Following the same theme of liminal UI areas, another thing that peeves me is touch screens like my local supermarket self-checkout which respond with a beep (indicating they know I hit the button) but do nothing, because apparently the beep-region and action-region and not the same. Or maybe I dragged my finger, in which case, please don't beep.
I spent half an hour last night resolving this exact class of bug on a padded clickable widget I was making.
No one told me it had to be perfect, but I care about the user and don't ever want the user to be surprised.
That's the difference you get with outsourcing your engineering team vs developing in-house. If you choose a good team, your developers feel directly responsible for the user experience, go beyond stated requirements, and aren't just doing the bare minimum in order to make a paycheck. A good UX professional is constantly testing their work with unexpected input.
I personally think that was a decent use of time - 30 minutes vs a product-lifetime of not pissing off users that little bit will give a lot of goodwill payoff. But I have worked at a place with in-house developers where they probably wouldn't have showed the initiative to do it themselves, and if brought up later as an annoyance I'd be asked for a "business case" which is a complete non-starter, because how do you even begin to quantify this in a way everyone can agree on?
I value polish for its own sake highly as I think you do too, a well made tool is more rewarding to use. But the ones forecasting developer effort need a concrete justification. So it's best to just sneak this in if you can and hope other people you work with feel the same, after all it's much quicker to do it up front than to lose context and revisit it later. Asking permission will cost far more than your 30 minutes.
Agreed. Just make the best product you can, minding deadlines. If you think your deadlines are too short for the level of polish you prefer, discuss it with your manager and/or decide what is more important to you: polish, or pay. Whether that means putting up with it, finding a better-aligned organization, or starting your own product.
I disagree that this is an invariant of outsourcing; I have worked plenty of places where the contractors/vendors cared more than the FTEs. Conversely, the pressure for dark patterns has generally come from the inside.
This isn't a dark pattern, it's a combination of incompetent designer-developers and a lack of robust specification (on account of assuming competence in your designer-developers)
Oh, this is close to how Android/Material buttons work. When I had that phone, I wondered at least once a day why a button is visually reacting (material “wave” effect) when I tap it but does nothing.
It may even be the same thing you described, if they somehow managed to attach a sound to an animation instead of a handler.
