In a pretty high end high tech company, there’s still lots of people who see a terminal and think “ha hah, they are still stuck in old mainframe stuff like you used to see in the movies”.
My team determined long ago that we have to have two user experiences for our team to be taken seriously.
A GUI to mostly convince our own managers that it’s serious stuff. Also to convince clients who have execs make the purchasing decisions without consulting the people that will actually use it.
An API, mostly to appease people who say they want API, occasionally used.
A CLI to wrap that API, which is what 99% of the customers use 95% of the time (this target demographic is niche.
Admittedly, there’s a couple of GUI elements we created that are handy compared to what we can do from CLI, from visualizations to a quicker UI to iterate on some domain specific data. But most of the “get stuff done” is just so much more straightforward to do in CLI.
In a pretty high end high tech company, there’s still lots of people who see a terminal and think “ha hah, they are still stuck in old mainframe stuff like you used to see in the movies”.
My team determined long ago that we have to have two user experiences for our team to be taken seriously.
A GUI to mostly convince our own managers that it’s serious stuff. Also to convince clients who have execs make the purchasing decisions without consulting the people that will actually use it.
An API, mostly to appease people who say they want API, occasionally used.
A CLI to wrap that API, which is what 99% of the customers use 95% of the time (this target demographic is niche.
Admittedly, there’s a couple of GUI elements we created that are handy compared to what we can do from CLI, from visualizations to a quicker UI to iterate on some domain specific data. But most of the “get stuff done” is just so much more straightforward to do in CLI.