I work On UI/UX for B2B software businesses and the reason Isee for the problem is that the web is built by engineers. There has been a big focus on code quality, best practices, frameworks etc. But the majority of these engineers didn’t spend time on UI. This is definitely changing. 95% of our customers are great engineers that are seeing the value good UI/UX can add to their product and help deliver a better experience to their user. We’re in the early stages of this shift, but forward thinking engineers are already paving the way.
winform and win32 were built by engineers. Wpf had much more thought put in place for design aspects. The problem s we try to write applications in a system designed for documents.
UI would be a solved problem from an engineering perspective if someone could define what was necessary for building a good UI, for all time, without working directly with pixels, and without completely obliterating the at least somewhat secure browser sandboxing.
There are essentially no unknowns from an engineering perspective to create any possible ( not impossible ) solution in this space, except for two: What is a good UI, and how do we make almost intrinsically safe execution environment for categorically untrusted code?
There might be, and probably is objectively good UI practices, but what is considered by most to be good UI changes with fashion, with what primitives are available, and what is almost - but not entirely - possible at any point in time.
The kind of freedom the author seem to want is probably not possible to do in any reasonable secure way without all operative systems makers agree on a rather advanced security model that continues far outside the browser, in fact it has to essentially replace the default OS model for all content generated from the browser, and for any application that has ever interacted with any such content.
Looking at saving a file without a save dialog as an example, it might sound trivial, but then the smallest bug in the browser, which is a very complicated runtime for executing distributed content of mostly untrusted nature, could rewrite any file into an executable Trojan horse, completely taking over control the next time you run it.
To avoid this, the OS would have to restrict anything saved or generated from a page to the same set of restrictions that page had, transitively.
Even the possibility to save anything at all opens this window quite a bit, but not at all to the same extent as being able to do it silently. In addition to the obvious reasons, there are other benefits like not having to keep a list of allowed files, and thus can't as easily be tricked as easily to reveal the local names of those files either through direct attacks, or side-channel attacks. Unless you are okay with the 'application' not knowing the name of the files, but then someone is going to complain that it's impossible to make a 'recent files' menu, and thus the circle continues.
There are actually solutions to this that are plausible from a technical and engineering perspective, but they all work by extending the sometimes cumbersome restrictions of the browser right into the native environment to an extent that would probably make OS companies extinct in short order. They are likely to want to either avoid this, or try to become a single supplier. The various strategies of the actors in this space seems to be rather obvious.
Background:
I’ve been working with B2B SaaS companies for over 9 years now, helping mostly with product design.
Observation:
One thing most companies seem to mean by ‘growing’ is getting more traffic. The big advantage of B2B software is that you can do very very well with very very small amounts of potential users flowing through your funnel.
Solution:
The biggest thing I’ve seen contribute to B2B product growth is by far a focus on increasing conversion rate (instead of traffic generation). UX design plays a central part of this (Full disclosure, I run http://fairpixels.pro - a design firm for software products in this space, so I might be biased, but the data I see every day backs this claim up). Stating the obvious, but it’s a lot better to have 50 people visiting your website every day, and get 5 of those to subscribe to your annual plan, vs driving 200 people to your website but only having 2 or 3 join.
Map out your user flow. Where does your lead come from? When on your website, what does he/she see & do? What’s the one CTA you present them? Is your value prop clear? Does your CTA have the right color and is the placement right? Does the look & feel of your website communicate professionalism, trustworthiness, etc.
It’s sexy to think about driving thousands of users to your platform, but it’s more practical, useful and valuable to focus on those questions.
It would be great if all these new regulations only applied to companies of X size. Scrappy startups with no access to good lawyers and understanding of these regulations are more likely to suffer vs the big guys who were the cause of all of these changes in the first place.
Now that you mention it, how are Google themselves deemed to be compliant with the GDPR? If I put up a blog containing my name and email address, and that ends up in a Google search result for my name, have I consented to this use of my personal data just because my blog is on the public web?
The infamous "right to be forgotten" (and the robots.txt standard) gives me an ability to opt-out of some uses of the data on my blog, but I thought that the GDPR is more stringent about requiring opt-in rather than opt-out.
