[HN Gopher] Losing our product to button syndrome
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Losing our product to button syndrome
Author : hrishi
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-01-12 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (olickel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (olickel.com)
| webel0 wrote:
| On my iPhone 6 with safari I'm just seeing an error message:
|
| > Application error: a client-side exception has occurred.
|
| But from the other comments I get the impression that "button
| syndrome" has something to do with UX/accessibility. Tad ironic.
| polyterative wrote:
| An excellent article
| vba616 wrote:
| I'm not sure I saw the basic yin/yang tension explicitly
| described that I would like to see.
|
| Back in the 80s, the earliest Mac interface guidelines said
| something to the effect of "eschew modes". There were lots of
| reasons for that. Some argue that as more people are familiar
| with computers, it's reasonable for the standards of good
| design to change.
|
| But. Gigantic numbers of buttons are kind of a consquence of
| avoiding modes.
|
| I don't think I need to reiterate all the bad things about
| modes, because quite a few were mentioned in the article,
| including life and death situations with military aircraft.
|
| Quote: "segment our interface into a much larger number of
| smaller pages, each of which serves a specific function" -
| those are modes!
|
| There's no right answer, and the article covers a lot of the
| ground, but I think the end of it is unbalanced, because it's
| fundamentally about a duality with no resolution, where
| intelligent people have argued for the opposite of the final
| advice.
|
| There's nothing really wrong with the article, except it avoids
| the keyword that connects to significant history that shows
| both sides have merit. "Mode" is not used once.
|
| The older I get, the more depressing it is when I see someone
| rediscovering something without recognizing it.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| also a lot of fluff. Lenghty tirade about flight controls and
| linking a 1-hour flight lesson didn't help brevity/clarity.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| pour a drink, sit back and have a read
| nine_k wrote:
| Captain, it's Wednesday.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Brevity is not the only goal in writing. If the author had
| not provided an analogue in another field, it would not have
| been engaging.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I think I want to agree with this article, but I found it a
| little confusing.
|
| In particular, I think it's strange to compare the F-16 with the
| F-35 when the former is regarded to be one of the best fighter
| jets ever made and the F-35 is infamous for being problematic. My
| understanding is that they are also different kinds of planes for
| different purposes, but at any rate, I struggle to focus on UX
| when there's that contextual elephant in the room.
| draw_down wrote:
| corndoge wrote:
| I know this isn't the point of the article but the supposed F16
| cockpit in this article is an F15 cockpit. The F16 has a
| sidestick, mfds and the canopy has no support arch.
| luhn wrote:
| I think it's worth talking about a couple downsides of a search-
| based interface:
|
| Speed: Search-based puts a floor on how fast an interaction can
| be. "Button Syndrome" interfaces are a slow "hunt and peck" for
| new users, but experienced users can use them extremely fast,
| building up muscle memory so they don't even need to consciously
| think about the action they're taking. Imagine piloting an F35
| with a search-based interface.
|
| Discoverability: Buttons make it explicit what functionality is
| offered by the product... somewhat. Users may not know exactly
| what a button does, but they can make an educated guess based on
| labeling and context, and it gives them a jumping off point to
| experiment with it or find it in the documentation. With search-
| base interfaces, there's no natural way for a user to discover
| functionality they aren't aware of. Worse, a user may remember a
| function exists but forget the terminology, flailing in the
| search box guessing different terms.
|
| This is not to say search-based interfaces are bad. There are
| mitigations to the downsides (the article mentions a few, like
| search suggestions), plenty of upsides to go along with it, and
| let's not pretend that button-based interfaces are all sunshine
| and rainbows. I only mean to say that these are things that
| should be considered.
|
| I think the broader takeaway of the article is: Always be
| thinking holistically. It's important to consider how your users
| interact with your product as a whole, not just the individual
| features. Also important to consider how different users of
| varying experience with the product and the domain will feel with
| the UI--Often features for "power users" come at the expense of
| new users or vice versa.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd add data collection/privacy concerns that list too. "search
| suggestions" seem great until you see that often every letter
| you type is being sent over the wire for analytics and to mine
| for personal info to sell to 3rd parties. The site even
| mentions how useful it is for them to see what people are
| searching for. I don't know anyone who hasn't ever typed or
| pasted data somewhere they didn't mean to and it's painfully
| easy for sensitive data to get leaked this way.
|
| That concern won't apply everywhere, but it's worth keeping in
| mind. Even when my interactions with a simple menu are recorded
| (for analytics/profit) and reported the amount of data they get
| is at least limited.
| ddingus wrote:
| My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right to
| the button, and or can initiate whatever it is.
|
| Each search is an opportunity to build experience needed to use
| search less.
|
| The buttons are there for those who want to run fast and or
| efficiently.
|
| Doing that well is a lot of work, but it also delivers high
| value.
|
| Going search only can be super lean, which has to be
| compelling. Everything costs something though, and the cost
| here is no user becomes adept. There is a permanently fairly
| high Ccost of interaction.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > My favorite compromise is a search that takes a user right
| to the button, and or can initiate whatever it is.
