[HN Gopher] Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
___________________________________________________________________
Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
Author : luu
Score : 715 points
Date : 2021-03-08 02:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.plover.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com)
| OliverJones wrote:
| Yes, that UI is off-the-wall stupid. I'm no expert either. But I
| spend a lot of my time these days on Meet calls with far too many
| participants with my mic muted and video switched off. Then I get
| called on to say something.
|
| Ooof. Where's that user interface? Oh right, it pops up if I
| hover near the bottom of the Meet tab. Oh, right, I have to
| hover, then click the little webcam item, then click the little
| mic icon, but not click the little red thing between them --
| BETWEEN THEM!!! -- that looks like the receiver from a
| 1970-vintage telephone 500 set. What is this, a Peter Sellers
| political movie with a way to call the Kremlin?
|
| "Sorry, could you repeat the question?"
|
| It really is horrible design.
| sischoel wrote:
| If it is any help to you, there are some hotkeys that you could
| use instead:
| https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9896256?hl=en
| madrox wrote:
| I feel this way whenever I watch YouTube streams with live chat.
| It's unwatchable. Unlike Twitch, the chat is an overlay on the
| video (not sure if that's true everywhere or not). I'm positive
| some designer made a really beautiful looking still image without
| thinking of what it might be like to follow a chat (or watch a
| video) in this way.
|
| I'm quite positive this is a byproduct of the
| product->design->engineering waterfall, because while we say we
| are agile, nothing really gets iterated on once an engineer
| starts coding. If it isn't caught in the wireframe phase, it'll
| take a redesign to address.
| arkaic wrote:
| Random thought: I always felt the mic on/off in conference apps
| should've been a toggle switch (up/down or left/right) rather
| than a single button that's red or crossed off when off. In the
| latter situation, I always find myself testing it a few times to
| make sure the UX conformed to what I think it would be.
| ysavir wrote:
| I think the author's point about reset buttons and cancel buttons
| is valid, but not about the Google Meet interface. Reset and
| cancel buttons present an either/or with the submit button. You
| either submit or cancel, and only rarely reset a form, so they
| present interface functionality that is rarely used, but
| significantly impactful of the experience.
|
| But a "leave meeting" button is used at least once per meeting by
| each participant, which may be more frequent than the mute or
| hide video buttons. It's appropriate to put it front and center
| where participants can easily find it.
|
| I feel like what the author really wants here is a confirmation
| before leaving in case of accidental clicks.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I never use the hang up button in Google meet because it just
| irritates me to figure out where to click. So I just close the
| tab.
| ysavir wrote:
| Exactly. Finding the "leave meeting" button is not one that
| should be hard to find as it's expected to be used at some
| point by each participant on the call. The UI should be
| calling attention to it (albeit in a click-safe way).
| Aachen wrote:
| That's actually a good point, I could add a user style that
| hides the button completely because I also always close the
| tab. Would make life a lot easier!
| sesqu wrote:
| That's not so much a problem for the people who want to leave a
| meeting, but it is very much a problem for people who
| frequently toggle their mic on and off.
| alejoar wrote:
| The "leave meeting" button is not used "at least" once by each
| participant. It is used exactly once. Same as the submit
| button.
|
| The reset button can be used multiple times, same as the
| "enable/disable mic/cam", although arguably the latter WILL be
| used multiple times.
|
| I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use that
| needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs finishing"
| actions when separating/grouping buttons.
| ysavir wrote:
| The usage of the other buttons varies wildly by participant.
| I know some that mute and hide the camera at all times unless
| otherwise necessary, while I also know others that generally
| never mute or hide.
|
| > I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use
| that needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs
| finishing" actions when separating/grouping buttons
|
| We could probably separate them along those lines, yes. But I
| don't think this relates much to the original article. It
| compared the "leave meeting" button, which we agree is an
| "exactly once per call" button, to the cancel/reset buttons,
| which are in the "hardly ever maybe never" category, and
| that's not a fair comparison. My point is that while we can
| find ways to distinguish the "leave meeting" button from mute
| and hide, it's not appropriate to give it the same treatment
| as a cancel/reset button should get.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| My favourite stupid design: In iOS, your alarm, when it goes off,
| has two buttons: Snooze and stop. They are properly spaced out.
|
| The timer app has a similar UI, two buttons, one to repeat, and
| one to stop, spaced out. The problem: They are swapped!
| boatsie wrote:
| This bothers me as well and I constantly end up snoozing my
| timers! I can only imagine the reason it's not fixed is that
| some people will complain that they reversed the buttons in
| their app!
| meatmanek wrote:
| It's funny when you compare the two (and I'm pretty sure I've
| accidentally restarted a timer that I meant to stop because of
| the muscle memory I have around alarms), but it makes sense to
| me.
|
| For alarms, the biggest, most obvious button absolutely must be
| snooze, not stop. The plausible harm caused by accidentally
| stopping when you meant to snooze is very high: you miss an
| interview, final exam, court date, or are late to work one too
| many times. The plausible harm caused by accidentally snoozing
| when you meant to stop the alarm is orders of magnitude lower
| -- you are embarrassed when the alarm goes off somewhere quiet,
| maybe you get kicked out of the movie theater.
|
| For timers, 90% of the time, you want to stop the timer.
| Another 5% of the time, you want to start the timer again for a
| different amount of time. (How often do you put something in
| the oven for 35 minutes and then discover it needs another 35
| minutes? Usually you just need a few more minutes.). Only
| occasionally do you want to restart the exact timer you just
| finished. It's a nice feature to have, but it's appropriate to
| make it subtle.
| asdff wrote:
| IMO for the alarm app, the stop button is too small. Probably
| once a week I think I've hit stop and then I'm brushing my
| teeth and hear my alarm ramp up to 100% volume in the next
| room, to the chagrin of my neighbors who work nights in the
| adjoining thin walled unit.
| qubit000 wrote:
| The problem is that everyone has an opinion on design and thinks
| it's only about making things pretty. The designer, often on low
| end of organizational pecking order, is asked to bend over from
| all sounds and is just trying to keep food on the table.
| arkh wrote:
| I'd like to add Discord to the pile: see someone has started to
| stream their screen, click on the icon. Now try to find how to
| get out, usually the first time you'll click on the only
| "disconnect" button you find which disconnects from the
| voicechat. No one thinks "I'll just go on some of the text
| chats".
| oblib wrote:
| This post cracked me up. The follow up post to this is just as
| good.
|
| When I first started developing software in the mid-late `90s I
| bought a book published by Apple called "Apple Human Interface
| Guidelines". I expected it to be a very technical book, but it
| felt more like an 5th grade level school book with lots of
| cartoonish illustrations and very simple language. At first I was
| very disappointed. I sped through it and felt I'd learned
| nothing.
|
| After a few days I picked it up and went through it again. It
| only took about 10 minutes to read it. It explained how the GUI
| widgets were based on UIs that people were familiar with, like
| the old Radios in cars with push buttons that changed the radio
| station and check boxes used on printed forms and then it began
| to dawn on me just how brilliant that design was, and how well
| that book was written. So well most any 5th grader could
| understand it.
|
| In my own software I've been tempted to use one of the many
| "Icon" galleries we have to choose from now but decided not too.
| I opted for simple links and buttons with short but descriptive
| words, like "Preferences" and "New Document" and "Reports".
|
| There are icons for all of those, but my users don't need to
| learn what those stand for, and really don't want to. It's silly
| for me to expect them to learn the purpose of an icon in my app
| when every other app they use might implement them for a
| different purpose.
|
| Sometimes "a picture is worth a thousand words" is not a good
| thing. Sometimes just a word or two is a lot better.
| seph-reed wrote:
| It would be nice if a precedent had been set a long time ago for
| having to double click or click and hold for actions like this.
|
| A prompt saying "are you sure" is obnoxious. But I wouldn't mind
| if big scary operations required me to click and hold for 1
| second instead of just tapping the thing.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| Teams' incoming video call pop-up, anyone?[1]
|
| Can't tell you how many times I hit the big, highlighted
| telephone icon - exactly what you hit on _every other platform
| since the dawn of time to accept an incoming call_ - only to
| instead reject it.
|
| [1] https://www.lync.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/image-6.png
| wohfab wrote:
| "Why is do I get an second call when I'm busy?"
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| I still can't get over the autohiding of the toolbar feature in
| Google Meet.
|
| You cannot disable the autohide and it reflows the whole thing
| for no apparent reason. Usability is yet again at a loss.
|
| I loved this one comparison I read about it. It went:
|
| > Imagine I'm driving on a highway and suddenly I see that the
| exit I want to take is really close so I have to change lanes.
| But the maker of the car made it so I first have to take out the
| steering wheel out of the glovebox to make a turn. That is how it
| feels to use Google Meet's UI with the mute button hidden away.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| They disabled the auto-hiding of the bar about a month ago. Now
| it stays visible all the time.
|
| Before that change we had colleagues complaining that they
| couldn't find the buttons. Now we have others complaining that
| the bar is always visible.
| solox3 wrote:
| Google Meet is an interesting example. The mobile apps (Meet, and
| for some reason, within Gmail) have the End Call button on the
| left, which is more reasonable I guess, but makes me tap the
| wrong button on desktop all the time.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| End call should ideally be on the right, since it matches with
| the usual calling button conventions of send on the left, end
| on the right.
|
| Example:
| https://pixfeeds.com/images/technology/phones/1280-458994239...
| [deleted]
| intrepidhero wrote:
| I just had an idea that might explain why this happens.
|
| Firstly, I've observed a phenomenon when I talk to a programmer
| about a problem I want to solve. They might get excited, learn a
| bit of the problem domain and then go off and build something
| that kind of solves part of my problem. But then I'm stuck in a
| endless cycle of explaining the rest of the problem, to someone
| who isn't really interested, then waiting for a new iteration and
| then evaluating how it doesn't completely the solve the problem
| until the programmer gets bored and goes off to find something
| new and exciting to do with computers. Programming the
| computerwas always the end for them. They don't actually care
| about the problem. I care about the problem. So for me computers
| are a tool to solve my problem. I might as well write the program
| myself because it's less work to become a mediocre programmer
| than to intimately understand the problem.
|
| My theory is that something like this happens in interface
| design. There are designers who love to create beautiful designs,
| and we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They
| don't actually care about the problem that the program (website,
| app, whatever) is supposed to solve. If they were stuck in a job
| filling out forms all day they would quickly learn the lesson to
| put the reset button out of the way. If they were intimately
| familiar with the problem, the better design would be obvious.
| And so it is that people with no "design skills" can point out
| the obvious mistakes of the designers.
|
| It's also true that good design _is hard_. Starting with a blank
| sheet and creating something, let alone something good, is
| daunting. Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to
| admit, "I don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the
| empathy to care about the problem enough to learn it well.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| The single most important lesson I learned in any of my
| software engineering courses was to listen first, build later.
| And keep asking questions until you understand the full
| requirements of the project! So much time and effort is wasted
| when programmers build first and ask questions later, and the
| whole process is needlessly frustrating for everyone involved.
|
| You're spot on re: humility and empathy. I see so much hubris
| in programmers/computer people thinking they/we can fully
| understand the world's problems, much less _solve_ them.
| sriku wrote:
| There's a certain corollary effect to what you describe that
| perhaps applies to "modern" interfaces (both web and native
| desktop/mobile).
|
| Concurrency is excellent as an idea for systems design but
| horrible for user interfaces. Nothing seems to provide a stable
| interface and some concurrent process considers it it's
| privilege to suddenly modify a list of things I'm choosing from
| .. resulting in the items shifting just a few milliseconds
| before I click or tap my choice, which results in the wrong
| choice. This shift happens not only in vertical lists, but also
| tab-bar style buttons.
|
| To be precise concurrency isn't to blame for it, but it's more
| like laziness. The interface elements should be locked in place
| if the system detects that I'm about to select something.
| Whatever else is waiting to show up can wait, because I
| obviously didn't need to know about them a few milliseconds
| earlier.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Your comment makes me think of the distinction Simon Wardley[1]
| makes between Pioneers, Settlers and City Planners. The former
| are the ones who get excited by making something new (and not
| solving the problem), the latter are the ones who get excited
| by making sure things keep running flawlessly.
|
| I do believe there are programmers for every category though.
|
| [1] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-
| to...
| microtherion wrote:
| Kirk McKusick had a similar metaphor around road building,
| with some people hacking a path through virgin jungle with a
| machete, some bulldozing the road, some paving it, some
| adding lamp posts, and some painting the lamp posts.
| valeness wrote:
| I think it's important to note that product lead, system
| architect, and UX architect are distinct roles, each with
| distinct responsibilities, for a reason.
|
| It's not my job as a coder to care about your problem past what
| has been described to me. It is your job, as product lead, to
| care about the problem and design a sufficient information
| architecture, subdomain map, and other documentation to model
| your problem.
|
| This goes both ways. It is not your job to care about my
| problems past how it impacts the product. I don't expect you to
| know or care about how we design the software or how it is
| implemented; whether we use snake or camelCase, if we use
| openssl or pgp, if we choose mysql or postgresql.
|
| I just think it's important to outline that much of your
| comment can be applied in the inverse, and saying that "It's
| less work to become a mediocre programmer than to intimately
| understand the problem", is the same as saying "It's less work
| to become a mediocre product analyst than it is to intimately
| understand how to code".
|
| I agree with your last point, it's important for every
| department to have humility and empathy for the problems of
| their peers. But, it's not a problem to be figured out by
| designers and coders; it's instead an issue that extends
| further and requires effort from everyone involved, and at
| every level, to support.
| creeble wrote:
| I agree here. I think a big part of the problem, even in big
| companies, is that those roles blur too much.
|
| In particular, it is frequently the case where a product lead
| says something like "we need a way to..." and leaves the
| implementation open to discussion to all.
|
| This often leads to a programmer, who is more deeply
| concerned with how that function will operate on the data,
| coming up with a "how about a button that..." and/or just
| implementing the button as a suggestion.
|
| And then the UX architect and product lead, knowing that they
| don't want to piss off this coder for fear of future pushback
| on their ideas, just caves and says "fine".
|
| That's the most common scenario I've seen at larger
| companies. That, and having woefully inexperienced UX and UI
| designers in the first place.
| daveswilson wrote:
| I like that theory. It may explain why the Google Workspace (/G
| Suite/Google Apps) icons are now so indistinguishable. If one
| looks nice, why not make the others look just as nice?
| simonh wrote:
| This is why in so many problem domains, especially outside
| technical problems for IT people, proprietary software is the
| only option, or the only complete option. The best way to
| ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit
| and finish, and make sure they get attention from people with
| the different sets of skills needed to do a good job in all of
| those areas, is to pay them. That means you need a really solid
| revenue stream, and initially need enough capital up front to
| get the project going.
|
| I know, there are open source business models which work for
| some companies and that's true but generally in the sorts of
| technical problems for IT people. Compared to the IT industry
| as a whole those are edge cases. They seem more important to us
| embedded in the IT industry, but compared to the overall multi-
| trillion dollar global IT industry they're peanuts.
| pbasista wrote:
| > proprietary software is the only option
|
| What do you mean by "proprietary" in this context? I believe
| that the availability of the software's source code to its
| users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual
| development of such software is paid or not.
|
| Moreover, free and open source software (free as in
| "freedom", not necessarily free as in "free beer"), makes it
| generally simpler for the regular users to provide input
| regarding the features they need changed. So, in a way, it
| also helps to achieve the goal you describe:
|
| > The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those
| last areas of fit and finish...
| asoneth wrote:
| > simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding
| the features they need changed
|
| Don't get me wrong, a good interface needs to take user
| feedback into account. But trying to accommodate the union
| of all features needed by all users is a recipe for
| madness. Somewhere you need an engineer, PM, designer, CxO,
| or _someone_ who can make judgement calls and decide which
| user needs are more important than others.
| simonh wrote:
| >I believe that the availability of the software's source
| code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the
| actual development of such software is paid or not.
|
| This is true, and I've seen that happen too, one of the
| companies I worked with would sell source licenses to
| customers, and as I understand it this was very common in
| the mainframe business going way back. The software vendor
| retained rights to sell and distribute the software though,
| that's what I mean by proprietary.
|
| I've seen these arguments for open source and libre
| software before many times, but there's a huge
| discontinuity between the theory and what actually happens
| in reality. In the real world there are tens of thousands
| of small and large software houses producing niche software
| for diverse use cases for businesses all over the world.
| Hundreds of niche engineering design, test and optimisation
| applications, B2B services, audio and video tools, chemical
| engineering tools, automation and industrial control
| systems, booking and billing systems, here are an almost
| infinite variety. Most of them are only known to people
| actually in these niche specialisms. In that world
| customers paying for customisations is stock in trade, it's
| entirely normal. In fact the company I'm at right now is
| paying the vendor for customisations to our incident and
| change management ticketing system.
|
| In comparison open source, outside nerdy IT oriented tech
| projects, might as well not exist. It's minuscule. Barely
| even a footnote.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There's a third category: "enterprise" software, where the
| people doing the purchasing are completely disconnected from
| the people using it _and_ the developers. This results in
| appalling UI disasters like Lotus Notes.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| There used to be meme among my friends that we'd express
| how much a piece of enterprise software sucked by how
| expensive we thought it cost. For example, "Wow, this
| sucks. This must cost $500k a year."
|
| It was scary how close we got to some published prices.
| danjac wrote:
| > proprietary software is the only option, or the only
| complete option.
|
| If only that were true. I've watched a completely non-IT
| person work with both vanilla Gnome 3 and Windows 10; they
| found the former far more intuitive and unobtrusive (not
| looking at the individual apps, just the basic desktop UI).
| Proprietary design-by-committee doesn't necessary make for
| better solutions: hence the numerous complaints recently from
| people (often with accessibility issues) trying to book
| vaccination slots on government websites.
| chaos_a wrote:
| This is why most linux distros have interfaces that are
| missing minor features and can be frustrating for users who
| don't have command line experience. For example, why can't I
| easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? Or how about the fact that
| you can't get full file paths shown in the default file
| manager, I often know what directory I want to get to but
| have to figure out what maze of folders I have to go through
| to get there.
| practice9 wrote:
| > Or how about the fact that you can't get full file paths
| shown in the default file manager, I often know what
| directory I want to get to but have to figure out what maze
| of files I have to go through to get there.
|
| Did you mean MacOS?
| rewgs wrote:
| View/Show Path Bar.
| roblabla wrote:
| Windows also has a similar problem: The URL might not
| actually have the "true" path. It's so infuriating each
| time I try to get the path to my Downloads folder on
| Windows, and end up getting "This PC\Downloads". Please.
| I'm a grown up. Give me the real damn path...
|
| Seriously, Linux has a lot of UX issues, but hiding the
| full path of files is a problem that plagues literally
| every single OS file manager. It seems that at some
| point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too
| stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with
| tricks to hide it.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| After reading r/talesfromtechsupport for a while, it's
| apparent that there are quite a few people who _are_ too
| stupid to understand a file hierarchy.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers
| agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file
| hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.
|
| And this is why I find myself mostly in the text shell.
|
| Were I to go graphical the minimum I want is a simple
| address bar that I can override the current path with a
| specified path at will.
