[HN Gopher] The Decline of Usability (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
The Decline of Usability (2020)
Author : mmphosis
Score : 215 points
Date : 2023-09-10 07:22 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (datagubbe.se)
| scioto wrote:
| When iOS introduced the long press, that pretty much did it for
| me: I couldn't tell what user interface element did what when I
| pressed on it, so I tried tapping everything. And now we have to
| long-press on things to make them do other things. I can't spend
| time tapping then long-pressing on elements to do what I think or
| hope the app can do.
| layer8 wrote:
| Apple should have established long press for the purpose of
| context menus in iOS, from the start. When I got my first
| iPhone around 2009, I was rather surprised that this wasn't a
| standard convention, like right-click on the desktop. It seemed
| so obvious that that's how things should work. Instead we now
| have long press for random purposes.
| euroderf wrote:
| A UI convention for "long-press-able" might be a start.
| layer8 wrote:
| IMO it should behave like right-click (context menu) on the
| desktop, which generally doesn't require an indication.
| mdaniel wrote:
| May I vote for ellipsis overlaid on one corner of the
| element? -------...- | Primary |
| -----------
|
| unobtrusive, "..." indicates more was omitted in every
| context I can think of, and it can be any number of colors
| because it's so visually distinct (err, of course, except for
| the same color as the background, but if someone was that
| evil, we're right back where we started from in the "I dunno,
| guess" realm)
| hkpack wrote:
| "Inmates are running asylum" [1] - is one of my favourite books,
| was written in 2004, which describes how bad most of the
| interfaces are and the reasons behind it.
|
| Design solves problems which are not always obvious to the actual
| users. Using computers was always frustrating experience, but it
| improved dramatically over the last two decades for sure.
|
| I don't know how anyone couldn't see that.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-
| Products/d...
| atoav wrote:
| > but now UI is better than ever
|
| Now the question is, for whom? Users are not a uniform block.
|
| I suspect: For those unwilling to learn the tools they use on a
| regular basis.
|
| Because for those who are willing to put in the work, most
| general purpose software got worse, in terms of how many layers
| of menus you have to click through, how well default shortcuts
| are thought out, etc.
|
| This is the old poweruser vs one-time user tension. Granted,
| good design can resolve that tension in a way that makes both
| classes of user happy, but that costs development time and
| research.
|
| In doubt today's software company often priorizes habing an
| "intuitive UI" over making it efficient. The first onboarded
| user counts more than rhe one using the thing a hundred times a
| day. That is a design decision and it is made for economic
| reasons. However if the typical web startup designed a
| supermarket cash register we would still be waiting in the line
| because the animations take their time, the multi step process
| takes more clicks, etc.
| ho_schi wrote:
| Apple?
|
| The people which removed the menu from the window and keep it
| separate to tease all users? Maximized windows and full-screen
| are itself a pain. I cannot use MacOS. Finder is especially bad.
|
| The partially weird idea of GNOME (Hamburger-Menu) is also a copy
| of CSD-Style. Putting that aside GNOME did some really good
| things (keyboard-centric usage, dash and overview instead of a
| desktop, no desktop-icons and system-tray). Evolution does a
| great job in this regard, they use menu-bar and CSD-menu at same
| time (configurable). And Evolution doesn't follow the strict
| GNOME release cycle, which has some bad side-effects (Epipany and
| WebKitGtk should also do that).
|
| PS: GNOME has copied a lot of bad ideas from MacOS and killed at
| same time a lot of bad patterns from Windows (e.g. desktop
| metapher).
| yawaramin wrote:
| The separated window menu which is always attached to the top
| of the screen, is a usability win. It gives you much more
| leeway to move your mouse and hit the target you're aiming for.
| See: Fitt's Law.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I agree with you, except personal preferences get in the way.
| I would prefer the detached menu bar at the top of a monitor,
| others like the menu bar on every window, others want
| neither, or a hamburger menu, or a jumble of confusing tabs,
| or ...