|
| This is how MacOS X's help menu search box has worked for
| over a decade, and it's brilliant. Type in a search and it
| shows you every menu item that matches, and rolling down the
| list shows you live where each menu item is.
|
| I wish Spotlight search was similar - showing paths more
| readily, and making it easier to open the folder that
| contains the item that you want to look at.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| It's not just button syndrome. Lots of companies continuously
| fail their users in terms of just being to able to perform basic
| functionality while marketing themselves as world-changing, good-
| doing champions for people.
|
| Being a developer, I'm one of the main points of contact in my
| family whenever a relative can't figure out how to do something
| software-related, and boy has it been a sobering look into the
| future.
|
| I recently helped a relative file for unemployment verification
| through ID.me, which is a popular identity verification platform.
| My relative, who is not well off financially, had an old phone
| that didn't play nicely at all with the ID.me verification flow.
| I spent an hour trying to get my relative signed up and I never
| could get it to work. The site was barely mobile-friendly, and
| the photo upload process kept failing, which was a required step
| for verification.
|
| It was so Orwellian to see this kind of UX on a device that
| wasn't new (and of course, how is someone on unemployment
| expected to purchase a new phone?) I truly wonder how many people
| have starved because they didn't have access to devices that
| allowed them to collect their unemployment through this platform.
| It really kept me up that night.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It was so Orwellian to see this kind of UX on a device that
| wasn't new (and of course, how is someone on unemployment
| expected to purchase a new phone?) I truly wonder how many
| people have starved because they didn't have access to devices
| that allowed them to collect their unemployment through this
| platform. It really kept me up that night.
|
| It may be disheartening to hear, but this is _by design_. A
| (Western) government cannot get away with _entirely_ not
| providing or dismantling basic elements of a social safety net
| (unemployment insurance, healthcare insurance, disability
| assistance) for publicity reasons... but what _perfectly_ works
| is to make the system as complex and hoop-jumping-dependent as
| possible to reduce the number of claims:
|
| - requiring modern devices (or not making sure that older
| devices work too, like you witnessed) is a major hurdle many
| people who are too poor and under-served by libraries or other
| public Internet access
|
| - requiring in-person presence with short opening hours during
| weekdays discriminate against people who have to take care of
| sick relatives/children, have to work two or more jobs or have
| certain mental health issues that make following up with
| appointments very difficult (e.g. some of the strains of
| autism)
|
| - requiring specific forms of ID or other paper documents (e.g.
| birth certificates) can be almost impossible (or, very
| expensive) to solve for people who have lost their
| belongings/are homeless
|
| - requiring proof of residence is an automatic exclusion of the
| homeless
|
| - complex forms with bureaucratic language discriminate against
| illiterate people, non-English speakers and frankly, most
| people who don't know or can't afford a lawyer to help them out
|
| - automatically rejecting the first claim and only allowing
| after an appeal / a lawsuit is _commonplace_ for disability
| claims, it is very effective in "weeding out" poor and already
| troubled people
|
| The ones that _do not_ require a lot of bureaucracy are not
| governments... the void that helps those left behind by
| governmental bureaucracy is more often than not religiously
| affiliated: churches, Salvation Army, other charities - but
| unlike government (which is theoretically bound by
| constitutions and anti-discrimination laws), they are free to
| choose whom they help and how much.
|
| And now: good luck if you're a publicly outed LGBT member, a
| person of color or otherwise marginalized person right in a
| religious-conservative stronghold. The government won't help
| you as you can't jump the hoops that were designed to be that
| way, and the "private sector" won't help you as you are not
| mainstream conformant. _This_ threat is what makes
| dysfunctional government bureaucracy so insidious.
| soco wrote:
| They invest a bit in the initial development then call it a
| day. Another example is the chatbots fad: after the technology
| implementation there's almost no energy for actually training
| those bots, so you as user are served with a fancy and
| overpriced menu system.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| That isn't realistically fixable unless companies are really
| willing to invest a lot more in testing. Most companies don't
| even have any user testing for products beyond what devs do on
| their own machines.
| alistairSH wrote:
| For a government service, testing of older/lower performance
| devices should be part of the initial contract.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It often is, but will be tested to a "yes, it is
| technically possible" level.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| I realize that, it just put the entire software industry into
| perspective for me. We are building products for users that
| can afford to interface with them, and even then, it's not a
| guarantee that you're gonna get a great experience.
|
| Here's to hoping that neither you or I ever become that
| irrelevant, because that doesn't look like a pretty existence
| to me.
| vpilcx wrote:
| I had the exact same experience. A barely smart phone being
| used to verify ID and we had to do the facial recognition more
| than 10 ten times, each time having to go through a whole step
| by step process to get there. And it still didn't work. I think
| he had to go an entirely different route in order to even do
| it. If he didn't have someone like me who could think
| systematically, there's no way he by himself or any non-
| technically minded person would be able to do it.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| To be fair, public libraries generally have computers suitable
| for this purpose.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| For that you have to be living in proximity to one and be
| able to afford the time and money to get there.