|
| Maybe a tree view like in Windows 95 Explorer just to
| pretty things up. Some of the modern comforts like
| thumbnail images would also be welcome.
|
| I wish they would stop insulting their users who have
| taken the time to understand the underlying
| technicalities of a file system. All this should be user-
| configurable in a good file manager. SpaceFM and PcmanFM
| come closest to what I've specified.
| groby_b wrote:
| Hm. Cater to the 1% who have shown that they're able to
| learn complex concepts easily, or support the 99% who
| would rather not think about internals and use a computer
| as a simple tool.
|
| That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes
| sense to expose the internals is if you build a
| specialist tool for people who like internals exposed.
|
| This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable"
| either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of
| states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general
| purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat
| tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path.
|
| The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical
| tools industry has known for a while: You can build a
| general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or
| you can make a specialist tool.
|
| Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with
| the specialist tool and modify it to their own
| requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that
| makes even close to all specialists happy. The
| specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool
| if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step
| of the way.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Being able to see the path in Finder doesn't seem like
| something that only 1% of users would want, though. I've
| seen "normal people" get very frustrated because they
| couldn't figure out where they saved a file. They saved
| it in a folder called "Documents", but they then tried to
| find it in a _different_ folder also called "Documents".
| Hardly seems problematic to show the path to the folder.
| teh_klev wrote:
| > "This PC\Downloads"
|
| I find this annoying as well, but it only happens when
| you use quick access shortcuts. And then once you're in a
| sub folder it'll display the full path in the title bar
| provided you turn on "Display the full path in the title
| bar" in the Folder Options.
|
| Navigating directly to _c:\Users\MyUser\Downloads_ will
| also show the full path in the title bar.
|
| It seems some of these shortcuts have "special"
| behaviours in explorer.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| According to
| https://superuser.com/questions/1362386/always-show-
| absolute... Windows does not mess up the path (yet) if it
| is a UNC path of the format \\\Computer-Name\Users\MyUser
| so you can pin these folders to Quick Access to benefit
| from bookmarking folders while keeping the ability to
| copy folder paths easily.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Thanks for that.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| Seems unlikely, given that in MacOS you could e.g.:
|
| - Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the
| path
|
| - Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which
| inserts the path
|
| - Press Command+I to show a popover describing the path
| to the file
|
| - Enable the "show path bar" option in the Finder's
| "view" menu, which will show a nice graphical
| representation of the path to the current location at the
| bottom of the window (which lets you copy the POSIX path
| to each item)
|
| - For more advanced users, run the command `defaults
| write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES`
| to show the full path to the current folder in each
| Finder window title
| aasasd wrote:
| Also in the same ballpark, you can right-click on the
| window title and see a dropdown with the parent
| directories. Which primarily lets you navigate to them.
|
| Ah, and also if you alt-rightclick on an item, you can
| copy its path to the clipboard. Or you can open the
| 'Edit' menu with alt pressed and copy the path to the
| current folder. Apparently there's even a shortcut for
| this.
| jonplackett wrote:
| > defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle
| -bool YES
|
| THANK YOU!
| nguyenkien wrote:
| On linux side:
|
| - Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the
| path
|
| - Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which
| inserts the path
|
| - Press Alt + Enter to see details describing the path to
| the file
|
| - Press Ctrl+L to see full path. Or just use better file
| manager like Nemo
| eek04_ wrote:
| MacOS has been a pain for me with this; in some of the
| later revisions it's always a pain to get around to the
| right place. I don't spend time learning Mac in depth;
| I'm mostly a Unix person, using a Mac as just a terminal
| to the stuff I actually deal with (which mostly is web
| based or run on a datacenter somewhere.)
|
| It's certainly fine if you work a lot locally with the
| Mac; but for me, the cost-effective thing has been to
| fumble around each time (since I only do this a few times
| a year) rather than memorize handling that I use so
| seldom.
| jiofih wrote:
| The parent comment was complaining about that being
| impossible in Linux before the conversation switched to
| Mac. Which is it?
|
| Also, nothing to memorize about copy & paste or drag &
| drop. I would say you're used to Linux GUIs _not doing
| what you expect_ so the obvious solutions aren't even
| considered.
| ric2b wrote:
| > Also, nothing to memorize about copy & paste or drag &
| drop.
|
| To a terminal. I thought Linux was the one where you
| needed to open a terminal to do basic things, yet from my
| experience it's usually MacOS that needs a terminal for
| such basic things as turning off mouse acceleration.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Dragging a file from a file-browsing application into a
| different application (like the terminal) just to get the
| path is unintuitive and not obvious.
|
| Showing the Finder path bar is the more obvious option.
| Nautilus, the file browser on some Linux distros,
| supports this as well.
| godshatter wrote:
| Dolphin, in KDE land, has this functionality as well.
| the_other wrote:
| Here's one more:
|
| - use columns view
| chaos_a wrote:
| > Did you mean MacOS?
|
| In macos I don't have to edit random .conf files in
| system/application directories just to make my wifi work
| correctly. The graphical UI is configurable enough that I
| rarely need to modify anything outside of my normal user
| directories.
|
| Where as in ubuntu the forums/stack overflow usually say
| "go to this file at /sys/whatever and write in this".
| Hence the need for full file paths.
| dsego wrote:
| Oh really? MacOS is fine when things works, but when they
| don't it's pretty much the same as linux, for better or
| for worse.
|
| Quick example, because I'm trying to make my nas usable
| on a mac and it's given me a headache.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208209
| vetinari wrote:
| On your NAS, put /.DS_Store/ into veto criteria.
| vetinari wrote:
| Really, don't you?
|
| The first thing I do on any Mac is to drop into Terminal
| to run this: defaults delete
| com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs
|
| And don't get me started on the wiping
| `/private/var/db/mds/messages/${UID}/se_SecurityMessages`
| after each update, without which SMB doesn't work.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I mean, I just learned that to show the path in the title
| of the Finder window I need to run:
| defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle
| -bool YES
| ric2b wrote:
| Please tell me how to turn off mouse acceleration in
| MacOS without opening a terminal, because I didn't find
| another way.
|
| It's quite a basic thing, most games include it in their
| settings yet it doesn't seem important enough to have a
| setting in the OS itself.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| At least in KDE's default file manager, if you click on the
| right of the "prettied up" location view, it gives you a
| plain old text-based path field.
| TuringTest wrote:
| And in most KDE and Gnome file explorers and open/save
| dialogs, Ctrl+L shows the whole path in plain text.
| aiilns wrote:
| Same thing in GNOME files if you press ctrl+l. Just like
| you would to get to Firefox's URL.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Uh.. I get to Firefox's URL by clicking on the address
| field.
| airstrike wrote:
| Ctrl+L works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Windows
| Explorer FYI
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Okay?
| airstrike wrote:
| I just mean it's a seemingly ubiquitous hotkey so you may
| find it useful to memorize it
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that hotkey
| if you don't already know it, which is why requiring it
| for a common UI function is bad design.
| airstrike wrote:
| Well, to be fair it is entirely optional.
| ric2b wrote:
| > Right, and I mean there's no way to discover that
| hotkey if you don't already know it
|
| True of any hotkey.
|
| > which is why requiring it for a common UI function is
| bad design.
|
| it isn't required.
| tomcooks wrote:
| When you opened an issue on the respective but trackers
| what did they answer?
| simonh wrote:
| Thank you for posting this, a thousand times. It really
| clearly illuminates precisely why in open source the
| interests of the user and the developer are fundamentally
| differently aligned than in commercial software. Not
| miss-aligned necessarily, but differently aligned.
|
| In open source the developer has the power, they get to
| decide what they work on and nobody can tell them
| otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging
| letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user
| thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask.
|
| In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the
| developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the
| developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of
| mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large
| they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance
| of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a
| lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet.
|
| There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre
| software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's
| proponents seem to think proprietary software is some
| sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why
| proprietary software dominates so completely in so many
| domains outside of IT infrastructure.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And the decade-plus-old bugs I've filed on Google's
| various tools say what?
|
| (I've given up either reporting bugs or, where at all
| possible, using their software, as it's abundantly clear
| my interests and theirs are not in the least aligned.)
| simonh wrote:
| How much did you pay Google? Thanks for lending support
| to my argument that paying for software is the best way
| to ensure the user and developer's interests are aligned.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Some people pay for Google apps on a custom domain
| ($12/month exactly), but I don't expect Google to even
| answer the phone since that's small change for you.
|
| At a certain scale (much smaller than Google's, probably
| already at about 100 customers) it's impossible to please
| _all_ users of your software, so you try to please the
| majority. And whatever you change, there will always be
| that 'one guy' whose workflow will break.
| vetinari wrote:
| Even if you pay annual maintenance fee with 4 or 5 zeros
| at the end, your bugs are going to be ignored, especially
| if they are feature requests.
|
| If they are critical bugs, they might or might not be
| addressed.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Good luck convincing a commercial software developer to
| apply the changes you want. It's rare that a company,
| commercial or not, changes software because of what
| customers want (marketing department koolaid doesn't
| apply).
|
| Developers know best, even when they don't, because
| they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS
| ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes
| yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design,
| documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and
| issues manager
|
| Let me know when you can do this commercially.
|
| On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial
| software when there are libre alternatives; every use
| moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal
| September
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Developers know best, even when they don't, because
| they're the ones doing the actual work.
|
| For me, a large part of the fun of being a developer is
| enabling others to do stuff they otherwise couldn't. As
| such we absolutely entertain feature requests and
| similar, and implement a lot of them.
|
| When sales come back from a sales presentation laughing
| and telling of jaws hitting the floor, it's almost always
| due to features that started as a suggestion from one of
| our users.
|
| Very often though the feature requests are trying to
| solve XY problems. Often there's a better route to
| achieving what the user wants, which almost always is
| some way of avoiding redundant work or other workflow
| simplifications.
|
| Us devs often do know best when it comes to edge cases
| and limitations, and about other use-cases that this
| particular user haven't considered.
|
| However most requests are born from something real, so we
| will usually inquire what the user is after, in an effort
| to determine the impact and alternate routes. I might
| even contact other customers who I know use that module
| or have a similar work flow and ask them what they think.
|
| And based on that implement changes that make the program
| better not just for that user but for all our customers.
| simonh wrote:
| Is it also a crime to create and sell software, even if
| that's the only path available to you that will result in
| the product you see a need for?
| tomcooks wrote:
| You answered yourself with your own question, best
| regards
| conanite wrote:
| If you don't have the skills to make the open-source
| changes you want yourself, but you have the money to make
| it happen, there is nothing stopping you hiring a
| developer to build the patch that you need. I don't know
| of a reliable way to do that with proprietary software.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > there is nothing stopping you hiring a developer to
| build the patch that you need
|
| unless it's accepted upstream, you've got an ongoing
| maintenance problem on your hands. getting an idea in
| isn't always just about time/resources/money. if your
| idea doesn't fit their 'vision', it won't be accepted,
| regardless of how much you have funded your feature. do
| you now take on maintaining a fork? sometimes the answer
| might be 'yes', but I suspect in most cases it's going to
| be 'no'.
| simonh wrote:
| I've worked for two ISVs who's business model was partly
| based on exactly this. Their customers would directly
| fund the development of custom features they needed. The
| first company developed cellular radio network planning
| software, the other developed business middleware.
| collyw wrote:
| I think the things you are complaining about are more
| personal preferences and being accustomed to Mac / Windows
| system.
|
| > why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? > how about
| the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the
| default file manager,
|
| Is it any worse than needing to find the setting to display
| file extension in windows?
|
| I am on Cinnamon desktop as it's a bit old school and
| predictable (for people who have been around since windows
| 98). I right click a file and I have an option to create a
| link. And my default file manager shows the full file path
| in the address bar . So I don't think it's a Linux problem
| rather than a Gnome 3 problem. But I am sure plenty of
| people don't mind Gnome 3 (everyone else at my work used
| the standard Ubuntu desktop.
| Maken wrote:
| >why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu?
|
| Blame GNOME 3. After a decade it's still lacking polish
| everywhere. The day Canonical decided to drop the ball on
| Unity was a sad day.
| cipherboy wrote:
| >
| [deleted]
| pier25 wrote:
| I've seen that too. UI designers not realizing UX is way more
| important than aesthetics.
| jevgeni wrote:
| I think partly it is because UX is measurable ("A is less
| usable than B and thusly bad"), whereas aesthetics are not
| ("different tastes"). A kind of means to escape personal
| emotional accountability.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The problem is also what we do with the ability to measure.
| Typically, we're making easy things intuitive, and
| difficult things impossible. This is exactly the wrong way
| to go about things, if you care about delivering value to
| users[0]. We should be making the easy things easy, hard
| things possible, and forget about the whole intuitiveness
| thing.
|
| There's this widespread belief now that software is only
| good if a user who never saw it before can become
| proficient in it in seconds to minutes. I think this is one
| of the most devastating, dangerous ideas in computing. The
| only way you can achieve a learning curve like this is by
| removing almost all functionality from software - make it
| so dumb that it really takes only a minute to figure it out
| entirely. Sadly, this is what we see in mobile and web
| applications these days.
|
| What worries me here is that we've conditioned everyone to
| assume software is immediately and fully discoverable.
| Nobody is expected to read the manual these days, and so
| manuals are not provided, and since manuals are not
| provided, any feature that cannot be made apparent without
| explaining it in the manual goes away.
|
| (Even with kitchen appliances, the situation isn't that
| bad. When a person sees a particular appliance for the
| first time, they _do_ read the manual, or get someone to
| show them how to operate it. Maybe it comes with the fact
| that buying appliances is expensive and overall a hassle,
| whereas software is too easy to procure?)
|
| --
|
| [0] - I highlight that condition, because it's my belief
| that most software vendors _don 't_ care about delivering
| value to users. They care about making money off users, and
| there are many cheaper ways to do that than creating a
| truly useful and ergonomic product.
| [deleted]
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I think the problems with creating a working solution run both
| ways. I've been involved in many design sessions where the
| subject experts didn't understand how to make their envisaged
| product useful to their audience. It's a common problem in
| programming as well, you can write code that performs well and
| is correct but the interface is such a mess that it's
| completely unusable by anyone else. If someone is designing for
| beauty alone they're caught in the same trap, the composition
| will work well by itself but its purpose will be
| unintelligible. Producing a good design requires working with
| all parties involved including the end users.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is exactly right. I also see this from programmer side-
| projects. The programmer finds a new cool idea, makes a MVP,
| then gets bored and moves on. Github is a holding yard for such
| things.
| dgellow wrote:
| It's not necessarily about getting bored. The
| research/experiment process can be the goal in itself. Not
| everything is about building a finite product.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Nothing wrong with writing simple side-projects and moving
| on, that's an excellent way to learn. Not everyone can afford
| to donate a bunch of their time in maintaining a project for
| free, especially considering it's often such a thankless
| task.
|
| The fact that the code is available means someone can fork it
| and make their own changes and improvements.
| atoav wrote:
| As someone who both designs and programs for the better part of
| his life, nobody is really safe from that phenomena. If
| programming and designing is communication this is akin to go
| "let me say something", sprouting an interesting point, leaving
| the inplied punchline hanging and exiting the room while
| ignoring the reaction. If it happens once, okay -- if it
| happens all the time, maybe you should do something about it.
|
| The thing is: both design and programming are more often than
| not _messy_ when things get real, but every programmer wants to
| create clean and beautiful code and every designer wants to
| create aesthetical designs. Many intuitively perceive this
| "beauty" to be in tension with the complexity of the problem
| that needs solving. The goal of programming and design is
| however _not_ to create beauty, but to solve problems and do so
| beautifully and clearly communicate these solutions, because it
| doesn 't matter how beautiful your code/design is if nobody
| understands it. Beauty is the cherry on top that you get to
| achieve once the cake below is done, tastes well and puts a
| smile on the faces of all the party guests. If you are good you
| might already plan the cherry into the shape of the cake at the
| very beginning -- but confusing the cherry for the cake IMO
| means you are either not there yet in terms of your profession
| or the thing is a toy project to try things out specifically --
| which is totally acceptable if everybody involved agrees and
| totally egoistic and shitty if they don't. Don't agree to
| serious projects you are _not willing to commit to_ once the
| initial interest fades.
|
| Really good designers _are_ about integrating both usabilty and
| aesthetics in an iterative process, and do so in such a way the
| problem is solved, and solved beautifully, all while reducing
| the cognitive overhead needed by users.
|
| And this cognitive overhead is really what should drive us. The
| work of programmers and designers is so beautiful/dangerous
| because it multiplies to a thousand people for a thousand
| hours. Our decision affect people on a daily basis. Removing a
| papercut might seem like nothing, but if it avoids irritating
| even ten other people who use that thing 10 times a day, isn't
| it the obvious thing to not half-ass on, not to toy around
| with?
|
| Btw. Design that is only about aesthetics is something that I
| call "styling" maybe we need a similar word for programmers who
| toy around?
| TuringTest wrote:
| > If programming and designing is communication
|
| There's a research field called Semiotics of Human-Computer
| Interaction studying user interfaces from that angle.
| Developers usually have a technical background from maths or
| engineering, and often are not aware of the importance of
| linguistics in our field.
|
| Both programming languages and GUIs are languages
| (artificial, sure, but linguistics also study those) which
| are used to write expressions that can be read by humans.
| Semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning, provide
| methods to analyze how users make sense of the _software
| artifacts_ (products and tools) delivered to them.
|
| One researcher called the user interface a _designer 's
| deputy_, i.e. a messenger that conveys in its entirety a
| message that the programmers wants to communicate to the
| users. This deputy must stand on its own, since it's the only
| information available to the user.
|
| Users then perform sense-making on the symbols in the
| interface, to infer the meanings of all elements [1]. Notice
| that the user can't see what each interface element actually
| _does_ , since they don't have access to the code; they can
| only guess what it does from the available symbols. If the
| symbols lead the user to infer an incorrect meaning,
| communication breaks.
|
| [1] https://blog.prototypr.io/how-semiotics-can-help-us-in-
| ux-on...
| msla wrote:
| This is the kind of thing project-based courses ought to train
| programmers to expect: Yeah, you're a legitimately good
| programmer, but programming mostly comes down to solving other
| peoples' problems, so you can't rest on your laurels. There's a
| whole, wide world out there of companies that need bespoke
| software, and most of the actual effort in writing that code is
| ensuring it properly enforces the business logic of a business
| you know nothing about.
|
| Therefore, in this project you'll be helping a professor from
| some non-CS department write educational software. You have to
| balance accessibility with pedagogical accuracy, as guided by
| someone who _doesn 't_ secretly know that some specific
| algorithm is the magic key to solving the problem.
| chii wrote:
| There's a 2nd order problem, where the stake holder doesn't
| actually know the requirements until they see a sample
| implemented. "I'll know it when i see it" style. This is
| often the case, with bespoke software.
|
| If the stakeholder has such a clear vision of their end
| result, they probably won't need you to help them implement
| it!
| harryf wrote:
| Also sometimes it's the process a team working on a design
| follows. Tried to illustrate this long ago about mobile
| hamburger menus https://medium.com/@hfuecks/so-we-went-with-a-
| hamburger-menu...
