Structuring the UX in a user friendly way matters more, that doesn't mean random 200ms lags are OK. As you said, performance is UX too.
I hear normal, non-tech people with average hardware complain about "lagginess" of their machines all the time. And usually the only application they use is Chrome. They won't say that they had a 200ms lag when they clicked on a button, but the overall experience degrades when things are slow to respond. And when you sit that person in front of a good, optimized, snappy application, they will sing praise. Not particularly because of performance, but they will enjoy using it more, and they won't be able to explain exactly why.
You'd think that with the ridiculous amounts of money software engineers are paid to do what they do, they'd be able to swallow slightly more difficult collaboration and developer experience in order to deliver a more quality product. Forgive me for being harsh, and I don't mean this as directed to you (I don't know you), but our industry behaves like a bunch of babies.
Aside: if you're making an interactive game, you have 16ms to respond and render, not hundreds. In 16ms, modern games dispatch draw calls for millions of triangles, do AI, physics, netcode, level streaming and other bookeeping. Yet the teams there collaborate just fine.
Random 200ms lag is different than showing a new panel full of elements.
I'm aware of those complaints. 95% is when people are using a thermal throttled old device, while the app in question is trying to smoothly animate a complete clusterfuck of a webpage (for bonus points it's usually in some god-awful WebView in an app).
It's not simply displaying new checkboxes, inputs, labels, buttons, it's multi-megabyte images with fancy CSS effects and so on.
> They won't say that they had a 200ms lag when they clicked on a button, but the overall experience degrades when things are slow to respond.
Of course, no questions there! But it's not because the "framework is not performant enough", it would be slow even in vanilla JS in 95+ % of situations.
> And when you sit that person in front of a good, optimized, snappy application, they will sing praise.
Yes. And it's because you say to the client/designer/productperson that hey, if you want snappiness even for the 99th percentile of your users (ranked by hardware), then let's test on that device, and let's forego that nice animation that you saw in that native app on your friend's iPhone 15 ÜberMaxPro.
And, not surprisingly, many of the aforementioned culprits will say "I want that shiny thing"
> but our industry behaves like a bunch of babies.
I don't think you're harsh at all! And I agree. Many IT workplaces went all-in with the infantilism. (Daycare for autist-savants! Colorful open-office with a playroom, maybe even a ball pit! You can't concentrate today? Don't worry, just play some table tennis, and try it again tomorrow! -- Contrast this with the endless office gray cubicle farms of the engineering departments ~50 years ago. Which is probably the other extreme of the spectrum. And I believe there's a healthy middle ground. Well maybe slacking off on HN is not exactly part of it.)
> Yet the teams there collaborate just fine.
The games industry is famously not in a "fine" place, I'd say :) But yes, of course, they have a clear target, and even if the process requires some blood sacrifice for the crunch times, it works, sometimes. Sometimes we get buggy things like Cyberpunk 2077, which was less-than-optimized for some target platforms.
I hear normal, non-tech people with average hardware complain about "lagginess" of their machines all the time. And usually the only application they use is Chrome. They won't say that they had a 200ms lag when they clicked on a button, but the overall experience degrades when things are slow to respond. And when you sit that person in front of a good, optimized, snappy application, they will sing praise. Not particularly because of performance, but they will enjoy using it more, and they won't be able to explain exactly why.
You'd think that with the ridiculous amounts of money software engineers are paid to do what they do, they'd be able to swallow slightly more difficult collaboration and developer experience in order to deliver a more quality product. Forgive me for being harsh, and I don't mean this as directed to you (I don't know you), but our industry behaves like a bunch of babies.
Aside: if you're making an interactive game, you have 16ms to respond and render, not hundreds. In 16ms, modern games dispatch draw calls for millions of triangles, do AI, physics, netcode, level streaming and other bookeeping. Yet the teams there collaborate just fine.