|
| Preferences are my preference. The interface can be switched
| around and modified, turned off, turned on, completely
| removed, installed again. Not just the menu bar, but all
| sorts of interfaces: windows/tabs >
| checkbox/radio/list/combo/popup-menus and at various levels:
| virtual system > system > application > document/file >
| paste/clipboard/shelf > view/drawer. For example, why can't
| we have different running Apps appearing as tabs within a
| single window? I think we could have much much richer
| interfaces.
| p_l wrote:
| It was a win on original Mac with tiny screen.
|
| On 4k 27", when not scaling to make it look like 1080p, the
| menu is nowhere close to what I am working on, and often had
| to move over multiple other applications.
| Y-bar wrote:
| The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because
| of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is
| happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with
| hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades
| of grey.
|
| This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably
| in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that
| something exists somewhere behind that hover animation you can't
| easily target it because the actual target area is not visible
| and active until after you have moved the mouse in the exact
| area. Most egregious is the Music app as well as notification
| actions.
|
| _Edit:_ Another issue is the lack of distinct draggable area in
| window titles, never understood why one pixel makes the window
| draggable, then the one below which looks identical is not.
| estebarb wrote:
| Recently I bought a MBP and I'm surprised by how hard to use it
| is.
|
| Printing by both sides? Not supported, you must do it by hand.
| And some apps print the pages in reverse order, so you end up
| having to sort the pages.
|
| Use numberpad . as . instead of ,? You have to download an app
| to use a sane default.
|
| Alt+. in terminal? No luck if you aren't using an English
| keyboard.
|
| Run a downloaded app? Run it, accept failure, settings,
| security, look for blocked app, enable it. It is even worse
| than Windows Vista.
|
| Give some app permissions? Yeah, you must know which
| permissions, as you cannot search by app...
|
| And so on...
| wredue wrote:
| The blocked app shit really gets me. Installing compilers by
| hand is always a fight and a half.
| matthew_stone wrote:
| It has been possible to print double-sided since at least
| Lion/2008...
| estebarb wrote:
| Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you
| have to do it by hand
| https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-
| dou...
| yawaramin wrote:
| If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the
| software?
| jt2190 wrote:
| The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to
| provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS
| access to that printer capability. (One could argue that
| Apple should write the driver, and they might for very
| popular devices.)
| dgb23 wrote:
| Somewhat related:
|
| As someone who likes working on a single screen I typically
| like to open things in full-screen mode by default.
|
| MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between
| screens. You can't turn it off, you can just switch between two
| similarly slow ones.
|
| I can't imagine a good reason for this. What is their model of
| a user and how did they derive "slow animation when switching
| windows is good" from that?
| silvestrov wrote:
| Same with animation when switching to/from full screen. I
| mostly just want it to happend in an instant.
| Y-bar wrote:
| It's been a staple Human Interface Guideline that
| applications should re-open in the layout and position they
| were when they quit. Personally I barely use full screen at
| all in Mac OS, but I can see why you want it. It is default
| in some apps, it should be default in all apps, it isn't.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between
| screens...
|
| Perhaps:
|
| System Settings... Accessibility > Display: Reduce Motion
| dgb23 wrote:
| That just switches from one slow animation to another.
| wredue wrote:
| People absolutely LOVE slow animations for general OS use.
|
| Personally, I want for what I asked to happen to actually
| happen when I press a button, but I am far and away the
| minority.
|
| What's even worse, is that developers today have taken this
| "people love animations" stance and decided "hey, we can get
| away with utterly shit tier performance by just making an
| animation!" And so 15 second page loads are now the norm
| because you are rewarded with a few fade effects now and
| again.
|
| And now the "fuck performance" has invaded literally
| everything.
|
| We now even have technology being built for the express
| purpose of letting developers off the hook for performance
| characteristics (Look hard at you DLSS). Somehow, the general
| public has decided that DLSS is an optimization, and not
| actually just a way to not optimize at all. In the
| conversation of Starfields utterly dogshit optimization, the
| first "optimization" always brought up is DLSS.