| dgellow wrote:
| I sympathize with what you're saying, though I would like to
| point one thing regarding your first part: writing software is
| sometimes a way to wrap your mind around the problem and think
| about it. When trying to solve something new I like to start
| writing code early on because that gives me a canvas on which I
| can start drafting ideas. It's more concrete than a whiteboard
| but can still be very abstract and flexible.
|
| That's how I identify what I understand and what I don't.
| nipponese wrote:
| Not sure why the designer always gets the blame here. The
| Product Manager set the requirements and sign off on the
| designs.
| yen223 wrote:
| One thing I learn from hacker news is that it's never the
| software engineer's fault
| tomxor wrote:
| If the product manager dictates UI and UX design then they
| are the UI and UX designer and their title is meaningless.
|
| But what I think you really mean is that people are often in
| a blame culture that strategically puts up responsibility
| defenses which distracts them from producing a good result
| and focuses them on red taping to cover their asses. It is
| quite possible in these organizational structures to produce
| absolute shit and tick all the boxes and get everything
| approved and make sure no one in the position of actually
| doing stuff gets blamed for anything.
|
| Not saying that it's their personal fault that certain
| companies are that way, but it is possible to have some self
| respect and march back up to the manager and say hey this is
| shit and we should do a better design rather than waste time
| on this (ok, yes in a more articulate and respectful way) -
| if you think that risks your job then it's probably going to
| be more fruitful working somewhere else anyway. Disclaimer:
| yes I know real life has other restrictions that means not
| everyone can do this.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| This is a pretty lazy explanation of a problem, leaning on
| somewhat disparaging stereotypes like "nerds just want to nerd
| out" without even giving specific examples or looking at deeper
| reasons this might be happening.
|
| For starters, what context have you even experienced this in?
| From your description it sounds like both you and the
| programmer (or designer, as the case may be) are just doing
| this as a side project. Of course there's not going to be the
| incentive to follow-up and do the hard work of finding actual
| product-market fit if it was supposed to just be a fun learning
| experience from the beginning. Did you ever communicate with
| them what your expectations are, what the end goal is, how much
| of a time commitment you expect, and was the other person on
| the same page and equally invested in it? Also, why are you
| expecting the programmer to both figure out the nuances of the
| product and implement it? What is even your role in this, what
| do you bring to the table?
|
| It sounds to me like you did not communicate well or did not
| set expectations properly about this project, and now you're
| blaming the other person for doing a bad/lazy job.
| danjac wrote:
| I think at one time there were a number of designers who
| transitioned from the print/magazine/brochure world to the web.
| They tended to prize "pixel perfection" and aesthetics over UX
| and functionality. This way of thinking is fine for making
| static landing and marketing pages, but is very counter-
| productive when you are building user-friendly, interactive and
| responsive applications. This is opposed to people who are
| actual UX experts who know how to trade off asethetics with
| usability.
| austinjp wrote:
| There certainly were, I worked with a bunch of them. They
| were all talented, came from print and shifted to web +
| print. My job was to turn their gigantic Photoshop files into
| hand-crafted HTML, usually tables to layout carefully cropped
| and compressed JPEGs, and form elements :)
| asoneth wrote:
| This mirrors my experience as a UX designer coming from the
| usability side.
|
| Many graphic design refugees are interested in learning about
| usability, user research, heuristics, Fitts' Law, GOMS/KLM,
| etc. But it takes time and energy. I've found that some small
| companies with no established UX team start out gravitating
| to shiny portfolio examples and end up putting visual design
| (VX) folks in charge of interaction design which sometimes
| goes poorly e.g. https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-
| dribbblisation-of-des...
| danjac wrote:
| "Too many designers are designing to impress their peers
| rather than address real business problems." This has its
| parallel with the developer world, where tech choices are
| made to impress the peer group (including those in other
| companies likely to be hiring you) rather than address the
| business problem at hand.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I partially agree that designers love to create beautiful
| designs and they don't care about the products.
|
| This is giving a false complacency to what outta be a tight
| intergration between design + developers with an oversight from
| the product owner. It is _simply inexcusable_. We 're actively
| creating a culture of disregard/complacency/ignorance by not
| shedding light on this as a huge problem in UX/UI design.
|
| I want more people to make noise about this.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I think you're missing a few steps in your development process,
| or at least one. Normally it goes like this:
| problem->solution->implementation->testing. Each step has a
| role associated with this: user->analyst->coder->tester.
|
| If you go straight from problem to coder, you shouldn't be
| surprised that you don't have a proper solution, because nobody
| really made a proper solution. That's like building a house
| without an architect. Hire an analyst.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I don't know. The projects I got involved in that had an
| analyst involved tended to have reams of documentation for
| the obvious features, completely missed the non-obvious
| features and was wildly wrong in parts.
|
| This is what agile was created to solve. It was an acceptance
| of the reality and an attempt to live with that rather than
| trying to bend it to your will.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Even agile teams need someone who analyses the solution. If
| there is nobody who specifies the solution, you get what OP
| describes.
|
| Agile does not exclude different roles, on the contrary.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Most corporations aren't big enough to warrant dedicated
| personal for these roles.
|
| And if they are, it often ends with impossible to
| implement/maintain designs.
| koonsolo wrote:
| So 5 developers don't need a tester and business analyst?
| WTF.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Most developers can write tests and architect software
| just fine.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Each step has a role associated with this:
| user->analyst->coder->tester.
|
| Have you ever played that telephone game?
| koonsolo wrote:
| These are the steps, not the communication channels. Look
| at any agile team and all parties should be represented in
| 1 meeting.
| hulitu wrote:
| Testing is hard. That's why they let it to the user.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| If I know that the user changes what he originally wanted,
| damn right I give the thing to the user instead of wasting
| effort on perfection and edge cases that get thrown out.
| obscura wrote:
| This sounds like a flawed development cycle. Where's the end-
| user testing?
|
| In defence of the developers/programmers, many people are
| _really_ bad at explaining what they want, not least because it
| 's often not what they actually need.
|
| If a designer is designing something that looks good but
| doesn't work well (i.e., solve the problem), they are bad at
| usability/UX. They should be getting user feedback on their
| design before it's implemented - that's what user-centred
| design is about.
|
| There's often a gap when it comes to understanding requirements
| - between the end-user and the developer, between the designer
| and developer, etc. Requirements gathering is actually a
| specialised skill and one of the key duties of a business
| analyst.
| bsanr2 wrote:
| I think it's simpler than that, in this case. What OP is
| describing is essentially a *control panel* (a small interface
| of grouped inputs for common tasks). This is an artifact of
| engineering design, where physical space and materials are
| usually at a premium, both in construction and usage. Once
| you've designed and built your controls, that's it; there's no
| spiriting a secondary interface out of thin air.
|
| However, with dynamic display-based interfaces, you can do just
| that. Much as I tend to loathe Apple's design, the way they
| handle iPad shutdowns is quite good: first, you press a button;
| then, the _entire display_ changes to focus on this task. If
| you want to shutdown, you then have to perform an entirely
| different gesture to confirm. This layering of visual feedback
| and input types escapes the control panel paradigm and
| correctly takes advantage of the freedom that act lends to
| better communicate with the user.
|
| Unfortunately, doing so often means eschewing standards and
| best practices to find a solution that _should_ work better for
| users. That is extremely difficult to get right; it 's not very
| surprising that designers would purposely decide to use a
| flawed but known model instead.
|
| We need to get it out of our heads that designers only do
| things because they're visually satisfying. They are making
| purposeful and critical decisions to meet a design objective.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Architects - of the original building sense have a similiar
| misplaced emphasis problem being more about appearances and
| "advancing the field (read: novelty)" than functionality.
| Brutalism was an infamous example for making downright
| needlessly depressing buildings to live and work in that don't
| even save on maintenance in spite of eschewing ornamentation.
| Other fun foibles include putting the duct work on the outside
| of the building, the mold trap that is Fallingwater, and
| accidentally having a skyscraper melt a very fancy car with its
| glare before they had to sandblast it away.
|
| It is kind of a tautology to say it but this hints at it being
| a human organizational social issue behind the pathology if it
| keeps cropping up.
|
| I agree that good design is hard and often involves substantial
| work beyond just making something on the sheet.
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| > There are designers who love to create beautiful designs, and
| we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They don't
| actually care about the problem that the program (website, app,
| whatever) is supposed to solve.
|
| They're essentially aestheticians, not designers. Yep, I hate
| them too.
| prox wrote:
| You literally described my job, I bridge the gap between
| design, code and make sure there is a thorough implementation
| of both, I have skills that overlap in those areas and so I can
| advise clients properly for any gaps that might have arisen. My
| bible is About Face : Interaction Design.
| mst wrote:
| Speaking as a programmer who only occasionally interacts with
| design and considers himself largely terrible at it, reading
| "About Face" is probably the single book that helped the most
| to make me (slightly) less terrible.
| prox wrote:
| It is always good to hear this! Especially the part about
| smart products and posture is very good to know by heart.
| So many apps still just botch their posture or completely
| forget the users intent and context (if they even consider
| it!)
| tootie wrote:
| Haha, yes! And that book is pretty ancient. I think the first
| edition dealt exclusively with building Windows desktop apps
| because the web wasn't ready yet. It lays out some of the
| blindingly obvious UX axioms that a lot of devs just don't
| bother to think about. One of them is "hide the ejection
| lever" (a metaphor for the ejection lever on a fighter jet)
| for exactly the kind of thing MJD is discussing. Have those
| irreversible, destructive controls be present and findable,
| but really hard to click by accident.
| prox wrote:
| Haha, great example! It has had some revisions, my copy is
| from 2014, but the great thing is that it all remains
| relevant.
|
| The big takeaway is that humans shouldn't be required to
| think like computers when they are interacting with one.
|
| "Warning : Failed to load library" <ok>
|
| Why did the library failed to load? Why are we being
| informed? Why does it say "Ok" when it is not ok?
|
| As a lovely example. And on the regular you still have
| these problems. The daily wtf is full of current day
| examples.
| tootie wrote:
| I think my favorite lesson was their term
| "implementation-driven design" that I still see pretty
| frequently. It's where you build your UX to match your
| system architecture and is the opposite of "user-driven
| design". Like building forms that are just one-to-one
| with the database tables. It's why I cringe every time I
| see devs on hacker news saying they don't need managers
| or designers to build products because you'll end up with
| an implementation-driven design more often than not.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| This is an excellent description of the CADT issue in most open
| source software.
| thom wrote:
| It's always been notable to me that the thing that killed Flash
| wasn't the wars with the usability community 20-odd years ago,
| it was the iPhone. People dumped these garish interfaces
| because a beautiful device came along that refused to run them,
| not because they were in many or perhaps most cases terrible
| for the task at hand.
|
| I think a lot of the methodological knowledge built by
| usability people has probably been ignored in favour of a
| metric-driven approach these days. That approach is very good
| at identifying bottlenecks in existing workflows or deciding
| between two ideas, but ultimately lacks the empathy you
| describe. You can only really build that by engaging directly
| with users, and watching them suffer at the hands of your
| creations.
| matsemann wrote:
| I've always felt it a bit weird that iPhones quickly became
| the norm for all designers I've worked with, them hailing it
| as a so great to use. While I'm stuck not knowing how to find
| stuff, it's always hidden behind some undiscoverable swipe
| gesture. The home button used to have 10+ or so different
| functions based on context. They _way_ you touched the screen
| (click, long press, 3d touch or whatnot) mattered.
|
| Do normal users know all this? Or do they just only use the
| 10% easy functionality of the phone and is happy with that?
| Maybe articles like "17 Things You Didn't Know Your iPhone's
| Home Button Could Do" is a sign usability has been sacrificed
| in order to have a clean&neat design.
| rkachowski wrote:
| I have a half-baked still-gooey thought about this, but
| it's really around the time of the iphone (and the take off
| of the smartphone) that discoverability got thrown in the
| trash. Search bars instead of menus became the primary
| means of interaction, and ironically you can only find
| something with the search bar if you already know what you
| are looking for.
|
| Of course menus don't translate well to touch devices, and
| menu systems can quickly become unorganized junk drawers
| for functionality, but it feels like discoverability was
| never fully solved on touch devices.
| bentcorner wrote:
| As an Android user it's also a problem here. The settings
| menu got a Search feature a few releases ago and its a
| sad concession that people have no idea where to find
| things in the Settings menu.
|
| And it also has the same problem you describe - you don't
| know how to find something unless you know what it's
| called. And even if you do find something, there's no
| breadcrumb trail to learn how to find it _without_ using
| search. You have to look at what 's on the current page
| and like some kind of reverse engineering sherlock, think
| about where a designer could possibly have put this page.
| It's insane.
| asoneth wrote:
| Interesting. I've worked in design orgs since the iPhone
| came out and in my experience it's always hovered around
| 50/50. Maybe it's an East Coast, West Coast thing?
|
| I will say that when it first came out the direct
| manipulation of the iPhone UI was a qualitatively different
| experience compared to any other touchscreen for a very
| long time. Back then most Android reviews included caveats
| like "stuttery", "janky", or "low resolution", and these
| had the cumulative effect of spoiling the illusion of
| direct manipulation.
|
| Today the gap is much smaller and easier to ignore, and the
| iPhone has added lots of hidden affordances like swipes and
| double, triple, and force taps to cater to expert users at
| the expense of novices.
| aikinai wrote:
| How is it as the expense of novices? They were fine
| without it before and they're fine without knowing about
| it now. But if they do end up wanting to do some of that
| advanced stuff, it's one Google or friend-suggestion
| away.
| asoneth wrote:
| It's a persuasive argument, and one I've used myself.
|
| One danger is if the affordance is triggered
| accidentally. For example, my kids like pushing buttons
| and swiping when I wouldn't think to do those things and
| accidentally switch apps or enter into guided access
| modes without meaning to. In my case I occasionally
| trigger things like sticky keys unintentionally.
|
| Another danger is if application developers start
| assuming that they can rely on users knowing hidden
| affordances and use swiping, double-tapping, force
| pressing, right-clicking, etc in the core application
| workflow. Not an Android iOS example, but last night one
| of my kids started playing Stardew Valley as their first
| non-tablet game. It has a steep learning curve since it
| relies on multiple different keyboard keys and on
| differentiating between right and left-click, whereas I
| wouldn't consider right-clicking to be a novice skill.
| wruza wrote:
| You can tap on the clock to scroll to the top on iphone
| (not only in browser).
| Agentlien wrote:
| I have never understood the hype about the iPhone
| interface. I had an early Android and I loved it. Then, for
| a year or two, I had an iPhone 4 which I got from work. I
| never learned to love it. It always felt a bit obtuse and
| like it didn't quite do what I wanted. I felt like the
| interface was sacrificing usability for a superficial sense
| of elegance and efficiency for smoothness of animations.
|
| When that phone stopped working I got a decent Android
| phone and it felt so much more comfortable.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Actually, having 10% common functionality easily available
| for unsophisticated users, and the rest hidden but fast to
| access, is good UI.
|
| Sure, discoverability is good to have, but it is not a
| failure that you need to be told about it as long as it
| only contains features useful to power users.
|
| Requiring experts to undergo some training to make the most
| out of their devices is acceptable UI if the final
| interactions are optimized for their use; double so if it
| doesn't interfere with usage by untrained users.
| matsemann wrote:
| Yes, but I just feel that I have to help my parents with
| the most menial of tasks, but even then I sometimes
| cannot figure it out without googling.
|
| I wonder if it's kinda a stockholm syndrome or if it
| caters to one's ego somehow. After discovering a feature,
| one feels smarter / more connected to the device,
| compared to if it was actually easier to use from the get
| go.
| kolinko wrote:
| Examples of such tasks? I gave my 65yo mom an Iphone a
| few years back and there were literally zero issues after
| the quick intro on how to launch apps etc
| krustymeathead wrote:
| I wish my 71yo dad was as proficient as your mom. He
| doesn't remember anything he doesn't do regularly.
|
| For example, he texts frequently but doesn't know how to
| check his email. Because I am the tech support child, he
| reaches out to me for iPhone help. However, since I am
| not an iPhone user, I always struggle and sometimes fail
| to solve his problem.
|
| Perhaps this is a sign I have not dedicated enough time
| to learning this new OS in my family ecosystem, but I do
| feel it is the least-similar to the other OS's I have
| used. It's like if my dad was learning programming and
| asked if I'd help him with his Lisp program. No thanks.
|
| Though maybe I am just a luddite and the universe is
| written in iOS.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah. You are supposed to say "dumb, little ole me, look
| how smart this this thing is, hiding all this cool
| stuff...isn't that neat!" It fits well with the kind
| people our society churns out. Victims that blame
| themselves.
| collyw wrote:
| I am beginning to think that hiring for enthusiastic
| programmers might be a mistake. Get on old cynical bastard like
| me. I just want to make my own life easy, and that means
| writing the easiest to maintain code that I can. Not trying out
| some new tech that has promised to solve all my problems.
| j-krieger wrote:
| You're describing me and my ''kind'' of programmers very well.
|
| I try to make myself interested in your problems. However, most
| of them seem really ''otherworldy'' to me or are in a domain I
| don't care about about. I became a programmer because I like
| the art of the trade, and I keep myself interested by writing
| interesting code.
| myth2018 wrote:
| I agree and I think your ideas form a good model to explain so
| many issues we've been facing more and more often.
|
| Some days ago I wrote here in HN about the change my stock
| broker made on their default home broker. It immediately
| becomes obvious that the people responsible for that design
| have never performed anything nontrivial with stocks. They
| created a symmetrical, colorful platform. The symmetry is
| enforced, therefore you don't have the flexibility of setting
| up your quote-boxes any longer (perhaps because that would
| break the artist's concept). Just to mention one of many issues
| the new design brought.
|
| The same applies to the Google Meet example in the article.
| Functionally, you'd never want those buttons presented that
| way. But placing them like that makes them look nice and
| symmetrical and Gestalt-related stuff, so that's the way to go
| and deal with it, dear users.
|
| > Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to admit, "I
| don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the empathy to
| care about the problem enough to learn it well
|
| I agree, but don't see that happening, not in the short term at
| least. I had an argument with a designer some time ago about
| how much longer the project was going to take and how her ideas
| were actually substracting value from a user perspective. But
| she ended the discussion with a "this project has my signature,
| my reputation is in there". And that's what my criticism
| against current UX trends is all about. Artist's concept trumps
| user needs, project maintainability and everything. They are
| investing all the resources on graphic design matters and this
| is obstructing the whole field.
|
| Some UX folks argue that designers like those "aren't true UX
| designers". I agree, but those "false" designers seems to be
| outnumbering the "true" ones. The latter may eventually have to
| found a new discipline.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| This is a great comment which concisely expresses my own
| thoughts on the topic. Junior developers could learn a lot by
| absorbing this insight.
| andybp85 wrote:
| I've been saying this exact thing about the copy and paste
| shortcuts for years. If I had a dollar for every time I copied
| the thing I was trying to paste over, I could afford to crusade
| against this injustice.
| dmalik wrote:
| There is a recent NN/g article that covers this exact UX issue:
| https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt...
|
| > One of the starting points of the modern UX discipline was the
| application of psychology to industrial design in the 1940s.
| During World War II, Alphonse Chapanis (among others) worked to
| understand why pilot errors caused a large number of B-17 bomber
| crashes during landings. He noticed that the lever that pilots
| used to lower the landing gear and the one that lowered the wing
| flaps were identical and differentiated only by placement. This
| similarity caused pilots to mix the two up, especially in high-
| stress moments such as landing a plane. Chapanis helped redesign
| the controls on the B-17 bomber to avoid pilot error by changing
| the shape of one of the two levers, so pilots could quickly tell
| which lever they had in hand.
| roughly wrote:
| > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and
| "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you,
| Firefox.
|
| Oh man, I actually remapped quit on Firefox because this bit me
| too many times and Firefox kept removing ways to confirm quit. I
| will die on the hill that "confirm quit" is the correct behavior.
|
| (I have, in fact, died on this hill enough times I may be outing
| my HN burner with this comment.)
| lifeformed wrote:
| Reminds me of playing PUBG: while in a moving vehicle, press R
| to reload, or press F to jump out and instantly die.
| vxNsr wrote:
| This is where extra mouse buttons save you, if my wasd
| fingers are leaving their positions I'm doing something
| wrong.
| input_sh wrote:
| My favourite is editing crontab ( _the_ scheduler on Linux).
| It 's -e to edit the file, -r to delete all content from it
| with no confirmation dialogue or anything. I fell for that
| twice already.
|
| I can't imagine how often you need to delete everything from
| a file without using a text editor. I'm sure it's not _that_
| common that you need to give it a one-letter flag (instead of
| --remove or --delete) and put it right next to the fucking
| edit flag.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Or no flag at tall to replace it entirely with the stdin
| contents. How many commands are there that completely
| destroy all the data they can access if you call them
| without parameters?
|
| I really wonder if there is any script on any distro that
| uses this behavior. Most distros did go into the sane
| "let's split the crontab into many files" option.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The designers were aware. One of the car in-game has a F2HNK
| license plate (f to honk), which doesn't honk but jump out of
| the car.
| natrys wrote:
| Apparently it's finally going to be configurable in Firefox 87
| (next release)[1].
| browser.quitShortcut.disabled true
|
| The default will still be false though.