|
| Access to government services should be a _right_ accessible
| to _everyone_ , not just the select few that can jump through
| intentional hoops!
| teddyh wrote:
| _If there were a science of user interaction, its second law
| could be called the Wide Angle Fallacy. When a disgusted user
| goes back to the designer saying, "Your system doesn't perform
| the special function I need," the designer's ego is deeply
| affected. To regain the good graces of his customer--and to re-
| establish his self-esteem--the designer is likely to answer, "I
| can fix it in no time. I will just add another command for you."_
|
| _Later, the same man will be seen at conventions, meetings and
| workshops, extolling the virtues of his system, the "power" of
| which can be measured by the great number of commands it can
| execute. I believe this is usually a fallacy and users should
| recognize it as such._
|
| -- Jacques Vallee, _The Network Revolution: Confessions of a
| Computer Scientist_ (1982) chapter six, _Obfuscatology_
| (https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC)
| eitland wrote:
| No software I can think of has been ruined for me because of
| getting too advanced.
|
| To particular pieces of software has lost _a lot_ of their
| utility for me thanks to dumbification:
|
| - Google I have now given up. It was equally dumb as DDG when I
| last used it and the only reason I sometimes fell back to it
| was to see if it randomly provided a useful result.
|
| - Firefox is still the best for me but is a shadow of its
| former self. I'm eagerly waiting for a fork and on Mac I have
| already switched to Orion which has built in vertical tabs, can
| fix ctrl-tab and support both FF and Chrome extensions. (My
| main criteria is: 1. works great 2. not Chrome- or Chromium-
| based)
| autoexec wrote:
| Bloat and feature creep are real (and I'd accuse Firefox of
| both) but in general yes, I'd rather have more functionality
| and a complex interface than have features stripped away or
| hidden behind some search box where I have to know exactly
| what I want and hope the app can guess at what I'm asking
| for.
| eitland wrote:
| Agree to a large degree, but this:
|
| > Bloat and feature creep are real (and I'd accuse Firefox
| of both) but in general yes[...]
|
| Except Pocket, what particular new bloat has Firefox added
| over the last decade?
|
| I am not too fond of Mozilla myself, but if anything I feel
| like Firefox has been stripped down way to far.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| There's a distinction to be made between "capable but not
| overwhelming", "capable and overwhelming", "incapable but not
| overwhelming", and "incapable but still overwhelming". The
| first two can both describe advanced systems without
| dumbification, but the user experience is qualitatively
| different and can lead to wildly different outcomes when put
| into use.
|
| You can have an "advanced" (whatever it may mean in context)
| system which fits into the first two categories, which is
| very useful to remember. Something I like is command prompts
| in the style of emacs accessed via M-x and similar shortcuts
| (or in VS Code, which many more people are familiar with).
| These permit discovery of new commands and activation of
| commands without overwhelming the UI. They can also "teach"
| the user, by providing information like what the keyboard
| shortcut actually is for activating it. Contrast this with
| something I've seen in many desktop projects (especially ones
| targeting a smaller number of power users, versus a more
| public system distributed to a broader user base): menu hell.
| All those same commands are still there (maybe), but buried
| in menus with submenus with submenus. Even though a command
| may logically appear in multiple places, it probably only
| appears in one. They may not even appear in a logical place,
| but just a conventional one, like search commands showing up
| under "Edit".
| [deleted]
| n8cpdx wrote:
| He missed one of Office's key innovations - commands-on-
| selection, which is now available on the web app as well.
|
| It reinforces the story even better than the given examples and
| has been there since Office 2007. The web version just added
| search-for-command in the right-click menu as well, which is
| similarly powerful.
|
| This seems to be called the "mini toolbar". Very hard to Google,
| easier to find through use. It is in Outlook for web now, too.
| The version in word is more powerful, especially when working
| with tables.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The OP doesn't actually describe what he thinks is wrong.
|
| > It isn't just us, here's Office 2003.
|
| > [image]
|
| > Here it is after the rebuild.
|
| > [image that is similar, but on a narrower screen]
|
| > To understand why - and to find a solution - the history of
| software is helpful.
|
| Step back. To understand why _what_? To find a solution to
| _what_?
| pjerem wrote:
| And the screenshot isn't even from MS Office 2003 but from ...
| Kingsoft Office.
| duxup wrote:
| I found that confusing too, like I walked into the middle of an
| existing conversation.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I am not so sure that replacing physical fixed function buttons
| with context sensitive buttons in a fighter is really a good
| idea.
|
| If you look at the Navy, there have been several mishaps that
| have been blamed on poor electronic controls.
|
| In addition, and likely more importantly, a fighter pilot trains
| for hundreds of hours in their cockpit. They develop muscle
| memory. Having a button at the same place, with the same feel,
| that does the same thing, is likely vital when you are engaged
| with an enemy fighter and don't want any extraneous distractions.
| Instead, it seems you have the cockpit version of Apple's Touch
| Bar.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Heck, I can't even consistently hit the correct touchpad-
| buttons on my Honda's radio. I can't imagine trying to do the
| same in stressful combat situations (both physically - high Gs
| and speeds - and mentally).
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