Having to fill in many forms this morning, I was just marveling at how unnecessarily painful data entry is with Expensify. If I want to select the current autocomplete for the vendor, do I press Enter? Nope, that saves the whole expense and exits back to the list. If I want to autocomplete other fields, do I press enter? Yes, that works! What's the difference? Who knows? Who cares? Clearly not anybody on the web dev team.
It doesn't take amazing software in this field to do way way better than everybody else, apparently.
With the amount of data entry that happens on the web, rhe lack of best practices, or really any standardized practices at all, is a damn shame.
My lord the UX decisions Expensify makes are irritating. They recently changed their web login flow; it now forces users to select whether they'd like to login with email, phone, google, apple... each time they login.
I've worked in web development space as a QA, and verifying that web forms are 508 compliant is a big deal if you want to sell anything to the government. Do they just never expect to get any Federal contracts and sell exclusively to private companies, or what?
I have no idea if 508 compliance does anything to help. After 10 minutes of reading, all I have found are nonsense websites that have not specified a single concrete aspect of what it might mean, except putting alt text in images.
I've certainly heard of 508 in the context of WCAG, but I don't know what benefit it could give unless it actually prescribed accelerator keys with consistent visual hints about what it those accelerator keys would be.
Web designers and developers spend way too much time mucking with React or other frameworks, spoiling the natural usability of web browsers. They are more concerned with restyling forms away from the platform's native, visually identifiable controls, than they are with making forms usable or speedy or consistent.
Old terminal based text entry systems were so much better at data entry than the crap we've built since then. I really wish that at least one web framework would take this seriously, given how prevalent web based data system are. Instead, we get a constant churn of harder to use, slower, and more and more abstract web frameworks.
It doesn't take amazing software in this field to do way way better than everybody else, apparently.
With the amount of data entry that happens on the web, rhe lack of best practices, or really any standardized practices at all, is a damn shame.