I've been in web development for a long time and not until four or five years ago did I had to keep up with this light speed moving train.
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Dissenting voice:
I do the opposite. Most front-end is fads & not beneficial to any site/app metric. Not even measured or understood. Immature tech always breaks at scale, edge case or becomes obsolete. Now there is an industry of front-end advisors giving out bad advice who have never worked at scale (your advice is good), don't study metrics & know little of SEO, growth, networks or engagement. "The ROI on your hover states is horrible". "Your SVG illustrations get clicked on 4% of the time".
"Push me" as btn text works 5X "Learn more". Try it. Use "Push me" & watch a bunch of people push the btn for no reason. Nope, it's all scrollbars, slide-ins, carousels, hamburgers, embedded fonts, google analytics, 100HTTP requests, outdated frameworks, same icons, same stock, same colors, same illustrations, privacy & security violations, award sites with unusable UIs, trend chasing. 90% useless. A lot of over engineering to deliver a few words & a pic usually.
Trendy technologies come & go. I stick to native & classical methods for everything. I don't waste time reading everyones thoughts. They never existed when I started & are often not based on actual metrics, just opinion, repetition & traffic chasing. TOS & returns are low on their sites. They can't get to 4min but can be acclaimed speakers or bloggers.
UI business overall is so useless, you get more engagement from snark, sucking up & 'playing the game' then from trying to be honest, knowing your stuff or helping. Glibness wins. Silly statements win. False positivity wins, lying wins. Lot of this is due to UI, bias & lack of self-awareness. Also, the history of tech plays a larger part in the overall lack of balance.
Not saying I am any better, but UI bloat is now an industry, not a product. If I was starting today I would avoid UI as a career (UI since 90s).
Also, I am not referring to specific individuals (I can, no prob), some provide massive value.
Ignore, implement, test, change, repeat. Live & die by the results.
Don't listen to me. Test for yourself.
I'm a bit torn - because I completely agree that the state of UI and frontend frameworks is a bit bloated. But I think this is a great article just to help you guide the frontend world and just to keep up with it - you don't need to spend hours reading through and following everyones advice.
But a lot of the frontend stuff you see coming out and that you have to keep up with - large large companies come up with these ideas and implement them at the biggest scale you can probably have. E.g. React with Facebook.
But I definitely agree, it's probably not ideal for small startups just starting out to engage in these frontend frameworks and fancy ideologies because they have no product market fit, need to move fast and these things are truly in their infancy.
I am being dramatic on purpose of course. The snarks are engagement triggers as I state, it works, we are "method commenting" to increase the activity on this post so more people see it & it doesn't disappear. Because it is good. I don't mind looking foolish to keep it on the homepage.
Many of the big sites did not get big because of their UI.
Most of their successes were acqui-hires. Most of their products are spyware powered not UI. All have substantial bugs.
With respect to UI
alexa.com/topsites look through the top 500 sites. White bg, dark text, blue links, left aligned (on L-R languages), adult sites inverse. All simple, all closer to HTML than the rest of the industry. 90% of startups fail. We are now 90% mobile. The vast majority of UI is over-done. It always was, even mine.
Anyone is free to do or think whatever you want but very few people actually address UI in a bigger or realistic context.
I think Yaser is smart & right, this article is good. I genuinely appreciate the effort & will read it in full (in parts). That's why I engaged (thanks)
I opened with "Dissenting voice" to be one (rather than am one). I think both things at once: read a lot, but do first & then you know who knows otherwise you implement wrong.
Luke, your balanced & accurate perspective is appreciated (thanks).
It's not how we get this post to 200 comments though. Editing my comment above to make Truong look bad is 👀. Oh UI...
Just kidding Truong, also you are right & I agree with you. Seriously.
Let the games begin between you and Truong haha!
The great UI wars of 2019 began on Dev.to but spread virally through all platforms. No one remembers what life was like before those tragic times but they speak of a flash & lots of tables. A holy grail, now lost in a maze of grids. King Truong has ruled for millennia.
Nowadays, AI creates all UI from realtime global feedback loops sorted by ML. If we stop clicking the electricity goes off & the Internet disconnects. I am not sure how much longer I can continue for so this may be it for me in this tiny comment box.
Off. Line.
Pick a side Luke. The answer is in you. The force is strong. You are our only hope.
This comment is nonsensical.
UI leads to creation of Graphql, React, Webassembly, microservice, Gatsby,.... and other tons of other technologies, some of them are not web-related (react native for mobile, for example).
Learning from others is the best way to learn.
This is great article and I totally second making use of your commute time with podcasts or reading.
Podcasts has been my friend for last 4 years and I love that commute time and it adds to the knowledge big time.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts
Hi,
I am a technical editor from China.
I think your article is very good, I hope to get your consent to translate and share with Chinese developers, I will point out the source and author.
Hi and thanks for your kind words. Sure feel free to translate and share
Thanks!
In order to keep up with the articles, I strongly recommend this tool: github.com/dailynowco/daily. I've been using it since it was released and now I can't imagine living without it :D
Wow thank you for putting this together, this is very useful, it will take some time to go through all of this.
This is the result of a couple of years of work, wouldn't expect anyone to go through all of this. But on the other hand, I found some of these pretty common 😊
I find this article really enlightening and helpful. Thank you very much :)
To prepare for your frontend/javascript interview. You can look at this ebook I created with collections of commonly asked frontend questions with solution.
mohit8.gumroad.com/l/ygass