[illamint]

Cynically, I feel like these details are often lost in the two-week sprint cycle or other realities of modern software development process. The Figma file didn't specify autofocus, the PM doesn't care about it, and the engineer just wants to close their ticket so they can move on to the next one. It's a login page, who cares? What revenue or business metric does it drive? Same reason the input field for the code doesn't have its input mode set to numeric (to show a numeric keyboard on mobile devices), and the same reason the email field doesn't have the email input mode set (to show the email input keyboard with @ and . prominently featured).

[ryandrake]

The root of all of these is: nobody really cares. The PM is just trying to cram features X, Y, and Z in before the sprint ends so that metrics A, B, and C can go up. The engineer (as you said) just wants to close tickets and implements whatever is in the ticket, regardless of whether it's the right way. QA probably caught this, but the ticket was prioritized as a P3 and buried with the other 459 P3 bugs that nobody is ever going to look at. The senior exec doesn't even know what autofocus is and just wants the $ chart to go up rather than down. He's really the only one on the totem pole with any power to say "Wait, stop, this isn't right--it isn't beautiful, it isn't complete, and the little details matter." But he won't because he is a businessman, not a craftsman.

Another post in two weeks that reminds me of that S.Jobs quote I lean on a lot: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Nobody seems to care about the aesthetic or quality anymore. Software development has become a beige, boring assembly line where brains go in as input and "Metrics Go Up" comes out the other end of the factory.

[htfu]

I care, and where I work (as a coder) what I care about does matter. Or I make it matter.

You sound depressed. Maybe try find a smaller shop where you have more influence?

[bob1029]

> these details are often lost in the two-week sprint cycle or other realities of modern software development process

Indeed. This is why we should abandon the "modern" software development process. Bureaucracy & consulting appears to be producing shit software. By whatever means necessary, the developer needs to be made to care more about the quality of the final product.

Making "UI/UX" a label, project category or other management abstraction is a gigantic red flag to me. This tells me it is everyone's job, therefore it is effectively no one's job. Someone needs to take deep ownership in things that end in "experience" or it won't work.

You'd be amazed at what others around you will start stepping up to if you set even the tiniest example. Certainly, there are those who will do bad work on purpose, but you won't change those. All you can do is your best and let HR take care of the rest.

[fy20]

It's the same reason why links are not a tags. The dashboard of my company is a React app, but it has proper routing so opening a new tab at mycompany.com/account goes to your account.

At the end of last year the menu was redesigned, and the links which were a tags were replaced with some other element. So now you can't ctrl click to open pages in new tabs, which was a big part of my workflow.

Oh and the labels on the design of the new menu were removed, but of course there is no title tag to explain what the items are.

I filed a bug report shortly after it was released, and it is - and probably for the rest of eternity will be - in the backlog.

[wruza]

What bugs me most in these stories is that they are actively destroying what worked before. Barbarians with big frameworks. Their company pays them while they make the product worse and nobody notices. Even with user feedback, because instead of going to a solver, it goes to the problem itself.

[marklubi]

> So now you can't ctrl click to open pages in new tabs, which was a big part of my workflow.

I came across the exact opposite recently. With Ghostery enabled, one of the company owned websites won’t work with regular clicks. The only way to go to the link is to open in a new tab/window. Infuriating.