Can you go into more detail about the GDPR effect? How will they be annihilated by that? Are they collecting more user data than users are aware of, and anticipate that if they told users explicitly what they're doing the business would be annihilated?
Who would start a new search engine in this day and age? You'd need some really unique features which Google can't duplicate, and the only one which seems to have made it is DDG with their privacy promise.
Google's advantage is also its Achilles heel: it is incredibly general purpose and searches the entire web.
Now how much of the web is all that useful? If a search results page on Google is just Google's opinion of what they think you want, what happens if you use a similar-enough algorithm but narrow the scope of the web you index to something more likely to contain information you can actually use?
Google today isn't even as useful to me as Google was 10 years ago. It has noticeably gotten worse. There has to be a fairly large niche there that several more specialized search engines could find a home.
As someone has suggested, not a generalist search engines. In Europe I can remember at least a couple of "price comparators" that are way better than Goggle at finding local small online shops (i.e. shops smaller than the behemoth called Amazon).
Or for example the code search engine, but I don't think it's from an European startup.
So that the access to information is more democratic? What stops Google from suppressing certain information at the request of bureaucrats or corporations? When you have a choice you are more likely to see information from different sides. Of course most people won't bother, but suppressing choice can only end up sad.
Just as a side note: not every search engine is a direct competitor to Google. You can have vertical search engines serving a specific purpose. These can do very well by executing on a narrow use case. Something the Googles can’t do.
No no no, bad idea. Because then those big companies will just 'hire' small companies to do their dirty job.
I think the problem here is some of the rules in GDPR is too overkill. Those rules need to be weakened/simplified a little to allowing companies in EU and actually everywhere to flourish without worrying too much about whether or not they will accidentally violates it.
Try Max Tabs [0] and force yourself out of your habit/workflow by needing to be selective with your tabs (or maybe you'll just learn to run more windows instead).
I'm pretty sure there are mass bookmark extensions. Get one of those and dump all open tabs into a triage folder; once a week go through the folder and move the ones you want to keep into a proper folder and delete the rest.
Hell, that ought to be an extension too. Autopurge a bookmark folder at set intervals.
Not sure what to think of this. Google & FB have internal frameworks and/or hackathons to encourage their own people to come up with ideas. After all the failed attempts of Snap (glasses, the redesign etc) to come up with some key new ideas, poor IPO, layoffs and other bad news, this seems to be a clear signal that screams: “we don’t have the smartest people working at our company. We need your ideas to save our future.”
I’ve been interested in watch OSystems for some time. Would LOVE to collaborate with someone who wants to work on a sideproject. I run a UI/UX firm and want to contribute with design. Feel free to reach out if interested. Details in my profile.
For us (http://fairpixels.pro) it’s actually the off-work connectivity. Slack, email, todo lists and all of the other tools make us pretty effecient and productive. But I’d love to see how I can boost social connectivity outside of ‘work’.
One of the main reasons I find her so inspiring is that her work clearly shows why adding a great designer to a great team of engineers can result in ever lasting impact.
As a designer myself, I work with teams of engineers (mostly in the B2B SaaS Space [1]) who write great software but don't have the skills to design a delightful experience for their users. It's a shame there are still too many teams of talented engineers out there who don't see the importance of great design.
Indeed. I'm a software engineer in the defense industry, and there has never been budget for a designer on any contract I've worked on. So you end up with interfaces designed by engineers who hate doing UI work. Which is how you get big panels of identical gray buttons and layouts that make no sense (or put another way, some of these government systems make the Eclipse IDE look like the work of a UI/UX genius). Also, some of the more recent and publicly embarrassing incidents of UI-driven operator error :)
A few times I've said (well, not these exact words), "Give that UI to me, I may not be a professional designer or even an experienced front-end developer, but at least I care about making something usable." I was actually told once that I had to scrap my interface and re-do it, because it made the rest of the product look bad by comparison.
As an aside, I think you provide an obviously valuable service, wish I had come across it before I had done the UI for my current project :)
http://fairpixels.pro