|
| Our industry is completely fucking sideways.
| zootboy wrote:
| My new favorite punching bag for this is Discourse. It's
| literally just a forum. Some text and maybe a few images.
| Nothing crazy. But their "new and improved" system has a
| stupid lazy-load design that takes 7 _seconds_ to load. The
| root document https transfer completes in 500 ms. What the
| flying fuck is going on in that remaining 6500 ms?
|
| And it's not just the first time. Every time you refresh
| the page, 7 seconds. And they have the audacity to call
| this towering pile of javascript nonsense "simple":
| https://www.discourse.org/about
| dgb23 wrote:
| Every application developer or UI designer should be forced
| to sit next to a non-technical person for a couple of hours
| who uses a slow machine (partly because it's infested by
| programs and services that they absolutely don't need),
| while browsing the web or using common applications.
|
| It breaks my heart how much precious time and nerves of
| these users we're wasting.
|
| They use outdated devices, that still should work perfectly
| fine, but are grinded down by extremely slow programs.
|
| They don't understand many of the fancy UI patterns _at
| all_. UI elements without text are the worst offender.
| Animations and hover effects routinely and reliably get in
| their way.
|
| They get confused all the time because their UI changes: "I
| could always click the frobniz here, but now it's gone and
| everything looks different."
|
| Their system is basically stuck in "dark patterns".
|
| Their internet connections are often relatively slow and
| unreliable, but common software assume that it's always
| available going full blast.
|
| To do even basic tasks, they are nudged into registering to
| this or that, when often a simpler, less invasive solution
| exists.
|
| They spend ungodly amounts of time navigating stuff, while
| getting distracted by notifications, misleading information
| and so on. Often giving up in complete frustration.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Somebody whose name I can't remember said something like Apple
| Designs a UI that people want to buy - it looks cool in the
| apple store - not use.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Perhaps they are creating a problem to push you onto their
| solution.
|
| When you can't discover things yourself, that annoying AI
| voice-assistant might become needed.
| pcurve wrote:
| Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden.
| Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the
| basic stuff.
|
| IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long
| time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS
| is just as terrible in many ways in not worse.
|
| What they do well device integration usability across their
| ecosystem.
| BruceEel wrote:
| Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability
| peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though
| not entirely downhill from there on.
|
| Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in
| Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every
| single time I need to change something, typically as a result
| of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I
| do not want.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| I am not afraid of the decadence they've made of the
| settings panel because I use Alfred.
|
| I haven't yet installed Ventura. I had to downgrade from
| Monterey because the cmd-L keyboard shortcut had stopped
| working on Contacs.app
| nntwozz wrote:
| You can remap cmd-L in settings globally or for each app,
| did you try that?
| ben_w wrote:
| From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 --
| and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic.
|
| The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many
| reasons; but the UI was fantastic.
| pcurve wrote:
| I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from
| the System 7.6.
|
| The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional
| system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-
| threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed
| hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
| BruceEel wrote:
| Ah yes, Mac OS 8, I have very, very limited experience
| with it, mostly in the form of one/two-week bursts on
| taking over from a coworker whenever he went on holiday.
| It's loooong time ago but on the negatives I remember
| getting very annoyed with this app called Toaster, on the
| positives I remember thinking how extremely pretty
| everything looked (still does) and being blown away by
| little things like, to set the icon for a folder or
| document you could just copy and paste one over from
| another file :)
| gjvc wrote:
| This thread correctly identifies "discoverability", perhaps
| aka "progressive disclosure", or "some form of
| incrementalism" as the measure by which good user
| interfaces are evaluated. Operating systems such as
| Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much
| complexity, and multiple modules, not all of which are
| necessarily in use by the users at any given time.
|
| Therefore, the problem of GUI design becomes one of
| navigating the complexity/depth-of-knowledge curve, as much
| as it does creating a usable set of features at each point
| along it.
