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by pram 861 days ago
TurboTax has this kind of “performative slowness” to convince you it’s doing more than it actually is. It has pointless loading bars and spinning wheel pages as you navigate through every section. I definitely wouldn’t be an advocate of replicating it.
2 comments
marcosdumay 861 days ago
The article is asking for functional slowness, not performative.

And it's a quite popular opinion, because almost every channel has some form of it, and he had to go way out of his way into cryptocoins to enable the problem to happen at all.

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ToucanLoucan 861 days ago
One could argue though if you're purposely designing your systems in such a way where they operate slower than they could otherwise, that in itself is just performative slowness.

Most of the processes that I think this author wants to see adopted don't even need to be slow, necessarily. More than anything it's just shocking how much modern software is so utterly bare bones in terms of features, especially around security. While I was attending a therapist not long ago, she had me use an app service I won't name to manage my appointments and payment information, and every login was done with a magic link. This was both annoying, because the app wouldn't stay logged in for a certain amount of time at all and I had to have it send me another password link every time I used it, and also ineffective, because if my email was compromised, nothing was stopping that actor from getting full and complete access to this app.

I don't think it was necessarily a huge risk, but there was literally no options for this. No MFA, not even a password or a PIN to set for stuff like billing information. I could see this being an absolute nightmare to unwind if you happened to have your email breached.

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al_borland 861 days ago
I wonder if some of that was added to try and nudge people to pay attention. With no cost to jumping around and going back, people will likely be more careless. If a user knows going back and redoing something is slow and annoying, they may pay more attention and double check their work before clicking Next.
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