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 (only
| took 21 years, jeez)
| goldsteinq wrote:
| Confirm quit is a default for me. Pressing ^Q gives me "you
| have 284 tabs, are you sure you want to close them" window.
| teddyh wrote:
| I thought newer Firefox changed it to Ctrl-Shift-Q?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Tbf, I think this is more the Mac's fault than Firefox's. I
| think cmd-q/cmd-w probably predate Firefox's use of them.
|
| > I will die on the hill that "confirm quit" is the correct
| behavior.
|
| Google Chrome has a weird 'solution': on cmd-q press it popups
| a temporary overlay which reads "Hold cmd-q to quit"
| eyesee wrote:
| > I think cmd-q/cmd-w probably predate Firefox's use of them.
|
| By a decade or two, yes.
| kps wrote:
| > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W
|
| Right -- Control-W should always1 be 'erase word'. Windows/IBM
| really mucked things up by stealing Control for GUI operations
| (among other things like conflating Tab with Next-Field because
| they're the same thing on punch cards).
|
| 1 Okay, 'end of transmission block' is also acceptable.
| m463 wrote:
| I've been saying the same thing about the Apple phone app for
| years.
|
| Here's the problem - you touch ANYTHING in the phone app and it
| will dial the phone.
|
| My mother used to have all kinds of problems with this.
|
| Why is butt-dialing a thing on an iphone? Billions of dollars of
| development and I still get into the phone app and I have to keep
| my hands off the screen and tap carefully not to screw up.
|
| I'm listening to a voicemail - whoops I am calling them back
| right now!!! argh.
|
| What is this unknown number? Wait, I DON"T WANT TO CALL IT!
|
| The solution is simple: a setting that lets you confirm before
| calling. Just like when you tap what looks like a phone number in
| everything OUTSIDE the phone app.
| swiley wrote:
| I've given up and just run older x11 software on my phone now
| because the UI is more sane.
|
| No one builds good UIs anymore.
| [deleted]
| username3 wrote:
| The reset button is for clearing search forms.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Shouldn't the submit button be obviously on the right? It's an
| operation that goes forward in the procedure, in time, like the x
| axis the process should point right.
|
| Do all web forms have a left aligned button by default? I just
| realized they do on HN but if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago I'd
| have told you it was on the right.
| kstenerud wrote:
| It's a leftover from windowed UI design. In an OS level window
| requestor, the "affirmative" button is traditionally on the
| left, and the "negative" button is on the right. Progressive
| UIs were not common, except in wizards.
|
| When forms were implemented, it was important to keep the
| behavior consistent with what people experienced in their OS.
|
| Now that we have touch phones, the situation has changed, but
| the best practices have not.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The notion is probably "first/common choice on the left."
| However, I get what you are saying about the go-forward context
| but that can change based on your language RTL vs LTR.
| throwaway346434 wrote:
| Entirely agree - left to right reading direction, the last
| thing you want to do is submit the form.
|
| Having it on the left, imo, people might look there first _but
| continue to scan_ to see what the other control is. When you
| finish reading a sentence of text in a paragraph, you certainly
| have the last word of it stick out, how is this different?
| [deleted]
| msla wrote:
| It should be on the right in locales where people read right-
| to-left.
| franciscop wrote:
| No, it depends where you are aligning things among other
| considerations. But if your form follows the typical "F"
| pattern, then putting the button where the user's eyes are is
| the logical step.
| sergix wrote:
| Not necessarily. Having the submit button first means it's the
| first action the user sees since most people (at least
| Westerners) read left-to-right. However, your reasoning with
| having the order the opposite with the submit button last is
| spot-on.
|
| No specific advantage has actually been attributed to either
| choice of order. What matters is (1) keeping the order
| consistent throughout an application, and (2) following the
| provided style guide for the platform you're developing on.
|
| (Also, the order may need to be changed if the primary action
| is destructive, such as a "Reset" button.)
|
| I did an extensive write-up about this topic if you're curious
| on more details: https://dev.to/sergix/ux-illuminating-
| intention-198k
| inetknght wrote:
| > _(1) keeping the order consistent throughout an
| application_
|
| Not even just an application. The whole phone needs to be
| consistent. Every app in it. Otherwise it's just repeatedly
| discovering and forgetting how to use each and every app's
| unique interpretation of what _their_ average user wants and
| what _their_ average user thinks is intuitive.
| sergix wrote:
| I mostly agree, and that is why I mentioned that you should
| follow the general design guidelines for your respective
| platform. However, when creating a web app, general
| guidelines are more "implied."
|
| The biggest reason why consistency is more important than
| following platform guidelines is for cross-platform apps
| available on multiple devices that have different platform
| design guidelines. It's obviously not feasible (and I would
| argue not user-friendly either) to switch the order of
| action controls for the same app on different devices,
| especially when the app is available via a web interface as
| well as native.
| danaliv wrote:
| I'm surprised to see so many people insisting that the submit
| button should be on the left. Next time you get a dialog box
| (or equivalent) on a platform that has user interface
| guidelines, pay close attention to the button placements.
| You'll find a preference for right-aligned buttons.
|
| Windows: "Right-align commit buttons in a single row across the
| bottom of the dialog box, but above the footnote area. Do this
| even if there is a single commit button (such as OK)."
|
| Mac: "Any buttons in the bottom right of a dialog should
| dismiss the dialog. An action button, which initiates the
| dialog's primary action, should be farthest to the right."
| (Also noteworthy: "Separate destructive buttons from
| nondestructive buttons.")
| arp242 wrote:
| On the left it's more linear, rather than tucked away in the
| far-right corner. It seems more natural to me.
|
| For example I would think this makes much more sense:
| Name [arp242 ] Email
| [arp242@example.com ] I have a HN account []
| [Submit]
|
| To: Name [arp242
| ] Email [arp242@example.com ] I
| have a HN account []
| [Submit]
|
| In the first example the "Submit" is aligned with what you're
| filling in: Name, email, that checkbox, etc. Your eye will
| naturally fall to the "submit" because that's the next in the
| series.
|
| This also works much better if you put the labels above the
| inputs: Name [arp242 ]
| Email [arp242@example.com ] [] I have a HN
| account [Submit]
| [Submit]
|
| If you click (or tab) through every one of the inputs one-by-
| one then you'll end up on the "Submit" if it's on the left, but
| you need to jump to the right if it's placed there.
|
| And people read things from left-to-right; I find left-
| alignment almost always more natural; this is why most
| navigation sidebars are also on the left (which is often also
| inverted in websites using right-to-left scripts).
|
| It's even worse if you also place a reset button; I would
| imagine more than a few people in a hurry will accidentally
| reset forms if it's placed on the left and has equal prominence
| to submit. Aas the article already mentioned, you probably
| shouldn't have a reset button at all, and most forms these days
| don't.
|
| Anyway, I think "it goes forward in the procedure, in time" is
| overthinking these things too much in too abstract terms. Just
| put things where people's eyes and mouse cursor will naturally
| go for these kind of things will get you a long way.
|
| All of that being said, consistency is also important, so if
| there's a system/platform where things are consistently on the
| right then sticking to that is usually more important.
| foz wrote:
| Having actions on the right is more natural - this is
| reinforced by the UX of mobile devices we all use every day.
| Tap and we flow forward, to go backwards, we go left.
|
| Like spoken languages, the language of design changes over
| time, and what used to be normal can be quickly outdated
| (like the reset button on forms).
| arp242 wrote:
| A desktop computer is not a mobile device though; there are
| different sensibilities involved because pretty much
| everything is different. A lot of UX regressions from the
| last years come from this mistake.
|
| What is more "natural" is a pointless discussion anyway
| IMO; I regret phrasing it like that and I wish I could edit
| it. As I said, the key is to put things where people's eyes
| and mouse cursor will go, and that's rarely a "jump" to an
| entirely different place on the screen (on mobile this
| problem exists less because the screens are small). While
| it doesn't matter too much on narrow forms (less of a
| jump), on wide forms it's a bigger issue (or if it's placed
| to the right of the form inputs take).
| fakedang wrote:
| Having been conditioned on Windows since my childhood
| (like nearly every person out there), I would be _very_
| weirded out if the Submit button was on the left on a
| desktop.
| godshatter wrote:
| Whichever is chosen, just make it visually distinct from
| the other buttons, and be consistent, and I'll be content
| (if not actually happy, depending on which one matches my
| opinion).
| dang wrote:
| Current thread on the successor post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395951
| blunte wrote:
| This is the classic problem of people being allowed or enabled to
| do things they are not properly educated about - not a criticism,
| but an observation.
|
| This can be applied to anything: child rearing, writing,
| presenting, singing, dancing, pet-owning, coding, UI developing,
| ..., ..., ...
|
| Without a formal educational foundation, people just do what they
| see. And the more people do without education, the more the
| overall result will stray from (perhaps) what is best.
|
| In school we learned formal language grammar, and only if we were
| experienced and of some high profile (or having no audience) were
| we allowed to exercise "creative license" to break the rules.
|
| It might kill some good creativity, but it would also kill
| bad/wrong creativity in user interfaces if there were fairly
| strict rules to follow.
|
| Some of the coolest UIs also happen to be terrible to actually
| use. Same goes for books written with inconsistent typography,
| alignment, etc.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The follow up about gmail icons is equally true + cutting. I've
| always just ignored all those icons having had no idea what most
| of them do.
|
| https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Opened this fully expecting to see a rant about the Spam button
| being right next to the Trash button (the UI 'mistake' I make
| most often because of lazy mouse movement).
|
| But it wasn't, and now I can't unsee those icons either, even
| though I don't use them!
| jonplackett wrote:
| It's funny, I didn't really fully know they were there
| either, I just had the feeling that gmail was really quite
| cluttered.
| ArchieMaclean wrote:
| My favourite example of this is Sibelius. The 'Quit Sibelius'
| button is precisely where you'd expect to find the 'Next' button.
|
| This video shows it at 6:33
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI&t=6m33s
| apexalpha wrote:
| That was hilarious, thank you.
| aasasd wrote:
| That dude also among other programs reviewed MuseScore, and
| now he's a head designer at MuseScore.
| mjd wrote:
| Title needs more fucking obscenities.
| intrasight wrote:
| Had to share this UX anecdote. My first job out of school was
| creating a "browser" for nuclear power plants. This is 1989.
| There were no mice. Just a dedicated custom expensive lit
| keyboard. Probably cost a few thousand at that time. This guy is
| in front of a more modern incantation. Ours had no joysticks -
| just arrow keys.
|
| https://www.alamy.com/control-room-of-nuclear-power-generati...
|
| One of the older engineers explained that the key labeled "Run"
| used to be labeled "Execute". But apparently after a near fatal
| accident, management decided to change the label.
| bronlund wrote:
| He obviously don't use macOS :) This utility have saved my ass
| more than once: https://commandqapp.com/
| VectorLock wrote:
| The Google Meet three-buttons thing is so infuriating. Every time
| I get a family video conference going an older person will join
| with their camera/mic off and a "press the red circle with the
| camera icon in it" inevitably ends up them hanging up on the
| call.
| lbriner wrote:
| Isn't this another example of something that to the casual
| listener sounds simple: "Good design" but the truth is incredibly
| complex, as many posts have already mentioned:
|
| 1) I am paid for design so leaving it as it is cannot be an
| option, I need to change something
|
| 2) I want to make something objectively better but this would
| make it too different than the other existing products
|
| 3) I can make it better but my existing users would prefer things
| to be left alone
|
| 4) I don't understand that just because that crazy new design
| works for Google doesn't mean it makes sense for me
|
| 5) Everyone has an opinion on design without necessarily any cost
| to that opinion
|
| 6) Marketing need to have some control over branding and the line
| is not usually clear
|
| 7) The reasoning behind design decisions is often lost over time
| so somebody breaks something to make it look good
|
| 8) Need to optmise for multiple devices = compromise
|
| 9) Things need a freshen up to stay competitive even if they are
| functionally acceptable otherwise we look out of date and people
| won't use us
|
| 10) The line between pretty and functional is not the same for
| each person/company product.
|
| I could go on but you'll be pleased to hear that I won't!
|
| (edit - formatting)
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| From his related article...
|
| > So you'd have a bunch of form widgets, and then, at the bottom,
| a Submit button, and next to it, a Reset button.
|
| > Even as an innocent youth, I realized this was a bad design. It
| is just setting people up for failure... Obviously, the Submit
| button should be over on the left, just under the main form,
| where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the
| other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the
| right
|
| Dead wrong. Most people are right-handed. The mouse cursor spends
| most of its time on the right side of the screen. That's why the
| scroll bar is always on the right and why the HIG says the
| confirmation button is on the right. Cancel/reset/destructive
| button is on the left.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Forms are usually left aligned, so the keeping the form button
| on the left aids usability.
|
| https://uxplanet.org/buttons-alignment-policy-a26de4ce0c70
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I think the author's own illustrations disprove his point.
| Most users do not tab between fields, they mouse. Given that
| anywhere on an input is clickable to focus, and the cursor
| rests to the right, a user is more likely to linearly click
| down the list on the right hand side.
|
| I suppose user testing would prove things one way or the
| other, but my money's on right.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Here are some results from a test Luke Wroblewski did many
| years ago.
|
| The best performing option was where the buttons were left
| aligned.
|
| See: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571
|
| But agreed, if you can test your designs with users then
| you should.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _the HIG says the confirmation button is on the right_
|
| There's more than one "The HIG":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| > Don't put the commonly-used "close this window" keyboard
| shortcut right next to the infrequently-used and irreversible
| "quit this application" shortcut.
|
| Obviously this matters only if your W and Q are next to each
| other on your keyboard, for your region, locale, custom keyboard
| layout.
| InvOfSmallC wrote:
| That happens on mobile with my fat fingers but not on desktop.
| ronyfadel wrote:
| Good design is forgiving. To err is human. Destructive actions
| (leave meeting) should have a safety pin.
|
| https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-error-forgiveness-1495...
| ggm wrote:
| Having both a do and a logical undo function use "down" arrow
| indicators is pretty bad.
| dhimes wrote:
| I would add, "Use your words."
|
| Pictures are nice. And I get that they are maybe easier for i18n.
| But if it isn't completely clear what the picture is supposed to
| mean (and everybody seems to like their own) then it
| understanding what the heck to do can take some time.
|
| I value my time.
|
| I'm still looking for the "back" button on my Apple TV. I seem to
| be easily able to touch something that takes me to some unknown
| place and basically have to start over.
|
| In a word, I would tell the FAANGs: don't re-invent UI. You're
| simply not good enough at it. Simple, repeatable and ugly is much
| preferable to confusing and pretty.
| hi41 wrote:
| Same thing happens on iPhone too. In the minimized window that
| appears on top, I click the small green button. I am not sure I
| clicked it, So I click again. But now it has turned into the red
| quit button and inadvertently click it and then the call ends.
| This is happened several times and got my wife super mad. I tell
| her bad UX design is at fault and it falls on deaf ears. Now my
| marriage is in ruins because of bad UX. Apple, are you listening?
| hamitron wrote:
| Venmo fits in here as well. The pay and request money buttons are
| the same color and touching. I have fat-fingered it before and
| paid a person who owed me money.
| excitom wrote:
| My favorite pet peeve is whoever decided that in gmail nothing is
| ever deleted but you can move messages to the Trash folder.
|
| So instead of Select message, click Delete you have Select
| message, click Move, select Trash folder. Sure it's not much, but
| I reckon the cumulative time wasted by that extra action has
| taken a couple days of my life over the past decades.
| ac2u wrote:
| Sounds as nonsensical as this one
| https://twitter.com/ac2u/status/1347315392121872389?s=20
| closed wrote:
| I'm surprised every time someone says:
|
| 1: This field requires a lot skill.
|
| 2: I am not skilled in this field.
|
| 3: It's obvious to me <observation that might require skill in
| domain>.
|
| And then there's no appeal to an expert in the field, or observed
| behavior.
|
| It's fair that sometimes negative effects are obvious, and if the
| writer was observing the deleterious effects of the button
| placement, I could see where they're coming from.
| mjd wrote:
| Getting it right is hard. Takes talent, smarts, hard work.
|
| But recognizing when it's wrong, not so much.
| Causality1 wrote:
| UI is designed to generate profit. Sometimes that means
| contributing to an optimal user experience, but sometimes it
| doesn't. Sometimes how it looks in marketing materials is more
| important to the bottom line than whether or not the user hates
| it after they're already locked into the ecosystem.
| nubero wrote:
| This might very well be true as a general statement. However, I
| don't see where it applies to reseting the contents of a form.
| tomaaron wrote:
| This is hilarious. Check out his next rant about gmail icons [1].
|
| [1] https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
| izietto wrote:
| The next blog post is hilarious too:
| https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| Raises/promotions at Google come from launching new products.
|
| Fixing the fact that the hangup button is next to the ducking
| mute button does not help your salary/bonus.
|
| This has always been true at Google. If Google management thought
| that was a problem, they've had 15+ years to fix it.
|
| Issue closed. Works as designed.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| How about HN and it's upvote/downvote placement/size? So small,
| that on my phone, Side-to-side would be easier, especially for
| the fat-fingered
| colanderman wrote:
| Regarding the addendum about mail archive buttons, Apple Mail is
| _particularly_ bad. It has three buttons right next to each other
| that all look like trash cans: Archive, Delete, and Mark as Spam.
|
| I only ever want to press one of these (Archive), yet I have to
| stop and squint and think each time to remember which is which.
| Can you guess correctly? [1]
|
| (I've since realized that the Archive button is actually a
| banker's box. I nevertheless ended up enabling text labels to
| tell them apart.)
|
| [1]
| http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/sites/default/files/sites/de...
| (ignore the arrow)
| beervirus wrote:
| Let's not forget about these horrible new icons:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/jjzr8l/homoge...
| ec664 wrote:
| Mac OSX is equally terrible as is windows by clustering window
| controls all in one section.
| rgovostes wrote:
| In Classic Mac OS, the close button was on the other side of
| the window for the reason described in the article. It joined
| the others probably for familiarity for Windows users.
| Aachen wrote:
| I never use the maximize button because I double click
| somewhere on the title bar. Why use a tiny button instead of a
| conveniently large area? When first installing Linux Mint years
| ago, I was going through the settings and noticed I could
| customize the buttons. I made the middle button, maximizing,
| empty and now just have more space between the minimize and
| close buttons.
|
| It's perfect.
|
| As a bonus tip, remapping double click to right click (also a
| setting in Cinnamon, don't need external software for this)
| also makes it way nicer to use (I never use the right click
| menu - after all, the buttons I regularly need are already
| right there and there's another button on the left for opening
| the menu, or you can use alt+space+t).
| komape wrote:
| Why is the upvote button for a Hacker News post so close to the
| link of the post? I just want to upvote this post but instead the
| blog post is loaded ;)
| Aachen wrote:
| Undown was a godsend for this mobile user. Not even because I
| hit it wrong so often - surprisingly - but now at least I know
| what I pressed and it's reversible to boot!
