I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers.
Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm familiar with, I can often work much more quickly in a terminal than I can with a GUI. The assumption that this is different for non-programmers or that they are all scared of TUIs is often a mistaken assumption. The green screens also tend to have fantastic tab navigation and other keyboard navigation functionality that I almost never see in web apps (I'm not sure why as I'm not a front end developer, but maybe somebody else could explain that).
I'll defend green screens all day long. Lots of people like them and I like them.
Everything else you listed I would agree with you about being terrible and mostly hated though.
Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system.
She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds.
When that was changed to a web app a few years later, the same action took 30 seconds, maybe a minute.
Bonus: a few years later, after we had to close shop and I moved on, I was onboarding a new web dev. When I told him about some development-related scripts in our codebase, he refused to touch the CLI. Said that CLIs are way too complicated and obsolete, and expecting people to learn that is out of touch. And he mostly got away with that, and I had to work around it.
I keep thinking about that. A mere 10 years before, it was within the accepted norm for an accountant to drive a TUI. Inevitable, even. And now, I couldn't even get a "programmer" to execute some scripts. Unbelievable.
The best oart was that it was entirely keyboard driven. If you can touch type, you can just read the paper and type away. The job was mind numbing, but the software itself was great.
A few years later in college I worked there again and by that point they'd transitioned to a much slower GUI that basically just wrapped the underlying green screen system. The learning curve was slightly better, but it wasn't nearly as fast.
Purpose-built mainframe-based TUIs were amazing. We lost a lot in pursuit of colored pixels.
Despite its obvious downsides, for people who do regular form input and editing, it's often better than the flavor of the day web framework IMO
I mean, I wouldn't choose to use it, but I get it
At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.
Maybe someone has examples of web apps made for also a high skill ceiling?
I've heard Linear, Superhuman does something like that while maintaining a nice interface, but I've never used those
then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it.
now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew.
rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
- Confirm this is correct? (Yes=F1, No=F2) - Would you like to make any changes? (Yes=F1, No=F2)
And maybe sometimes flip the yes/no F-key assignments as well.
In theory this was done to force users to read the question and pay attention to what they were doing, in practice, users just memorized the key sequences.
/s
Post-web and post 9/11, where web browser UI has infested everything, we are now in a cambryan explosion of crayon-eating UI design.
It seems our priorities have been confused by important things like 'Hi George. I just noticed, that for the admin panels in our app, the background colours of various controls get the wrong shade of '#DEADBF' when loading on the newest version of Safari, can you figure out why that happens?'. 'Oh, and the new framework for making smushed shadows on drop-downs seems to have increased our app's startup time on page transitions from 3.7 seconds to 9.2 seconds, is there any way we can alleviate that, maybe by installing some more middleware and a new js framework npm module? I heard vite should be really good, if you can get rid of those parts where we rely on webpack?'
Agree! Back in 2005, I was involved in a project to build a web front end as a replacement for the 'green screen' IBM terminal UI connecting to AS400 (IIRC). All users hated the web frontend with passion, and to this day, I do not see web tech that could compete in terms of data entry speed, responsiveness, and productivity. I still think about this a lot when building stuff these days. I'm hoping one day I'll find an excuse to try textualize.io or something like this for the next project :)
The fact that someone who has been doing it for years can do it faster is obvious, and pretty irrelevant.
Take someone who has never used either, and they'll enter data on the web app much faster.
You don't see keyboard nav in most web apps for similar reasons. First-time users won't know about it, there's no standard beyond what's built-in the browser (tab to next input, that kind of thing), and 90% of your users will never sit through a tutorial or onboarding flow, or read the documentation.
I would agree with you if we were talking about a customer facing webpage or something. But an app for say an accountant? That should be a TUI or as fast as a TUI. The workers are literally hired to get over the learning curve and become fast with the app, so it's not as big a concern if first-use is more difficult. You arent trying to sell them a product and drive higher percentage click through.
I 100% agree with you for applications for say online shopping. Those should prioritize new user experience over long time user efficiency probably.