|
| The most egregious offenders are the latest Windows, 10 and
| later, IMHO. When I was a kid, (coming from the world of
| RISC OS which had a much shallower GUI) trying to
| understand the big deep Windows interface, I joined the
| dots by telling myself "This is how they put it together.
| This is how they are trying to make the things work
| consistently and in concert." I rarely broke out of that
| story-telling loop.
|
| Now, when using Windows 10 or later, and a few clicks
| brings one to a Windows 2000 and before-era network
| dialogue box, the "fourth wall" as it were, of GUI design
| is broken, the story-telling loop above is replaced by a
| jarring feeling of bewilderment or all-too familiar
| frustration, and it's obvious they are shipping the org
| chart, and doing so over time, as much older GUI components
| are still available.
|
| At the risk of sounding nihilistic, I fear that both OS X
| and Windows have reached their respective local maximas of
| design, and we won't see any changes for the better (by the
| above metric) any time soon.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| >Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux --
| inevitability -- contain much complexity.
|
| Operating systems _should_ be modular, allowing the user
| to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and
| needed.
|
| I do not need unstoppable "gamed" and "studentd" services
| on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple
| has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the
| corporation. Now I can't reduce complexity, bloatware.
|
| The only solution seems to be praying that BSD or Linux
| become useable one day
| gjvc wrote:
| > Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user
| to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and
| needed.
|
| Yup, updated my comment to clarify that point -- thank
| you. "the overthrow of the root user by the corporation"
| -- damn. Good turn of phrase :-(
| holoduke wrote:
| Or what about the scrollbar hiding automatically so its really
| hard to manualy grab the scrollbar handle and scroll with your
| mouse. Specially in long lists super annoying.
| grishka wrote:
| There's a setting to always show the scrollbars.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Ah, yes, the "Beware of the Leopard" school of design.
| Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden, but the
| defaults are terrible and the controls are hidden as well
| as they could possibly hide them.
| Yemeth wrote:
| > and way-too-subtle shades of grey
|
| MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all
| colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much
| time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side
| bar.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure the monochrome
| icons began well before Ive had influence on the software. OS
| X moved towards shape rather than color in eg iconography to
| support UI scaling (which had been an effort, and a more
| ambitious one, for years prior); and then eventually to
| support adaptive theming most recognizable (for its value
| anyway) in dark mode.
| aequitas wrote:
| > hiding things behind slow hover effects
|
| I can't for the life of me understand why it's a good idea to
| hide the close button for notifications or virtual desktops
| behind a long mouseover on any spot that is not the actual
| location of where the close button pops up.
| eviks wrote:
| Rather spot-on criticism of all the flat-white-space-low-info-
| density design paradigms
|
| Though
|
| > On the desktop, however, a scroll bar is very useful for
| determining your current position in the content without having
| to break away from what you're presently doing and reach for the
| mouse.
|
| You don't need a scrollbar for that, a tiny brightly colored
| (currently non-existing) indicator would suffice.
|
| Along with
|
| > If you're accustomed to a title bar being for handling the
| window and nothing else, it's very easy to misclick and activate
| an application feature you didn't intend to.
|
| These are just a bunch of poor design features before "the
| decline" since they nudge the poor user to hunt down small
| slivers of windows (horizontal/vertical bar, and seriously, those
| tiny arrows on the scroll bar?) when instead they could have most
| of the window's area to perform these functions with some, dare I
| say, Windows key?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Why have desktop UI's gotten so bad lately?
|
| My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire,
| like, actual graphics designers.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There's also the perverse incentive created by having dedicated
| UX people. At some point the UI is at a good point and doesn't
| need significant improvement, but the UX person needs to
| justify their existence, so changes happen just for the sake of
| making changes.
|
| To me, Discord's UI - especially on mobile - exemplifies this
| perfectly. They change the image upload process every few
| months, alternating between various levels of decent and
| terrible design.
|
| First it used to be one tap, then they put it in a submenu, now
| it's back to one tap but uploaded images get grouped together
| requiring tapping on them to scroll through, so we're forced to
| upload them one by one to have them show in the more convenient
| old way, making it still strictly a step back.
