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@justmarkup
Last active December 30, 2016 17:21
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Too many features

As 140 chars are not a good way for a discussion, here are my thoughts on a tweet from Jake Archibald https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/814751108975489024

Many clients want all the features but only have a limitited (low) budget which in the end often leads to the following scenario.The agency/web company wants the job and promises all the features for the budget, while knowing this way the performance/usability/accessbility will probably suffer. The developers working on the project know they have too little time to add all the features and therefore use tools (frameworks, libraries, plugins...) to reduce developer time and somehow meet the deadline.

In the end, I think it is often not developer experience, often it is that developers need to use available tools to get the job done as fast as possible, which often means no time left to improve performance/ux/accessibility. Most developers know that using an unoptimized framework or some plugins probably leads to poor performance/ux/a11y but they need to get their job done.

The problem is that clients expect too many features and there is always a company doing the job. In the end, they often have a site with all the features but with poor performance/usability/accessibility. They mostly don't recognise the problems, because they only use their site on their fast devices and fast internet connection.

I don't know how to solve this, but as long as clients think they can get a Porsche with the budget of a Mini there will be Porsche out there which may look like a Porsche but have a top speed of 100km/h and don't work in Winter.

Some clients may get convinced to reduce features (often not used by any user anyway) and focus on performance/ux/a11y by showing them case studies... but many clients don't care about this, they want to have all the features and think this is the best for users without realizing it may be not.

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