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| I think Spotify has to take the award for worst design decision
| of recent history.
|
| They changed their interface last year to add a "hide this song"
| option in the menu _right where add to playlist used to be_.
| While hide song is useful, why is it very high up in the menu
| (when you have to scroll for other options that are more
| frequently used) _and why is it where the most used button, add
| to playlist was_. It totally broke my muscle memory for no good
| reason.
| mgh2 wrote:
| The author does not try to explain the subtleties of the design
| decision. Yes, putting two opposing choices next to each other
| might encourage some errors, at least initially, but what if the
| designers decided to do this because users were already trained
| to see this pattern in all other software? Because they were
| building on top of an already established mental model?
|
| Red is a double-edged sword: it has been identified as attention
| in nature (danger and attraction), so psychologically speaking it
| might warn AND nonintentional lead a user to a perceived action.
|
| What is the solution? Would you put it opposite to each other
| prompting the user to become frustrated when they cannot find the
| button to hang up? (X) closing the app does not imply hanging up.
| This is not a life or death situation (unlike healthcare), so at
| least offer some explanation of why it was designed that way or
| offer an alternative solution.
| wging wrote:
| Red only works if you have color vision. It shouldn't be relied
| on. (Traffic lights, for example, have a consistent order with
| red on top.)
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Unless they are the ones used on the railways, where the red
| light is on the bottom. Reason for this apparently, means
| that a build up of snow can't obscure it, causing a driver to
| not see it and ram up the back of another train. Of course
| nowadays, there's overrides to stop trains running red
| lights, but the red lights are still orientated at the
| bottom.
| eru wrote:
| It's still consistent.
|
| It's just not the same pattern for roads and railways, but
| that's fine.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| With the most common forms of color blindness (and maybe all
| of them?), people can still tell the difference between a
| white button and a red one
| polishdude20 wrote:
| You mentioned red is identified as danger in nature and that
| made me think... I'm assuming red is danger because blood is
| red? If so, I bet if we were to visit an alien civilization on
| another planet who has a different biological process, they may
| have different colored blood and their warning buttons may
| instead be blue or green even. Interesting to think about!
| richardxia wrote:
| You don't even need to leave this planet to find and example
| of this. In East Asia, red symbolizes prosperity, and the
| stock market tickers use red to indicate gains.
| amichal wrote:
| I've always wondered about this.
|
| We have a site dealing with finance for a East Asia
| audience. It's original audience was Europe with a blue
| theme (signifies trust etc) and it got extended to Asia
| (english speaking still). So we just themed it by changing
| the branding colors to the East Asia organizations color.
| Which is... red signifying prosperity. As in 10 shades of
| red.
|
| The site has the typical warning/alert/error message
| feedback in forms/charts etc... in different
| reds/oranges/etc. I spent a bit of time trying to find a
| Asia focused UX guide on color for alerts/errors without
| luck. Does anyone have suggestions? I've asked a few
| different culturally native Asians from various countries
| and just get resigned shrugs.
|
| Note: The messages have icons/text to go with them so it's
| not a total disaster but it is hard to figure out
| Kranar wrote:
| I will confess I didn't believe you, which makes me ashamed
| since I work in finance. But then I went to the Shanghai
| stock exchange and their English language website uses red
| for losses and green for gains, but if you switch to the
| Mandarin website, it's the complete opposite. I appreciate
| that insight.
|
| [1] http://english.sse.com.cn/
|
| [2] http://www.sse.com.cn/
| Stratoscope wrote:
| There is an interesting example of this in Robert J. Sawyer's
| _The Neanderthal Parallax_ , which has an alternate world
| where the Neanderthals became the dominant human species.
|
| In the Neanderthal world, red means "good" or "go" and green
| means "danger" or "stop".
|
| This is because red is the color of good meat and green is
| the color of bad meat.
|
| In a remarkable HN coincidence, I was trying to remember the
| name of this series when I ran across kleer001's comment on
| "At Home with Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals", also on
| the HN home page right now:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381829
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| That is an excellent book BTW, thanks for mentioning it.
|
| I am Canadian, and being able to read Canadian locales
| referenced in his books as places that I have been and are
| aware-of is a rare treat in Sci-Fi.
|
| I highly encourage any SciFi fan to read his works.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids
| myhf wrote:
| Red means "cancel" or "stop", which are safe actions, not
| dangerous ones. Red is the color of health and safety.
|
| Blue is the color of danger because it means "confirm
| changes". Blue is the color of the abyss, and aliens would
| agree on this.
| tomca32 wrote:
| My guess would be that it's because of fire. While fire is an
| incredibly useful tool, a wildfire can be devastating for the
| whole ecosystem.
|
| RED = FIRE => RUN AWAY WHILE YOU STILL CAN
| dang wrote:
| Posting something like this as a reply to the top comment when
| it's completely irrelevant to the top comment has the effect of
| hijacking the thread. Please don't do that. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26401637 for further
| explanation.
|
| I've detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395513 now.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Downvotes to this comment shows how HN has been deteriorating
| in quality- this was meant for constructive discussion and
| criticism so users can learn from each other (for the
| community's gain)- not because you merely disagree: offer a
| valid and logical counter-argument or some value to the thread.
| This is not Reddit.
| dang wrote:
| The downvotes show that users were justly irritated with you
| for posting your complaint as a reply to the top comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395513 - I've since
| detached it), when it had no particular relevance there.
| That's bad community behavior--it meant that your post was
| piggybacking on the upvotes that the other comment received,
| allowing it to sit at the top of the page, which subverts the
| ranking system and is unfair to all the other commenters who
| didn't do that.
|
| By the way, downvoting for disagreement is ok on HN and has
| always been ok on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
|
| What's _not_ ok on HN is complaining about downvotes:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. So please
| don't do that either.
| lhorie wrote:
| But the author gave a perfectly reasonable alternative
| solution: put destructive actions reasonably far from common
| non-destructive ones. There are many other valid approaches:
| e.g. Chrome prompts "Hold cmd+q to quit" if you fat-finger it.
| Github asks you to type out the name of repo if you press the
| delete repo button. Just make the odd-one-out action different
| in _some_ significant way.
| Arainach wrote:
| Destructive actions should be suppressed when they are rare.
| This is the case for "Reset" or "Close Application". For a
| video chat, however, "Hang Up" is one of the most common
| actions, and one that is urgent to be able to find rapidly.
| As an example, Discord puts hang up nowhere near the
| mute/video buttons - and every time I want to leave a call I
| have to search for 15 seconds to find it because it's over in
| a corner near nothing else currently in use.
| lhorie wrote:
| Zoom puts the "end meeting" button on the right bottom
| corner (and volume/video toggles on the left bottom
| corner). The buttons look different and they are labeled in
| plain text (no guessing what an icon means). Cmd+w prompts
| before closing. It's clean, it's intuitive, it's not rocket
| science.
| adambatkin wrote:
| There are no subtleties. The post contains a specific example
| in Google Meet, which is used by "the general public" and not
| by anyone "already trained to see this pattern in all other
| software". It's confusing for a lot of people.
|
| Have you ever watched a "normal" person try to complete a task
| on a computer? They routinely click the wrong mouse buttons (or
| double/single click when they should single/double click),
| close windows, press in the wrong places in the GUI, and
| generally fumble around until they get the task done. But they
| don't get exasperated, because they have been conditioned to
| expect that computers are confusing, and they persist on with
| their work. And that's why "normal" people think that computers
| are mysterious complicated beasts.
|
| Because the UX sucks. Everywhere.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| The neverending reality of the Edigerian nipple.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Lots of big companies (ie Apple) have thrown massive amounts
| of work into trying to make better UIs and it produced stuff
| like itunes and the one button mouse that has a secret right
| click. Maybe we just shouldn't expect some things to be so
| simple?
| hiisukun wrote:
| Archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210308022841/https://blog.plov...
| firefoxd wrote:
| Were you ever expecting an important phone call? Maybe from a
| lawyer, from the government, or worst from the doctor. I always
| end up hanging up on those accidentally.
|
| When you add stress to the situation, I can never tell if it's
| swipe up or swipe down. Just put the words "Answer" or "Hang up"
| on the screen!
|
| Context: Android.
|
| Also, there is a book by Eric Meyers and Sarah w.b, Designing for
| Real Life. Highly recommended for dealing with these issues.
| itomato wrote:
| What about pervasive compute with natural language processing?
| This will surely catapult us into a new age of bad ux?
| remir wrote:
| Genuine question: is there example of good looking UI that also
| provide good UX?
|
| I'm amazed at how big companies, with UX designers and
| researchers being paid big salaries, seems to produce confusing
| designs.
|
| Is it because management is pushing "shinyness" at all cost or is
| it because what works in terms of UX doesn't look "sleek" enough?
| franciscop wrote:
| Totally agree. In fact, it is one of my biggest issues moving
| from Linux to Mac (which is supposed to be oh so good about
| UX/UI). Fortunately there is a hack where you can map the
| Command+Q to something less malign like "invert the colors on the
| screen" so I won't accidentally kill the whole app when intending
| to only close a small part of it. I just wanted to disable it,
| but well at least inverting colors is reversible.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| Having a dedicated keyboard shortcut for Quit made a lot more
| sense when it was something you'd often do as much as or more
| than closing documents, sometimes dozens of times during a
| single project. (Open Illustrator, copy, quit Illustrator, open
| Word, paste, quit Word, open Illustrator...) It's less helpful
| nowadays when you can just leave applications lying around
| until next time you need them.
| Firehawke wrote:
| At least on Windows you've always had Alt-F4 so having Ctrl-Q
| was always a bit weird.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me to switch to text labels again. Text
| labels are immune to redesigns and have a constant mental
| processing time. Life is short, i don't want designers to steal
| my milliseconds. Instead of using other metrics, they should be
| judged on the user response times that their designs generate
| toto444 wrote:
| What about putting a one click 'Report spam' button next to a
| 'Delete' one in one of the most used software on Earth ? Looking
| at you Gmail.
| knowingathing wrote:
| Not only should the "END CALL" icon/button be more removed from
| the other more common actions like muting yourself, there should
| be a small "End call" label underneath or above the icon as well.
| Seeing what the buttons do without needing to guess or hover is
| important.
|
| The only way to get good design is to hire good designers. Money
| doesn't buy good design. This UI was shipped by Google. They have
| money.
| pornel wrote:
| Oh, how I despise the Reset button. People put in forms _just
| beacuse it exists_ , under assumption that it must exist for a
| good reason. Nobody has any use-case for it other than "I don't
| know, maybe someone _will_ want to reset the form for some
| reason. "
|
| And even if "filling in the whole form again from the beginning"
| was a real use-case worth catering for, the reset button would
| make more sense the beginning of the form (and it wouldn't be
| such a footgun there!)
| bogwog wrote:
| My only explanations for these types of problems is that these
| people either hate their jobs, or have horrendous managers.
| kristofferc wrote:
| Or don't put the <hide> link right next to the <comments> link
| (looking at you HN frontpage).
| capableweb wrote:
| Tiny tip: The "2 hours ago" link is the same as "comments" and
| far away from "hide" :)
| josephg wrote:
| There's an aspect of UX design that is obvious to users and not
| obvious to programmers:
|
| Not all UI elements should have the same visual weight
|
| If you have 3 buttons, probably one of those buttons will be
| pressed 80% of the time, and the other buttons pressed less than
| 10% of the time. How do you style those buttons?
|
| As a programmer, we like to think of the three buttons
| symmetrically. We want all the buttons to look the same and
| behave the same, because then they're easier to style and easier
| to reason about. Our instinct is to make a button class and then
| place all the buttons next to each other in a nice neat table.
|
| To a user, the three buttons are different, and it should be
| obvious which one is the button you're expected to press most of
| the time. From the user's perspective, "Submit form" isn't really
| the same _type_ of UI element as "reset form". The submit button
| should be big, bold, colorful and obvious. My eyes should
| naturally settle on it. The reset form button (if it exists)
| should be small and non-obvious. Its an advanced feature. It
| should be out of the way and most people should never notice it.
|
| My email compose window has this problem. It has 3 buttons -
| "Send", "Save Draft" and "Discard". When I'm writing an email,
| I'm not choosing between 3 equivalent options. I hit send about
| 80% of the time I type an email. Once I've written an email, if I
| visually hunt for the obvious button on the screen, my eyes
| should naturally settle on "Send". Styling should make that
| obvious. But no - there are 3 buttons I have to choose from.
| They're all next to each other, and they're all styled in an
| identical manner. The interface makes users actively hunt for the
| "Send" action. This is bad UX.
| antihero wrote:
| Pretty much every web UI toolkit ever has the concept of
| primary and secondary buttons.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| We are building a Design Review Marketplace that can help with
| this sort of problem by picking the minds of top experts. Check
| it out if you want at https://borrowmind.io
| chii wrote:
| user interface design has been taken over by people who do the
| graphics design.
| kitd wrote:
| > _Don 't put the Yes button right next to the No button. That
| encourages mistakes. Obviously_
|
| Eg. Don't put the "Sound Hawaiian missle alert button" next to
| the "Test sound Hawaiian missile alert button".
| madhadron wrote:
| The Google Meet example is utterly crazy, but for Submit/Reset I
| think I see how it happens. You're thinking through the user's
| flow, and at the end of that flow you have Submit and Reset or
| Cancel. You think about them at the same point in the workflow,
| so you by default put them together. I see the same thing with
| Approve/Reject right next to each other in internal review tools.
| wolfgang42 wrote:
| And on the point about why the form has a reset button at all,
| you see the option in the spec (again, right next to submit)
| and figure it must be there for a reason, so I guess I should
| include it? Everyone else is, it must have _some_ purpose...
| swyx wrote:
| First thing I do on every new Mac - remap the Cmd+Q command that
| closes all the things (one fat finger away from Cmd+W which we
| all use daily) to something harmless, like invert colors.
| lifesaver.
|
| https://dev.to/swyx/my-new-mac-setup-4ibi/
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| I've never actually had the Cmd+Q issue with my browser because
| Chrome overrides the system Cmd+Q, popping up a message to hold
| it if you want to actually close the browser.
|
| I just check with Firefox which he was complaining about, and
| while it doesn't do this, it at least by default prompts you to
| confirm you want to close multiple tabs which should hopefully
| prevent you from quitting out by accident.
| swyx wrote:
| idk how true this is, i use chrome myself and i had the Cmd +
| Q issue once before deciding it was a stupid shortcut and i
| never wanted to ever think about it again. that was like 5
| years ago
| dkarl wrote:
| > Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just
| under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course
| after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should
| be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by
| accident.
|
| So, there is one plausible intuitive argument for why his
| preferred way would be better. Does that make his preferred way
| "obviously" better?
|
| Here's another plausible intuitive argument. In left-to-right
| languages, right is forward. Left is backward. Submit is forward.
| Reset is backward. Putting submit on the right and reset on the
| left caters to our established instincts for going forward when
| things are satisfactory and back when things need to be redone.
|
| Now we have two arguments pointing in opposite directions, which
| should not be surprising, because arguments of this kind are far
| from conclusive. They don't make anything "obvious."
|
| > Does my "obviously" come across as superior and condescending?
| Honestly, it comes from a place of humility. My thinking is like
| this:
|
| His thinking does not take into account 1) how weak his initial
| argument was, and 2) that every domain contains some truths that
| are obvious with deeper thought and experience but are
| counterintuitive to most beginners.
| coda wrote:
| The correct answer of course is that the Submit button should
| be the primary CTA for the form, and it should be styled in a
| way to make that abundantly clear to the user. The Reset button
| (which I haven't seen on a modern form in years), if necessary,
| would be a secondary action and styled as a standard link,
| ideally beneath the Submit button (and it would require user
| confirmation).
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Credit to the author for admitting he doesn't really know UX. And
| he does have a point about the importance of differentiating
| destructive actions from non-destructive ones.
|
| Determining which those are can be _really hard_ depending on how
| your users use your app. And won 't always be universal. The
| example of the "commonly used" closed window versus quit app...
| the destructiveness of the former is equivalent.
|
| When one is a common action and the other causes more pain when
| performed accidentally, it's been more helpful to add an option
| to ask if that was the intended action than to retrain now-
| generations of users on keyboard commands. Cmd+Q/Cmd+W have been
| used this way since I was in diapers.
| mjd wrote:
| The destructiveness of "close tab" is not equivalent. Control-
| shift-T will instantly undo the close-tab action. And there is
| a menu item that lists "recently closed tabs".
|
| Try finding the menu item that brings back the app once you've
| quit.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| One of the most annoying things about Firefox is its limited
| reopen close tab implementation: I've gotten really used to
| Safari's behavior here and is really irritates me when I
| can't reopen the last tab because it triggers whatever
| Firefox uses to reset the history.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Speaking of Safari having good UX around undoing state
| changes that I miss in other browsers: why can a website
| put a navigation in another tab, but I can't press back to
| get out of it in any other browser? (Safari's
| implementation isn't perfect and I can think of ways to
| improve it, but a simple "yep I didn't want to go here"
| should be just as effective if the website specifies
| `target` as when it doesn't.)
| [deleted]
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > The destructiveness of "close tab" is not equivalent.
| Control-shift-T will instantly undo the close-tab action.
|
| And every browser has a way to reload tabs from the previous
| session. Both are equally destructive if the tab/s had state
| you were not finished with and don't preserve that state when
| reopened. At least quit can be guarded with an "are you
| sure?" prompt out of the box.
|
| > Try finding the menu item that brings back the app once
| you've quit.
|
| The um... Dock or Taskbar or Start Menu or Spotlight or every
| other thing people use to launch apps every day?
