But guess what. The real annoying shit that I have no interest in dealing with is the insanity of web development these days which involve build/compile and webpacks and frameworks and blah blah blah. If I had a platform that let me dip into CSS/HTML/JS but had security guardrails, deployment fully setup and had some basic capability to whip up a docs page, or a simple website that still looked good, I would absolutely use it in a heartbeat. In fact, I'm currently using a dinky-ass no-code app builder (lmao, in ESRI's ArcGIS Enterprise no less) to make a simple CRUD app. Why am I using it? Because none of the shit is documented at my workplace for deployment, I'm not interested in learning to use kubernetes just for a simple-ass website, and I have zero interest in figuring out how to configure HTTPS and deal with JWT tokens and whatever. I'm a data analyst who works in jupyter notebooks, python and SQL. "Should" I be making this god awful no-code app? Hell no. Do I want to? Hell no. But do I need it? Yes, very much so. Otherwise, the people I rely on to populate a referential / look-up table update their reference documents in word and the table only gets updated manually when someone bugs the DBAs to manually update it, so these tables are always out of date. I could go with a straight-face to our over-worked web devs and ask them to stop working on their enterprise-wide/big-client project, but they would either hate me forever (fair) or ignore me because they're doing way more important things. Or I could go to the policy people who update these tables who can stare at me with a blank face when I explain that even if they just make an Excel table instead of a Word table then it would improve so many things, but to them its "whats the difference? im putting text in one table or another." Instead, we have this dumb thing that's a drag-n-drop Bootstrap page maker, and with it comes built in auth, login and even exposes a simple REST API. If I narrowly focused down on whether or not making this app with a drag-n-drop tool vs just writing an SSG, ofcourse the latter would be easier and faster. But, just writing the code for an SSG is not the hard part here. It's everything else that web devs live and breath so they forget how stupid of a workflow it actually is to make a React-Nuxt-Next-Babel-Webpack-Vite-tailwindCSS-whatever monstrosity, when 90% of people's needs could be served with the equivalent of a web-deployed version of Excel with some neat animations. It's the same reason why UX designers and shit like figma exist. We let developers be in charge of designing an app, and they built unironic versions of userinyerface[1] and when told their shit sucks, they shrug and say whatever, "it'd be faster if they wrote X in markdown anyways." [1] https://userinyerface.com/ |