|
| Add in the managers who think that not having large UI changes
| every few years is a sign of stagnation regardless of reason.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Spotify has made a lot of changes in the last 2-3 years and
| most of them have been bad.
|
| A couple of instances come to mind. The first was with
| CarPlay. They went from list of thing (playlists, podcasts,
| etc.) that you click on to get to a new section to a home
| page with a row of useless tiles and a "view all" that is
| difficult to get to if using something like a scroll wheel in
| a BMW. Thankfully the feedback was so bad that they reversed
| the decision. They made the mistake of thinking that everyone
| with a touchscreen in their car uses it.
|
| The second is everything related to podcasts. Podcasts and
| music need to be completely isolated from one another because
| the method of browsing and maintaining are completely
| different. To this day there is no way to simply view a list
| that has all episodes for podcasts you follow and sort by
| recently updated. There is a "new episodes" thing that exists
| but if you click on something and back out it gets removed
| from the list. This assumes it is even updated, because
| clicking into loads from cache rather than doing a refresh.
| The only safe way to get an updated list of episodes is by
| hard closing the app and then re-opening it.
| wuiheerfoj wrote:
| Trying to find a playlist as it magically reorders them in
| front of my eyes is a ballache
| deeg wrote:
| I think this largely explains it, along with a desire for the
| UX designers doing something new and "modern".
|
| This explains a lot of user-unfriendly changes in other
| areas, too. I worked for a prominent travel web company and
| the army of people in marketing were constantly looking for
| new sources of "incremental revenue" to justify their work.
| This led to pop-unders and pages packed with more ads than
| content.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Spotify is the worst ever for this. Major UI changes that are
| awful every year or so. It was very easy to find anything you
| wanted 10 years ago. Now there's slideouts and hovers and
| collapsible garbage hiding everything.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| UX replaced HCI. Graphic design replaced science.
| api wrote:
| I think a lot of it is the other way around: graphics design
| driven by branding rather than UX.
|
| I also think the death of native development has a lot to do
| with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means
| there is no consistent design language across the system.
| simulo wrote:
| This is very similar to what Grudin suggests in his HCI
| history "From tool to partner": Apple used to be very
| usability and research focussed in the 80s and early 90s, but
| turned away from it with Jobs and went more look-driven --
| and had great success with it. Other companies followed.
| (Which does not mean that companies ignored graphic design
| before, but it was the more utilitarian parts of graphic
| design that were important focussing on distinct shapes,
| readability etc.)
| api wrote:
| True but I don't think this gets it quite right.
|
| The big problem with classic Mac was the cooperative
| multitasking weird OS and the unstylish and clunky
| hardware. The UI needed polish and modernization but was
| not fundamentally bad.
|
| The complete loss of OS coherence has a lot more to do with
| the web than anything else.
| jwells89 wrote:
| From my perspective as a dev, this is what happened: UI
| designers who had been trained on usability, who had a good
| grip on what was/wasn't feasible technically, and knew to
| take content variability into account were almost wholesale
| replaced with more generalist print/graphic designers who
| were great at pumping out pretty branded PSDs, but not so
| great at producing usable UIs.
|
| My guess is that this happened because real UI designers are
| harder to come by and cost more, while generalists are more
| common and cost less. I've not hired for these positions
| though so I don't know for sure.
| api wrote:
| It can also just be a result of oversupply of certain
| college degrees. Back in the late 90s to early 2000s there
| was a big trend of graphic design degrees at universities
| probably far in excess of available jobs for that
| specialty. I knew a bunch of these and many went into web
| design, and now I'm sure are doing UI design now that the
| web engine is the de facto standard UI engine everywhere
| but mobile. (Even on mobile it has an increasing presence.)
| dgb23 wrote:
| My theory is that UI has the exact same problem as programming:
|
| We don't know what we're doing.
|
| - Corporate interests lead to enshitification and chasing after
| local maxima.
|
| - We never learn from the past, new blood comes in faster than
| seniority can deal with.