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > Control-shift-T will instantly undo the close-tab action.
|
| Not if that tab was a google meet meeting.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| After having spent 10 years in the US nuclear navy, i am
| surprised at how many things are obvious in that organization
| that no one else seemingly has any idea about:
|
| "When I came to Washington before World War II to head the
| electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man
| was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled
| maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire
| bureau operated that way. It didn't make sense to me. Design
| problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in
| maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I
| changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire
| area of equipment--for design, production, maintenance, and
| contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to
| point. I run my present organization on the same principle."
| -Admiral Rickover, creator of the US Nuclear Navy
|
| the hang-up button in between the audio- and video- mute buttons
| results from the lack of responsibility described above. any
| single person would agree this is wrong, therefor no single
| person is in charge.
| pdeffebach wrote:
| Is the Navy really a good example of command structures that
| promote effective UI?
|
| According to Propublica, part of the reason for the Fitzgerald
| crash was bad interface design.
| https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Is the Navy really a good example
|
| good question. In the US, the nuclear navy is basically a
| separate organization. they are still in the military chain
| of command, but the nuclear portions are all separately:
| managed, manufactured, repaired, operated, trained, audited
| etc.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've always liked Apple's DRI[1] concept. You have a single
| responsible person who is the final decision maker about the
| [product | feature | initiative]. No more dodging tough calls
| and diffusing the responsibility over a project across 5
| different PMs, 3 designers, 4 tech leads, and 2 executive
| sponsors, so that really nobody is responsible for anything.
| The buck stops at a single, known decision maker. Most company
| cultures can't quite manage to do this, as everyone seems to
| have to have this weird fractional "ownership" of some part of
| the product.
|
| 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-
| does-...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| In addition to what you said, you need these DRIs to actually
| care. And they need a good mechanism for feedback since
| they're not going to know what's broken if everyone is afraid
| of harshly criticizing or even cancelling the entire product.
|
| You need Steve Jobs at the top. What happens with DRIs today
| at Apple is complacency sets in since no one is complaining,
| feedback (demo days with Steve) is getting weaker and less
| threatening. And, shitty ideas get democratized and
| perpetuated since no one is there to put an end to it.
| teekert wrote:
| I routinely drag one folder of my Windows Explorer favorites
| (where I drag all network disks because man I hate people giving
| me urls to THEIR U-or-whatever-drive) onto another. Thank god it
| then starts to load and load and load and I can use ctrl-z and it
| has been fine every time so far... But man, it makes me nervous
| that I can just drag a network disk onto another and make both a
| complete mess in a microsecond.
|
| Oh and also just switched from Android to iPhone. And the top
| search result in the app store is often not what I searched for
| (sometimes it is though), but a promoted app. Maybe it is clear
| when you don't use dark mode but if you're new to an ecosystem it
| would be nice if the top result is the correct one (and not a
| crappy result with a slightly discolored background tile behind
| it). Also, the app store opened to some page with no search the
| first time. Turns out there are tabs at the very bottom (where
| your thumb hoovers when reading the rest of the screen), one of
| them is search. Do people browse the app store like a magazine?
|
| Oh and please Apple, keep correcting my .nl email address to .nul
| in email-address fields, sure, you know better what tld I must
| mean. Thankfully it does stay correct after about 1-5 tries (it
| really varies!).
|
| Oh and try adding an app to a folder in the bottom panel/tray
| (the 4 apps arbitrarily placed below the 3 dots that don't move
| with the desktops because... you may still want them there on the
| next desktop?), it does not work, one must drag the folder above
| the dots, add the app and drag it back.
|
| Many things are not intuitive, thank god I found the yellow
| square with "Sets" as title when you open it (it's right below
| the gray rectangle with "No material available" on it). It has a
| flashy 14 animation. Sweet. It contains some tips, together with
| some stuff picked by a person named Genius, those tips are
| useful.
|
| Many things are nice indeed, but some things are just... how does
| this come into existence? What path did this feature follow to
| become... like this...
|
| Overall though, I really like the iPhone.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Someone at my work created a tool (windows hook? Not sure how
| they did it) which shows a warning when moving network folders
| and files. (Just a simple confirmation box). So much time saved
| by now needing to request the backup be restored because files
| couldn't be found.
| onirom wrote:
| Guess this is not restricted to interface design for example
| having quit & save keys shortcut close together...
| nubero wrote:
| Good article, and rather very similar to what I had written a
| while ago about the "save changes" dialogue boxes here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920422
| minhazm wrote:
| This has happened to multiple times in a meets call. But at least
| part of the reason is because Zoom, Bluejeans, and Teams have a
| more sensible layout with mic mute and video mute next to each
| other. So I expect that right of mic mute will be video mute and
| end up leaving the calls. I suppose I could get used to it if I
| were using Meets most of the time, but it is still a bad design
| nonetheless. It shouldn't be so easy to accidentally leave the
| call.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Google meet is the worst designed app of all time. Here are the
| 10 issues top of my mind.
|
| 1. It is slow. It heats my laptop and phone.
|
| 2. UI elements appear/disappear, slide-in/slide-out based on
| mouse hover.
|
| 3. There is no native app.
|
| 4. It is horribly feature deficient. Look at what use-cases Zoom
| supports. Meet probably supports less features than Zoom's
| initial PoC.
|
| 5. The videos are tied to the presentation.
|
| 6. There is no overlay mode.
|
| 7. There is no remote control mode.
|
| 8. There is no handover between mobile and PC.
|
| 9. There is no way to call somebody.
|
| 10. There is no way to share a tablet or phone screen, while you
| are connecting using a PC.
|
| It just infuriates me to no end being forced to use this piece of
| trash software at work. I genuinely wonder what the Google Meet
| dev team uses for video conferencing? Do they not know that it is
| so crappy? Are they using Zoom to collaborate??
| gezfrg321 wrote:
| To me only number one and two are concerns. I guess I don't do
| enough video conferencing to care about the other features. As
| long there is video, audio and screenshare I don't care about
| anything else.
|
| Edit: I didn't notice 9 initially, that one is actually a must
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > These three buttons are at the bottom of the Google Meet
| videoconferencing app. The left one temporarily mutes and unmutes
| the microphone. The right one controls the camera similarly.
|
| I have had this bite me SO many times; hanging up on calls
| without meaning to. That misfeature, all by itself, is enough to
| make me want to avoid the entire app.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| In Google's defense the size & spacing on those is way beyond the
| minimum recommended for touch targets and that placement keeps
| them in easy thumb reach. I would assume that's why this shipped.
| mjevans wrote:
| So very much effort is spent on making websites 'pixel perfect'
| conforming to some marketing person's designs.
|
| Human Interaction Engineers should be dictating this instead;
| with a focus on making information easy to parse, for humans and
| machines. For placing action widgets in locations that reduce
| errors.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| Hrmn. Marketing is probably more important a good part of the
| time, though? :(
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| In a capitalist economy obsessed with optimising for profit,
| yes.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| What makes people think that we cannot engineer marketable
| _and_ great user interfaces? It 's not like they're mutually
| exclusive. We can do better.
| trilinearnz wrote:
| I have this issue occasionally in Zoom breakout rooms. Leave
| Room? Leave Meeting? A moment's absent mindedness can result in
| an embarrassing exit from the entire call.
|
| This comes down to terminology, and also context. I feel there
| should be a single button that reflects the desire to "just get
| out of where ever I am now", with a safe, sensible action
| happening as the next step.
| darepublic wrote:
| Well the ultimate solution is to control apps with your thoughts,
| then there is no chance of fuckups. A bridge to get to this user
| brain interface utopia is a pure text command interface where
| arbitrary natural language commands can be fulfilled. This can
| then be interfaced with by voice but better yet small movements
| of the fingers that get translated into keystrokes and receive
| haptic feedback so the user is playing with an invisible but
| strangely physical device
| jclulow wrote:
| I absolutely don't want to talk to the computer, and I don't
| want to sit in an office or on a train full of people talking
| to theirs. I also don't feel any particular need to plug my
| brain into something that Amazon probably owns.
|
| We could, and I cannot stress this enough, _just do a better
| job with the buttons._
| userbinator wrote:
| I do not use Google Meet, but do those buttons at least now stay
| visible and not only appear if you know where to mouse over? Very
| relevant comment from a few months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293
| neilpanchal wrote:
| Uhh so apparently, Microsoft Teams copied that same pattern of
| auto-hiding the most important controls.
|
| https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
| s-lambert wrote:
| Teams has updated their UI, it's always shown on the top
| right of calls now, so at least they realised their mistake.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Still disappears for me. And when it appears it makes sure to
| obscure the video/content/subtitles so that I am frantically
| trying to make it go away.
| ashneo76 wrote:
| I have left the call by mistake sooo many times. I can't even.
| This a full desktop screen, use it. And give an explicit button
| to hide controls. With clear text. "Hide Controls" "Leave Call"
| "Mute call" arbitrary images aren't a replacement for this.
| overgard wrote:
| Slight rant, but I feel like phone interface design keeps getting
| worse rather than better.
|
| We don't have to go back to skeuomorphism of the old iphones, but
| whenever I use my phone I have no idea what's tappable and what's
| not. There's even this trend now of not making it obvious what's
| even a text box or what's not. It /looks/ nice, but it's
| infuriating to use. And then you have the weird gestures that are
| completely undiscoverable. Like pulling down from the top right
| to get the utility menu thing. I mean, yeah, I know it's there,
| but I never would have actually discovered that on my own. Also
| now there's this trend of just hiding everything to make an app
| look minimalistic and simple even though it's not. So I have no
| idea what it can even do when I look at it. And I /still/ have no
| idea how to properly line up apps side by side on my iPad. I mean
| I kind of do, but I constantly forget, and worse, once I do have
| them lined up, it's hard to get rid of them. It's all insanely
| undiscoverable.
|
| I wish UX designers would realize it's not all about being
| pretty, you have to actually give people an idea of what things
| actually DO. All the clunky old interfaces with the bevelled
| buttons and huge scroll bars and stuff might have been ugly as
| sin, but at least they weren't a constant confusion.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I often feel like I'm the only person who likes the sort of
| extreme skeuomorphism of Apple circa 2007: it wasn't perfect,
| but it didn't have the soulless corporate feeling of flat UI
| styles.
| felixding wrote:
| You definitely are not alone - I still love the old school
| Aqua UI. I just switched to Linux after almost two decades on
| Macs, and the primary reason I chose Elementary OS and Window
| Maker (I use both) is their somehow retro look and feel.
| asdff wrote:
| The worst thing is the new dialer. It's bullshit. It took me
| an hour to figure out how to paste a phone number into the
| damn phone. Turns out, you hold your thumb over an invisible
| UI element and then the paste popup appears miraculously. I
| nearly threw the damn thing across the room when I figured it
| out. Throw in a box and remove that headache, although it
| won't be nearly as sexy I'm sure.
| XorNot wrote:
| Skeuomorphism has the problem that everything looks like a
| photo - it doesn't advertise what's usable clearly either.
|
| The problem with flat UIs is that they're also in the middle
| of abandoning any conventions on what's interactable as well.
|
| Ironically Windows circa 3.1 and definitely by 95 had this
| nailed: is it greyed out? 3D? You can interact with it. Not
| 3D? You can't. 3D but greyed out? It is contextually
| disabled.
|
| Simple and clear at a glance. What that interface got wrong
| was the MDI motif - multiple document interface never really
| worked as well as Microsoft wanted, although if they'd made
| the leap of making it tiling by default they would've got
| there.
| jjice wrote:
| I agree and think that a good chunk of the apps I use on an
| every day basis slowly get worse UI over time.
|
| Spotify on Android is pretty awful at this point. Now I can't
| tap and hold to get to the context menu anymore, now I have to
| use the triple dot button. Why remove that? Usability is also
| pretty terrible. Why can't I load the list view of an album I
| have saved? What the hell. Same with entire playlists that I
| have saved and downloaded.
|
| Snapchat (I wish I didn't have to use it, but it's the main for
| of communication a lot of my peers use) keep changing things
| constantly when nothing was every broken. Over the past three
| years, they've changed the order and number of tabs they have
| at least four times.
|
| Google Photos on Android is also annoying separated IMO. Give
| me an order by date and an order by album/folder. Please just
| load the folder structure. I assume they do things the way they
| do to maximize use of their cloud storage, so it is likely
| intentionally awful for local images.
|
| The official Reddit app is absolutely awful and slow. Reddit Is
| Fun (third party app) is, and always will be, my favorite
| Reddit experience. Clean and fast.
|
| That was kind of ranty, but I just wish UI's were simpler on
| mobile.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There is a solution, but at this point, I think no vendor has
| the guts to apply it.
|
| The solution is:
|
| 1) Publish Human Interface Guidelines that detail a rich set of
| standard gestures, how various tappable elements MUST be
| marked, and how they SHOULD be arranged.
|
| 2) Publish abridged HIG for end-users as a part of user manual
| for the device/platform. Aim for closed-world reasoning, i.e.
| the user must be able to build a mental model of, "if I can't
| see this functionality here, here or here, it does not exist",
| and not "it may be hidden somewhere else".
|
| 3) Tell app developers to stick to the HIG or GTFO.
|
| I know, wishful thinking.
|
| The decay started long, long ago. The other day, someone
| commented on HN with a link to a piece of old Microsoft WinAPI
| documentation, I think Windows 95 era or older, where there was
| a side note on window styling and "escape hatches" that
| unfortunately had to be built in, because marketers are
| marketers and desperately want to fuck up usability to put
| branding on things. Back then, platforms already gave away too
| much control over styling to software vendors (where originally
| this control resided with end-user).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You know, by the Win 95 era the GUI toolkits would take
| descriptive code informing what kinds of interactions you can
| have, and automatically add the correct markings and widgets.
|
| It's interesting that nowadays, with all the work gone into
| sandboxes and frameworks, nobody seems able to do that.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nobody _cares_ to do that. Declarative UIs, where you
| describe what is being represented and what can be done
| with it, and the framework styles it up for you - these are
| desirable by developers and users, but not by people
| holding the money to pay for development.
| omniscient_oce wrote:
| I think this is partly why older folks often say something
| along the lines of "you young people are so /good/ at
| technology". We've had so much exposure that we've built up a
| mental model of how even non-intuitive / hard to discover
| things should work. Sometimes when I update my phone after a
| number of years or try and operate someone else's phone when
| they ask for me to "fix this problem" it's hard because of that
| exact problem, I don't know where or how to access the thing I
| want.
|
| But it's not all bad; you can't put heaps of buttons on a
| mobile interface because of the limited screen size and lack of
| precision with pressing them, so some amount of 'magic' and
| hiding is necessary imo.
| asdff wrote:
| I thought about that, why was I good at technology relative
| to my parents? It was because I had no job, and little
| responsibility, so I had the free time to go through every
| single setting in the control panel and see what it did, or
| every single setting in my phone and poke around, and it was
| only after spending that time that I actually became 'good at
| technology.'
|
| In contrast to my father, who gets off work and tries to do
| something with his computer and has an issue. It's simply
| faster for him to call me from my room and have me, whose
| invested tens of hours poking through all the pokable things
| already to solve his issue. Simply put, between working,
| commuting, being an adult, etc, my father had no real time to
| invest this time in pure discovery, when what little precious
| time he had as an adult had to be divied up in the most
| valuable way.
|
| I see that now as an adult, free time is precious. You don't
| have the time to learn like you did as a kid, when you could
| just throw 8 hours at something. I barely find the time to
| play my guitar for a half hour a day between working and
| being exhausted after the working day. I can't imagine having
| to learn how to use a computer, at this age. I simply have no
| free time to invest in such with all the other things life
| throws at you to prioritize, and what free time I do have I'm
| mentally tapped at that point, and I fully expect in a few
| decades at this rate to become a technology dinosaur just
| like my parents and grandparents were.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I haven't seen iOS in a while, but it's sad to hear that it is
| going downhill. It seems to me that there's a bit of an echo
| chamber in phone UI: it's done, and reviewed, by heavy users,
| who already know how it used to work and take a lot of glitches
| in stride. Maybe I am trying too hard to explain why everything
| is two steps away from being good.
|
| I recently got an Android 10 phone, from a vendor I had never
| heard of: Ulefone.
|
| I was coming from a Sony Xperia compact running Android 8 -
| roughly the same hardware, except not rugged. I presume Sony
| polished Android a little bit more than Ulefone did, but even
| taking all that into account, Android 10 was full of shockingly
| bad UI "decisions".
|
| First: the Do Not Disturb icon in the pull-down thingy is a but
| when enabled a appears in the top bar.
|
| Second: Pulling down the pull-down thingy once displays a row
| of 6 icons with no labels. Pulling twice displays 5 columns of
| icons with labels. It takes extra planning to rearrange the
| widgets in 5-column mode such that I get the 6 I want in the
| first row but also a logical grouping in 5 columns.
|
| Maybe these are Ulefone-isms, but whenever I trip over them I
| imagine how hard Steve Jobs would have fired someone who put
| this stuff in front of him.
|
| Just yesterday, I wanted to make a normal voice call to someone
| I usually contact via WhatsApp. When on their contact page, I
| couldn't tell which icon would make a WhatsApp call and which
| would make a PSTN call. The WhatsApp phonecall option appeared
| with the phone's "phone" icon, and the PSTN option had no icon
| at all. Both had text saying "voice call".
|
| Oh, and don't even get me started about my Android TV. FFS.
| flukus wrote:
| It feels like at the same time they keep hiding functionality
| the add some very in your face ways of telling you about the
| functionality or soliciting feedback. "Hey we added a new
| feature", "Did you find this screen helpful?", "want to make
| the most out of this app?". Instead of thinking about UX rules
| and applying them I'm constantly in some sort of AB test or
| survey when I'm trying to get stuff done.
|
| A couple of examples getting in my way at the moment, the
| android (or nokia) phone app added a full screen "call your
| favorite contacts with just one tap" image to the favorites
| screen. I could do this until they added the obnoxious message,
| now I have to scroll down to even see them. The other would be
| netflix constantly AB testing me on whether to show the next
| episode button or jump back to the home screen, just make a
| decision, the constantly shifting interface is worse than
| either option.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > Slight rant, but I feel like phone interface design keeps
| getting worse rather than better.
|
| In my opinion, my interfaces are getting worse rather than
| better. I feel like a few years ago, a lot of the major
| companies hit a tipping point with UI optimization and realized
| a LOT of what they were doing was unnecessary (and perhaps even
| costing the business money). Anything that didn't clearly serve
| a purpose got removed - streamlining for a few core usecases.
