Three times today only, a choice by engineers to not use standards and instead roll-their-own solution has made something essentially unusable:
- Royal Mail making a form totally JavaScript driven, not using a standard form or submit button, led to it not being able to be sent and zero validation or even a clue as to why
- Ticketmaster building some weird custom
selectelement that doesn't work with the keyboard and everyoptionwithin having some kind of scroll event so it can't be scrolled with the wheel/trackpad - NowTV on Apple TV not using the standard search or login dialogs, so you can't use the microphone to search and it doesn't prompt you to use the keyboard on your phone. This leaves the virtual keyboard on screen as the only option. Lots of fun when you have a long and ugly password
Every single of of these is more work. More work for a worse experience, failure from conception to delivery from product owners, designers, engineers, and testers. How have we managed to lose sight of the constant that the simplest solution is usually the best?
I once worked with someone who believed that anyone writing code for public consumption should have some kind of qualification. If writing code is a branch of engineering, then it should be treated the same way. Being self taught, I strongly disagreed at the time (and I think some of his motivation was that he'd spent years on a computer science masters) but I'm much more in favour of education in ethics being required for particular roles. It's absurd that we should have to mandate consideration for the end user over anything else but the internet of today constantly misses the mark.
Many Canadian-trained engineers wear an Iron Ring as a reminder of their obligations and ethics of their profession. Wearing a reminder and the ceremony that goes with it surely cannot fail to change the way they think about how to solve the engineering problems they face.
Obviously there are levels; the need to build a bridge that will not fail clearly offers more risk than a website not working, but when government websites that manage healthcare, benefits, and other essential services are extremely shit we need to think about what we're doing.