| Lorin wrote:
| The best phone UX experiences I've ever had was
| swiping/multitasking on BlackBerry 10 OS. I wish Android
| liberated it.
|
| - Swipe from bottom to wake. - Swipe from bottom whilst inside
| an app, peaks all open apps, once let go it fully minimizes the
| app. During a peek you also see the number of unread
| notifications on the left. - Swipe from left to go back. -
| Swipe from bottom, then to the right to access the BlackBerry
| hub, which aggregates ALL emails/IMs/notifications in a single
| list (can be customized into groups). - Swipe from bottom left
| corner towards center hides on-screen-keyboard. - Top swipe
| displays app specific option/help/misc links. - 2-finger swipe
| from top revealed quick settings (wifi, flashlight, etc). No
| notifications here (they're in the hub)! - Not swiping, but it
| had a clean, single unified location for all app
| notification/permissions/etc which feels much easier than
| Android.
|
| I feel if BlackBerry released the Q10 2-3 years earlier we
| would have had a totally different phone ecosystem today. I
| still miss it.
| thom wrote:
| It doesn't sound like most of those gestures are particularly
| discoverable though, which is sort of what the parent comment
| is complaining about when highlighting widgets that don't
| look like widgets. There are lifesaving bits of UI in iOS for
| example that I didn't know about for years, like holding the
| space bar to get directional control of the cursor. I like
| that it exists but I don't feel that good UI can be something
| you not only have to be told how to use, but didn't even know
| it existed.
| fakedang wrote:
| They had a nice tutorial on first use that explains all the
| gestures.
| Firadeoclus wrote:
| A tutorial on first use is probably not enough to have
| most users remember the gestures or even just which
| options there are. Maybe spaced repetition would be a
| better approach.
| Springtime wrote:
| > The best phone UX experiences I've ever had was
| swiping/multitasking on BlackBerry 10 OS
|
| It's a pity more haven't experienced the useful aspects of
| BB10's interface (10.3.2 IIRC was when it received a much
| appreciated UI appearance update, fwiw).
|
| I've tried Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BB10 is still my
| favorite. Windows Phone in particular was surprising in how
| unintuitive various of the gestures were in comparison.
|
| As a side note, on their phones with a physical keyboard
| (which featured touch detection on the surface of the entire
| key array) text interactions were much improved. Finessing
| text selections was particularly easy compared to using the
| touch-screen. Double-tapping the keys (without depressing
| them) brings up the loupe and from there one can hold down
| Shift while gliding around the keys to adjust the selection,
| much like a laptop with a touchpad.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Black and white low resolution interfaces were great exactly
| for this reason.
|
| 512 x 342 x 1 bit color created some pretty fantastic
| usability.
|
| I've wanted a modern consistent, monochrome interface for a
| while as a general computing interface.
|
| I've been looking at the e-ink devices for inspiration.
|
| Forced contrast, forced visibility, it all has to be apparent.
| I've been hacking lua for this holy grail for about 6 years
| now, before that in perl, then in C since around 2001 or so.
|
| I've got foot pedals, midi controllers I use for general
| computing, lots of little hacks. Multiple 4k monitors in
| portrait mode, lots of hacking with arduino sensor packs. Still
| not there yet.
|
| Interfacing is the current limitation in computing. I've got
| 128 cores, hundreds of gb of ram, and no good way to use it
| other than the current paradigms. There's gotta be something
| better
| christophilus wrote:
| Another annoying trend is buttons that look like text boxes.
| Oh. A white rectangle with a gray border? I guess I'm supposed
| to type there. Nope. It's a button cleverly disguised as an
| input.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Symbols on fuckin' telephones. I still cannot reliably answer
| telephones; growing up in a world where picking up the handset
| was to close that circuit and answer the call, the need to pick
| up the handset and then operate fucking buttons is still such a
| pain. I get it, there has to be an operation, because the phone
| could be in any position and any orientation at the moment of
| the phone call, being used for something else. But still.
|
| These things have huge resolution now and the user can pick
| their language; would it really kill them to write words over
| the little icons? If in English, perhaps "ANSWER", "HANG UP",
| "MUTE" and so on, but the magic of words is that it doesn't
| have to be those exact words ("HANG UP" and "END CALL" are
| completely different sets of words yet in the context of a
| phone call, mean the same thing to almost everyone - magic).
|
| Words. They carry so much information. So much. I know, people
| want to find some magic picture that carries full meaning to
| all cultures, but there simply ain't no such picture and there
| never will be; there's no shame in using words. Please. Use
| words. I'd even happily take them in a language I don't even
| speak, so long as it used an alphabet I could read (or even not
| - I can read some common software related words in Japanese
| simply through having sounded them out a few times). For me at
| least, words are easy; the ever-changing mist of icon-style-du-
| jour is not.
| aivisol wrote:
| My favorite was UI of a smartphone where a Hangup button when
| pressed will end a call and will display a contact screen of
| the other party with a Call button exactly at the position
| where the Hangup button was. So when you are about to end the
| call and the other side hangs up first, at the moment you
| pressed the Hang up button, it has turned into Call button
| and instead of hanging up you actually start to call them
| back.
| sesqu wrote:
| A few weeks after I got my first touchscreen phone, I had to
| google for how to answer it.
|
| I had assumed you'd just tap the "answer" button, but that
| failed more often than not. It never would have occurred to
| me to swipe a minimum of 3cm, starting with the answer
| button, and I must assume this knowledge has spread to users
| by osmosis rather than discovery.
| com2kid wrote:
| Accepting a call has been a different action on every
| Android phone I've ever owned.
|
| Typically it is a tap and drag in some direction, but the
| direction to drag for answer vs hang up is always different
| between OEMs.
|
| So that's fun. :/
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| The accept button animates on most phones in the way you
| need to move it. But it's true that I've seen many first
| timers get confused, probably because of the inherent
| pressure that accompanies a phone call.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I'm on stock Android using the stock Google made Clock app
| for my alarms and I still sometimes need to double-take and
| make sure I'm not snoozing instead of turning my alarm off.
|
| This[1] is what it looks like when the alarm goes off. (Swipe
| left to the "zzz" snooze icon or swipe right to the off
| icon). I can't always rely on muscle memory because I am not
| always consistent in which direction I put my phone down on
| the nightstand. This is not the best UI for a person who has
| just been woken out of sleep and still groggy.
|
| 1. https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/07/nex...
| godshatter wrote:
| There is also plenty of room to replace those three icons
| with "Snooze" and "Stop Alarm" buttons. Plenty of room even
| for multiple snooze buttons of varying duration. There is a
| downside to the button approach, though. I have one app
| that uses buttons to snooze or stop the alarm and I almost
| always touch some random one when I'm pulling the phone out
| of my pocket. That's why I like some apps that use buttons
| that have to be held down for a second or two to register
| for certain actions.
|
| Phone interfaces are a minefield for me for some reason.
| It's too easy to accidentally push a button you didn't
| realize was a button when you were trying to scroll down
| the screen but pressed it too hard when you did so. I run
| into lots of pitfalls like this. I grew up in the era where
| the OS interface was a "READY" prompt, so I've seen most of
| the paradigms out there over the years. Nothing has annoyed
| me as much in recent memory as having a touch-sensitive
| interface on a slick, compact phone with rounded edges that
| I desperately don't want to drop.
| flashingleds wrote:
| Along these lines, I admit with shame that lately I've been
| switching to airplane mode before looking up or modifying a
| contact, because it's not obvious to me which combination of
| symbol-labelled buttons will do this without initiating a
| phone call. I feel old.
| jiehong wrote:
| On iOS, There seems to be some background thing happening,
| because when editing a contact, it gets updated a few
| times.
|
| But each time it gets updated while you're editing a field,
| it gets rid of the keyboard, and maybe of the info you just
| added.
|
| It's extremely painful to use.
| tormeh wrote:
| If you are using Android it's possible to add in app names
| in addition to icons. It's in the settings somewhere...
| amelius wrote:
| Same here. Too often have I inadvertently initiated phone
| calls.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And don't get me started on trying to click on a missed
| call to either find out more about the number, access the
| voice mail or simply get rid of the "new notification" dot.
| I more often than not start calling the number although
| that's the last thing I want to do.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I'm in the "text or GTFO" team, and the opposite is an
| especially annoying trend in desktop webapps. My bank rewrote
| their UI to icons-only a while ago and it's complete
| shitshow. I randomly click around to go to the screen I want
| because icons are non-descriptive at all.
|
| Having said that, text has an annoying feature of needing to
| be localized, and localization of button texts is tricky
| because you want a very short string, in order to not
| overflow, because you have very small screen estate on
| mobile.
|
| (It doesn't also help that some native built-in components
| have APIs that show the icons only, without text)
| ashneo76 wrote:
| This. It is confusin for me as someone who grew up with
| internet. We have a huge screen, use it. Geez. Forget about
| my parents and older relatives trying to figure out how to
| hangup. I miss the green and red buttons on Nokias..
|
| There is no creativity any more. Everybody is too busy
| following apple
| the_other wrote:
| I wonder if part of this is a business problem, not a UX
| problem:
|
| - most of those apps with the hidden interfaces have no
| business being on a pocket computer in the first place
|
| If we stopped playing the game of maximising engagement, and
| returned to "practical usefulness" as the primary driver for
| application design, we'd probably make better apps.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's for this reason that I only ever open my investment
| account on tablet or desktop. I'm much more comfortable with
| the full-size dashboard and more visible information
| architecture.
| JD557 wrote:
| >And then you have the weird gestures that are completely
| undiscoverable. [...] I mean, yeah, I know it's there, but I
| never would have actually discovered that on my own
|
| I noticed a lot of UI problems like this when my parents
| changed from Windows Phone to Android and I had to help them.
| There are a lot of small actions that make sense if you used
| Android in the past (since they've been slowly introduced) but
| are completely bonkers to anyone picking it up now:
|
| - To reject a call, swipe the "Accept call" icon down (this one
| is particularly horrible); - To enable Wi-Fi, bluetooth, etc.
| swipe from the top; - To dismiss a notification, swipe it to
| the side.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Off-topic, but I'd like to give this line of thinking a name some
| day:
|
| > this particular problem is apparent even to a blockhead like me
|
| > So it must be extremely obvious
|
| "I'm not an expert, and even I can see that" sounds reasonable,
| but it's often used to disagree with experts. Whereas it's not
| unlikely that while it may look obvious to a layman, someone with
| more familiarity with a problem might know about non-obvious
| trade-offs that come with the "obvious" solution.
|
| All of which doesn't necessarily relate to the article, the rest
| of which I'm going to read now - I just found it interesting, and
| wanted to share.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I share a similar frustration at the glee with which folks
| lament the lack of common sense.
| draw_down wrote:
| Mmm, I think it's ok to disagree with experts. Yes, even for
| dirty laypeople.
| mightybyte wrote:
| I appreciate the OP's point. In fact, I accidentally hung up a
| video conference _literally today_ due to pretty much this exact
| issue (no, it wasn 't Google Meet). I even appreciate the
| colorful language and style of writing. Sometimes is just feels
| good to get one's frustrations out. However, allow me to defend
| the UI designers.
|
| The thing the author doesn't seem to realize / acknowledge is
| that UI/UX design is about balancing enormous numbers of
| competing constraints and concerns. It's a human problem, and
| like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer, only
| different sets of weights for different, often competing,
| concerns. Simplicity and ease of use are good things, but they
| are almost always at odds with flexibility and power...also good
| things. Do you make things bigger with more space so they're
| easier to see, or do you make them smaller so you can fit more
| things on the page? Do you use color so you can communicate more
| and catch the eye more quickly, or do you avoid that so that your
| app is friendly to colorblind users? (Yes, I know there are color
| schemes that can achieve both to a decent degree.)
|
| These kinds of tradeoffs are lurking almost everywhere you look
| in UI/UX design, but this kind of nuance seems to be lost on the
| author. He only seems to see his set of priorities for a UI. Yes,
| there are plenty of cases where one thing is pretty objectively
| worse than another, but usually it's more subtle than that. I'm
| way more impressed with someone who can talk intelligently about
| the tradeoffs than I am with someone who fixates on something
| that very well might have been traded off and rant about it.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There's also the issue of trying to balance what you know to be
| good vs the desires of the person actually paying you. Fighting
| this directly doesn't get you very far (you'll most likely be
| replaced by someone more pliable) and some people cannot be
| convinced of some things.
|
| Everyone and their mother has an opinion on what they think is
| good design. I am thankful that as a developer I am not having
| to fight over pixel pushing.
| amenod wrote:
| I agree with you about the tradeoffs and the importance of
| looking at the problem from all angles, but I would argues that
| this is clearly the case wher aesthetics won over usability,
| which should _never_ happen. It should be easy to visually
| separate the "hang up" button from other, much less destructive
| and more commonly uses buttons (especially "mute"), for example
| with some small amount of separating space. The only reason
| this is not done is that it "wouldn't look balanced" and
| _designers_ would be unhappy.
|
| In my experience designers are the worst people to hire for UX
| because they often sacrifice usability for aesthetics.
| Programmers fare a bit better (usable UI usually doesn't
| conflict with the code quality), still not perfect though.
| Casual users are probably best, with some education in
| usability of course.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes! A comment from a few month ago resonated with me: devs
| are to blame for mediocre design, designers for terrible
| design.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760194
| hbosch wrote:
| > The thing the author doesn't seem to realize / acknowledge is
| that UI/UX design is about balancing enormous numbers of
| competing constraints and concerns. It's a human problem, and
| like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer,
| only different sets of weights for different, often competing,
| concerns.
|
| To underline this point, I think in general design suffers from
| a _lot_ of bikeshedding at tech companies. There are likely
| many designs tucked away in discarded files that addressed this
| specific pain point, too, but were discarded at the request of
| some PM, or manager, or director. Then there 's the process of
| user testing and experiment design that is used to validate
| UI/UX of products like this. This design may have actually
| tested well even if it wasn't the team's favorite... I've
| worked places where that data is used to override a designer's
| opinion.
|
| Now apart from all that of course, Occam's razor probably
| applies as well I guess... perhaps this bit of UI was just
| poorly designed. But I see a lot of chatter on HN regularly
| about design being superfluous, subversive, unintuitive, "bad"
| when really I think many (most?) designers are unhappy with the
| designs that ship out as well.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre
| there is no "best" answer
|
| For this specific problem (Google Meet UX/UI) sure anyone agree
| with: don't put a destructive action that requires no
| confirmation (leaving the meeting) next to a common action
| (mute/unmute yourself). If designers don't get that right,
| sorry but they are not competent designers. It's like a
| programmer that, in order to "balance enormous numbers of
| competing constraints and concerns" decides to not escape user-
| provided HTML in the frontend. Well, that programmer is not a
| competent one.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Another classic case of this is your car's "key fob" buttons.
| You usually have three functions on three similarly sized
| buttons right next to each other: lock doors, unlock doors,
| and... SOUND THE DEAFENING ALARM. Really? Can anyone spot the
| one that doesn't belong next to the others?
| statstutor wrote:
| > next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself)
|
| I agree with this point, but if the designer had a phone call
| in mind (with a pre-pandemic mindset), then the design feels
| more reasonable.
|
| In a one-on-one call, 'mute' is much closer in intent to
| 'hang up' - i.e. I am not currently participating in this
| call.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Zoom solves this problem by.... adding a confirm popup button.
| As far as I can tell they're the only meeting app that does
| that, I find it almost annoying most of the time but very
| useful when I hit it by accident.
| danielbarla wrote:
| I've often wondered why this kind of confirmation couldn't be
| conditional on the confidence that the click / touch was
| intentional?
|
| As an example, my favourite pet peeve was using Visual Studio
| with old-school, upfront locking source control (like TFS),
| and then accidentally drag and dropping a file or folder due
| to lag in remote desktop, or a failing mouse which sent two
| click events in 1 ms or something. VS duly pre-emptively
| locks the 10k files in the folder you just dragged, and
| begins a 5 minute operation you'll have to somehow undo
| later, even though it should be fairly obvious from the click
| events that it was non-intentional.
|
| Going back to the meeting example, surely solid, accurate
| taps in the center of the hang-up icon could be taken as
| intentional, but a kind of glancing, less accurate one
| needing confirmation?
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| That type of approach is the way forward in UI. Maybe if we
| call it something silly like MLUX it will catch on sooner.
|
| Another instance of the same principle is that if an
| unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms
| or whatever the fastest possible read+react time is, the
| click isn't intentional and should be ignored or confirmed.
| This should scale over time based on user familiarity and
| speed.
|
| This culminates at:
|
| > as the technology became more sophisticated the controls
| were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the
| panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave
| your hand in the general direction of the components and
| hope. [HHGTG]
| tpxl wrote:
| Changing the way buttons behave that is completely opaque
| to the end user is a good way backwards.
|
| > if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it
| in <30ms
|
| Easily solvable by locking the buttons for a few seconds
| (or less).
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| Disadvantage there is advanced users know where the
| button will land and have to wait.
| kenneth wrote:
| Doesn't fix the problem of accidentally turning your video on
| when you meant to shut the call off. I've taken plenty of
| calls in places where it'd be more professional to keep the
| video off (especially when outside home)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That popup annoys me, because I never hit the button to leave
| a call by accident. It used to annoy me even more because
| there was a time last year when it was impossible to leave a
| call by keyboard only on Windows, because all methods of
| normally closing the window would trigger this popup, but you
| couldn't submit that popup by keyboard. Now at least I can
| Alt+Q Enter or something like that.
|
| (I confess that the first time I encountered this I opened
| Task Manager and found and killed a Zoom.exe process all by
| keyboard, just on principle. That was when I discovered that
| Zoom has two processes so that the main one can restart the
| call if the call process crashes!)
|
| But you know one potential factor for my never hitting it by
| accident? They use text labels ("Leave Call" / "End Call")
| rather than an icon. Much easier to get right.
| breeny592 wrote:
| It feels like one of those things where the context of the
| meeting/call should be taken in: was the scheduled time of
| this call for an hour and you've left 10 minutes in, maybe
| a confirmation dialog is more useful than when you've
| decided to leave within a few minutes of the finish time.
| Doesn't cover all the edge cases etc., but just observing
| that "the right UX" is super contextual and not a one size
| fits all thing.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Whether taking that context into account is a good idea
| is very debateable.
|
| The more contextually 'intelligent' a system is, the
| harder it is for the user to model it, and ease of user
| modelling is often more important than reducing the
| number of interactions need to complete a task.
|
| In this particular case, it wouldn't be possible to know
| if your keyboard sequence that quits a call would feature
| an unnecessary enter at the end or not.
| frusciante19 wrote:
| how low has gmail fallen from being the pinnacle of user
| interface design /s
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and
| "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you,
| Firefox.
|
| I feel like on a Mac this is just about every single application.
| I actually thought this was an OS level shortcut and not
| something implemented by the applications themselves. Maybe it's
| offered out of the box but can be overridden? I'm not an Mac app
| dev so not sure how that all works.
|
| I have accidentally hit the command-Q instead of command-W and it
| is very frustrating. I appreciate those apps that ask you to
| confirm quitting.
| wohfab wrote:
| The mac is extremely good in being bad in this. CMD+Control+Q
| locks the computer. Incredibly useful for office places, where
| you are not alone. Not quite hitting that Control-key though,
| and your app quits.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I'm guessing people who design/choose shortcuts like to group
| similar/related action shortcuts near each other like
| copy/paste. I am constantly hitting command+c when meaning to
| command+v still to this day! Some apps will annoyingly copy a
| blank space (or clear your clipboard) if your cursor is in an
| input/textarea but you are not highlighting anything. Chrome
| does not do that, on Chrome if you do not have something
| highlighted it will not copy it.
| 3np wrote:
| Another pet peeve with Meet (and others); does a crossed-out
| microphone button indicate "click here to mute", or "you are
| currently muted"?
|
| I can't be the only one getting confused about this on a regular
| basis.
| SamBam wrote:
| That's why I actually like the "split pill" style toggle for a
| binary choice like that, where one side is clearly pressed and
| engaged, and the other side is clearly up and not engaged and
| waiting for a user to click it.
| simonw wrote:
| This is a classic challenge in interface design: this confusion
| pops up every time you have a button which both toggles state
| AND represents the current state of the world.
|
| It's rare to see it solved cleanly. I try to avoid interface
| elements that attempt to combine these two roles entirely.
|
| I quite like the way the Twitter "Follow" button works: when
| you click it the text changes to "Following", which I think is
| just clear enough, but only because it's a button that every
| Twitter uses frequently enough that they are likely to remember
| how it works.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| How about a checkbox?
|
| [x] Mute microphone
|
| (apparently HN doesn't permit the checkbox character)
| 3np wrote:
| I don't get this obsession of removing all textual elements.
| "Muted" wouldn't be that bad would it?
| XorNot wrote:
| Given that's it's an absolutely critical state, I don't get
| why "You are muted" isn't in white text on a red
| background.
|
| This and "Your video is OFF" are states I care about when
| video conferencing because the reason to enter them is
| important.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| If I mute my TV, a big crossed-over speaker icon is shown
| on screen. That UX is how a muted microphone should
| appear in video meetings.
|
| There is perhaps a patent which prevents it for financial
| reasons.
| danybittel wrote:
| I have a similar problem with netflix adding a movie to list.
| Does a + or check mean add or is it added?
| pembrook wrote:
| Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?
|
| As organizational complexity increases, design debt and
| responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of
| people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has
| power or responsibility over anything specifically.
|
| Any individual interface element might have taken input from as
| many as 100+ different people over many years, each with
| competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this
| with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past
| (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this.
|
| As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of
| times.
|
| I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers
| have the power to make any real decisions inside large
| organizations.
|
| What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some
| design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay
| consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a
| precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different
| product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6
| years ago on some project where this kind of application was
| never thought of.
|
| And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15
| times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility
| guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the
| director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to
| whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at
| the time.
|
| Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.
| CivBase wrote:
| > As organizational complexity increases, design debt and
| responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups
| of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual
| has power or responsibility over anything specifically.
|
| This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight
| against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org
| structure and define strict definitions for what each level is
| responsible for?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Very small teams with a very specific area of responsibility.
|
| The moment you get whole departments involved you've already
| lost.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| But then inevitably you have either overlap or conflict
| between these small teams, because one of them needs
| something that's within the other's responsibility. Larger
| structures necessarily form.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?
|
| Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-
| arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has
| enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or
| make mistakes dealing with it.
|
| The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done
| at all?
| munificent wrote:
| _> Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?_
|
| Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously
| dumb things a greater _fraction of times_ than small companies,
| but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
|
| If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of
| almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company.
| Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is
| often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are
| kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we
| need done and the world moves on.
|
| For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a
| very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder:
| https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to
| input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type
| in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up
| on some random street at an address that starts with your zip
| code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business
| I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.
|
| We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99%
| of our life these days interacting with them and because the
| _mean_ quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so
| the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.
| xedrac wrote:
| fastmail.com is a small company with a vastly superior UI to
| gmail.
| edbob wrote:
| > Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do
| hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than
| small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of
| that.
|
| I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small
| companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less
| resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the
| outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google
| spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the
| outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small
| company, that is notable.
| EGreg wrote:
| How much of that can be attributed not to company policies but
| to the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect ?
|
| The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to
| do nothing!
| everdrive wrote:
| At a high, conceptual level this is the sort of error people
| make all the time:
|
| 1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current
| situation.
|
| 2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about
| this complex situation.
|
| 3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the
| company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions.
|
| This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things.
| It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about
| "personalities."
| parrellel wrote:
| Organizations can be very consistent in their behavior as a
| part of their internal organization and culture. Treating a
| corporation as a Chinese Room is a useful abstraction.
| bentcorner wrote:
| While I think on one hand you're right, on the other hand I
| don't think it's really an error, because to end users the
| company is a monolithic entity, and the complex circumstances
| that led to something breaking for a particular user aren't
| important because at the end of the day their thing is
| broken.
| KajMagnus wrote:
| So, a company can do dumb things, repeatedly, also if all
| people working there are bright
|
| For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less
| than the sum of its parts?
| CptFribble wrote:
| I think it's less of a moral narrative, and more to do with
| the way our brains process information - at a physical and
| organizational level, the human brain is like a series of
| stacked filters, cutting extraneous (or what our brain thinks
| is extraneous) information down to a size that can be
| interpreted by the higher cognitive functions within some
| acceptable limit of stress. The exact boundaries of what and
| how much information constitutes stress is different for
| everyone, itself produced by a learning process.
|
| Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these
| filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of
| feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-
| control over the large-scale structure of our brains.
|
| The end result is what you describe - people turn companies
| into singular, personified entities, because our lives are
| completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable
| people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to
| process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I
| certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming
| information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we
| can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e.
| pretend it's a person).
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I like how UK English uses plurals when referring to
| organizations. Rather than "Google is bad", it's "Google
| _are_ bad ", in recognition of the fact that Google is made
| up of lots of people.
| userbinator wrote:
| This is what the phrase "design by committee" summarises
| succinctly.
| myth2018 wrote:
| In automotive, aircraft and many other industries, it's
| commonplace for them to manage multiple concerns and balance
| them more or less at the same level of importance.
|
| Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many
| other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the
| design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach
| a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only
| speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software
| industry.
|
| For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our
| ability to fully understand their possibilities and
| implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our
| current struggles.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?
|
| Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you
| inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many
| good designers and good PMs out there.
| pembrook wrote:
| This is absolutely true.
|
| However, I would argue that the level of skill of any
| individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.
|
| If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the
| industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be
| hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and
| design debt.
|
| If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart
| that they have power to make decisions...then _they can 't
| design anything amazing_ because they're just another manager
| attending meetings all day and not designing.
|
| It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into
| pay bands.
|
| You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at
| modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get
| along with their peers without drama. This is basically what
| most company interview processes are optimized for.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I have worked in several, non-FAANG, but rich and
| successful large companies. I think you are spot-on.
|
| I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...
|
| Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.
| blowski wrote:
| https://hnrss.org/user?id=pembrook
| dormento wrote:
| Oh my, what have you done.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Follow and Reply Received are the only two social
| features I would like to see officially implemented.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Then HN would be a proper social media site, and by
| tradition we'd all have to start saying how awful it is,
| and endlessly post links to articles about us quitting
| it. /s
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| dang maintains a separate notification system for HN.
| It's been around for a long time, but not many people
| seem to know about it (only 2137 people are subscribed).
|
| http://www.hnreplies.com/
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the
| industry, it's completely wasted
|
| Not _completely_ wasted. At least they made sure the best
| designer is not working for a possible competitor.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Maybe you shouldn't focus on getting 'the best person' on
| the correct place, but try to make 'the best process' for
| evaluating and improving UI/UX and mandate it's followed
| everywhere. One of the projects at my workplace decided to
| document every design decision from all viewpoints
| including the final decision made. Seemed to help a lot
| against people arguing in circles and/or bikeshedding.
| blowski wrote:
| And that way lies large corporate Agile. All work becomes
| crap, because you can no longer tell the difference
| between good people encumbered by bureacracy and crap
| people using the bureaucracy as an excuse.
|
| My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply
| just enough process for each person and job.
| nubero wrote:
| You're absolutely right. Steve Jobs warned about process
| and process people as well and it's not surprising.
| KajMagnus wrote:
| Intereting talk :- ) "Steve Jobs: Content vs Process",
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE 3 minutes.
|
| I wonder if it'd work better with a _better-than-good-
| enough_ Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user
| interface however s /he wants,
|
| than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process
| ryandrake wrote:
| Process works though, because not everyone on your team
| is going to be an "A" student, and if you have 500
| employees, you simply don't have the time and bandwidth
| to make a custom process for each person. There's wide
| ranges of ability at every company, even prestigious
| FAANGs and investment banks and pretty much everywhere.
| The great benefit of layering on heavy process and
| bureaucracy is that you can get homogenized, reliable,
| reasonable-quality, but not consistently outstanding,
| output from the A, B, C, and D players, without terrible
| risk that someone who doesn't know what they are doing
| (who every company has) fucks everything up. As the
| saying goes, every process you encounter is scar tissue
| from a past fuck-up. What you sacrifice with all this
| bureaucracy is the absolutely brilliant output you
| _could_ be getting from the A players, but the cost is
| usually worth mitigating the risk of disaster.
| blowski wrote:
| You're absolutely right, and that's the reason large
| companies end up being so inefficient.
|
| Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only
| hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast.
| But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on
| more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B
| players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.
|
| There's no real solution, just different ways of playing
| the game.
| afarrell wrote:
| "The best process" makes it sound more mechanical than
| you probably intend. I think you mean: "focus on
| propagating tools and habits which raise the quality of
| design conversations"
|
| > mandate
|
| The problem with mandatory processes is that people don't
| take responsibility for the outcome of a process over
| which they have no power. Processes should be tools
| people can pick up to improve clarity.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| In the small group inside the large FAANG-adjacent company
| where I work we test designs pretty thoroughly with users
| to settle these kinds of debates/decisions. Surely we're
| not the only ones.
| hobs wrote:
| Many companies I am familiar with are "agile" in the
| sense that they work on a new chunk of the waterfall
| every two weeks; or just justify having NFI what they are
| doing on the business side by just slow dripping
| requirements over how much time/money they have.
|
| Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has
| the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so
| invested in the outcome of various features... it's
| literally theirs.
| ska wrote:
| This is a cop out, I think.
|
| Most first class work out in the world was not produced by
| teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of
| it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and
| attention to do good work.
| nipponese wrote:
| And the good designer has to be matched with the good pm.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| There are indeed only so many good designers.
|
| There are exactly zero good product/project managers out
| there. There are some really nice and good and capable and
| kind and talented people who have this label attached to
| them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are
| some good product/project directors. There are some good
| product/project evangelists. But no good product/project
| manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and
| productivity and delivering the right product to the right
| people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the
| years, in every case, they've become less likable people
| because of it and we're no longer a net positive
| collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy
| and felt less about themselves over time.
|
| Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project
| manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other
| responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of
| this "position" remains at zero good ones.
| hellohello1 wrote:
| This attitude is why I insist on having my developers
| manage at least one small project before moving to a senior
| role.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| Your assertion is hard to engage without knowing the
| distinctions you identify between "manager", "clerk",
| "director", and "evangelist", and what it would mean for a
| so-called manager to be "just masquerading as some other
| responsibility".
| duckmysick wrote:
| > Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project
| manager [...], but I stand by my assertion.
|
| What would it take to change your mind?
| danjac wrote:
| They might hire the best developers and designers, but the
| internal politics get in the way of them doing their jobs. UI
| in particular is prone to antipatterns such as bikeshedding
| and highest paid person in the room having the final say.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| I think the mean arrives a lot sooner than that. The
| situation where PMs and managers and goddamn copy writers
| start changing the design is commonplace even in smaller
| orgs. If you hire a competent designer to build an accessible
| and attractive application, just let them do their job! If
| you want design by committee instead then just fire the
| designer and get on with it.
| numpty13 wrote:
| As a designer, feedback from a _good_ "goddamn copy writer"
| is invaluable. If they can't succinctly describe the thing
| I've designed to somebody who doesn't already know how to
| use it, or they can't fit what they need to say into the
| spaces I've left for them, it's often a sign that I haven't
| designed it very well.
| waheoo wrote:
| I'm a distributed systems engineer with 20 years exp currently
| replacing a ten year old feature with something that looks
| exactly the same.
|
| Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something
| a grad on 60k/year could easily do?
|
| Who knows. This industry is fucked.
| [deleted]
| mft_ wrote:
| Late to the party, but while we're sticking the boot in to the UI
| in Google Meet, have you ever compared iOS to Windows?
|
| https://imgur.com/a/HO6oi2F
| markstos wrote:
| THIS.
|
| I accidentally left a meeting multiple times because the Google
| Meet icon order is reversed between Android and Web.
|
| What were they thinking?
|
| Using either order consistently would be better than changing
| the order between apps!
| laurent123456 wrote:
| Isn't it one of those things where they make it consistent
| for the platform, rather than across platforms?
|
| It's like the browser tab close button is on the right on
| Windows but left on macOS, which always annoys me.
| dsego wrote:
| I have problems with many programs like this. For example
| thunderbird where the buttons don't stay in place. So when I want
| to archive some emails to clean up the inbox I keep clicking on
| Archive. But if I click on a message marked as junk, the Junk
| button disappears and all buttons shift right so instead of
| clicking Archive it's now suddenly Forward.
|
| In my new car, the phone menu lists all recent phone calls
| without grouping them by contact, so if I want to use the fancy
| controls on my steering to call someone I have to scroll and
| scroll.
|
| Another example from the physical world. Recently I found the
| buttons for all 15 floors selected (probably a kid thought it was
| funny) and I had to wait on every damn floor. No way to cancel
| them. And it's such an easy thing to predict, there can nr max
| 5-6 people in the elevator at any time, so why should you be able
| to select more than 5-6 floors at a time? And no way to cancel of
| course.
|
| And almost every software or device has those issues, and like
| the author I sometimes have to ask myself, am I the crazy one
| here, how can everyone else live with this? I believe most
| ordinary folk will believe it's there fault when things don't
| work as expected and their lack of expertise or handiness instead
| of blaming the interface. Or by learning the nuances and quirks
| of a system they consider themselves as skilled and
| knowledgeable.
| ourmandave wrote:
| UIs should be consistent, so the least they could do is make it
| so if you push the buttons repeatedly you get to the floors
| faster.
|
| Like the buttons in the lobby.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Personal anecdote: I have accidentally left meetings when I
| wanted to just mute my audio.
| aimor wrote:
| On my Android keyboard the backspace key is directly above and
| adjacent to the enter key.
| aimor wrote:
| One day my Android phone updated and the interface for
| accepting/ignoring calls changed. A circle appears and you
| swipe up to answer and swipe down to ignore. I get a call,
| press on the circle, and swipe up, nothing happens. I press on
| the circle swipe down, nothing. Turns out the interface depends
| on the distance swiped up or down, and has nothing to do with
| the circle. By starting on the circle I didn't have enough
| runway to trigger the gesture. I love puzzles and felt pretty
| smart after solving this one after only the fourth missed call.
| ernesth wrote:
| On my physical keyboard also. As with all azerty keyboards from
| the last 20 years.
|
| https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4668/as-images.apple...
| muro wrote:
| Good one, though I surprisingly rarely use the enter key on my
| phone. Most text replies are single line and I send them with a
| dedicated button in the app.
|
| What really gets me is the touch bar on macbooks where I touch
| it by mistake when typing numbers, sending all my windows
| dancing around. Drives me up the wall. Leave more space there,
| Apple! Or just get rid of that stupid touch screen gimmick.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Don't put the commonly-used "close this window" keyboard
| shortcut right next to the infrequently-used and irreversible
| "quit this application" shortcut. In particular, don't put "close
| this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on
| control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox.
|
| Oh my fucking god, the number of times I've been bit by this and
| had hundreds of tabs closed from under me because the shortcut I
| press hundreds of times per day is right next to the "close
| everything _with no confirmation_ ". Yes, if you click the X
| button to close the window you are treated to an "are you sure"
| dialog. But if you accidentally hit Ctrl-Q that doesn't happen.
| jmholla wrote:
| I've been using this to work around it in Firefox:
| https://janschejbal.github.io/disable-ctrl-q/
|
| Sounds like we'll be able to disable it altogether in newer
| versions of Firefox.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| This happened to me just the other day and the post encompasses
| my exact feelings.
|
| I was sharing my screen, then using the chat, muting, unmuting,
| and eventually went to unmute and was jacked out of the call,
| with not even a "Hey, are you sure you want to leave?"
| dheera wrote:
| My biggest problem with the design of Google Meet is that the
| buttons are horribly inconsistent.
|
| The big fat red phone button means "click this button to achieve
| the state that is depicted on the button (hung up)".
|
| Okay, so good so far, by clicking a button, you get whatever is
| pictured on it. Makes sense.
|
| One would thus think that similarly, a picture of a muted
| microphone on a button means "click to mute" and a picture of an
| unmuted microphone on a button means "click to talk" and this is
| backwards from what they actually mean.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| To be fair to Google, though, this is a cultural problem. The
| mute and camera buttons depict the current state in basically
| all telephony applications (see Skype, Zoom, Discord ...) and
| the red "hang up" button is also the expected form.
|
| Yes, it's a bit inconsistent, but I can see why they make the
| buttons inconsistent within themselves rather than breaking
| user expectations.
|
| This does not excuse the placement, though.
| christophilus wrote:
| 100% of the time, I get confused as to whether or not I'm
| muted. This really should have text in addition to an icon.
| dheera wrote:
| Or alternatively, make it a toggle on/off switch with a LED
| light sort of indicator, which would be super clear without
| localization because that's how mic on/off switches are in
| the real world.
| shultays wrote:
| And meanwhile designers that aims to do dark patterns are pretty
| consistent and good with their works. For example placement of
| "reject all non essential cookies" button always seems to be on
| incorrect position
| andrekandre wrote:
| Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just
| under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course
| after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should
| be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by
| accident.
|
| hello github!
|
| how many times ive accidentally closed a pr or merged before i
| was ready because the big green "merge" button
|
| it seems everywhere we are designing very pretty ui's that are
| usability nightmares...
| tshaddox wrote:
| There's a fine line between valid complaints about widespread
| problems in user interface design, and making a frustrating
| mistake a few times and blaming this on "obviously bad" user
| interface design. The complaint about two keyboard shortcuts
| being nearby (on the author's particular keyboard) is pretty darn
| close to that line. There's nothing semantic about the physical
| locations of two keys on a keyboard like there (arguably) is for
| a submit and reset button on a user interface.
| sokoloff wrote:
| On the author's particular keyboard (Q and W are next to each
| other)? I think you mean on 98+% of keyboards in the US. It's
| not like it's some custom-assembled mechanical keyboard from a
| Kickstarter or group buy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's probably on the majority of keyboards that carry the
| Latin alphabet.
|
| Yeah, there are countries that use keyboards where Q and W
| are apart, but that's not common.
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