|
| - Trends and fashion give us comfort and a superficial feeling
| of (faux) improvement.
|
| - Preferring change over stability.
|
| - Vague methodologies and adages that sound good, instead of
| dry, actionable quality metrics.
|
| - Proliferation of bureaucracy and marketing.
|
| - Productization instead of standardization leads to a lack of
| foundations that can be relied upon.
| tjpnz wrote:
| In the past many involved in frontend design might've had a
| background in human factors or ergonomics, they would also have
| some knowledge of how the brain perceives what's in front of
| them. I would view this knowledge as quite fundamental but it's
| increasingly rare to find such expertise in the field now. In
| my mind it explains a lot in terms of how many UIs are an
| incoherent mess and why accessibility is considered an
| afterthought, if at all. Doesn't matter who developed it
| either. FAANG are just as adept at flubbing basic design
| principles as anyone else.
| sannysanoff wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _The Decline of Usability_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541 - April 2020 (695
| comments)
| sharts wrote:
| The problem is that UI/UX people are product and design people
| whose backgrounds were predominantly in art or similar. 99% of
| these folks have no background psychology, human factors,
| information science or the cognitive sciences.
|
| What can be expected when you hire these people?
| easeout wrote:
| Like any other kind of employee, you the stakeholder are
| responsible to get them trained in the role you delegate to
| them, or to evaluate that they meet your needs before hire.
| Designers I know do art for fun, but at work they design to
| solve business problems. They have a lot to say about this
| topic. In any case it isn't due to some character flaw on their
| part.
| easeout wrote:
| > What about Apple?
|
| > I can't comment on the current state of MacOS since the time
| I've spent actually using a Mac during the last 8 years or so
| probably totals to a few hours. Apple used to be good at this,
| and I hear they still do a decent job at keeping things sane,
| even post-Jobs.
|
| The macOS menu bar is still compulsory. First party apps
| generally still fill it out properly with commands for everything
| a user can do and put the common ones in their usual places. For
| third party apps it depends on whether the developer put time
| into platform norms. Many Electron apps don't: Slack makes many
| commands available only through UI popup menus; VS Code puts them
| in the command palette so you can only find them by search. Of
| course these apps have key shortcuts but you can't learn them
| from a menu bar item that doesn't exist.
|
| The focused window gets a heavy shadow. I think that's also
| compulsory.
|
| But first party apps and recently the system frameworks are
| guilty of cramming toolbars into title bars and leaving a drag
| area that doesn't span the width of the window. That's permanent.
| At least the window title is still written and you know you can
| drag that. A window's file proxy icon is often missing until you
| hover on the title. The bar at the top of the window may or may
| not be visually divided from the content area.
|
| First party apps also remove color and/or silhouette
| distinctiveness from those toolbars' buttons. App icon
| silhouettes are also gone.
|
| Scroll bars are of course hidden by default but can be always
| shown.
|
| The result is probably more usable than what's described in this
| article on other platforms, but off peak for macOS.
|
| Aside: iOS started the hidden-unless-scrolling scroll indicators
| trend, I think. Platform guidance was that you're supposed to
| flash them on first appearance of any scroll view whose content
| doesn't all fit. (To try it out, go to the Home Screen and then
| back to Safari.) This is the signal to the user that there is
| more to see. Users don't consciously think about it but they pick
| up the right expectation. You just call a method[1] after the
| view transition animation finishes. This has become arcane
| knowledge in the iOS field: No one remembers this is important to
| do in the absence of persistent scroll bars, and where it's not
| automatic due to using system frameworks in a high level way,
| many apps just don't get this right.
|
| [1]:
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscrollview...
| dangus wrote:
| I think the idea that UI was consistent between 1992 and 2012 is
| laughable. It's nostalgia and rose colored glasses.
|
| Cross platform applications were often based on entirely
| different codebases and looked nothing like each other or their
| native host OS. Examples: AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Office
| (persists to this day), Internet Explorer Macintosh compared to
| Windows. If applications like Slack are bad at being a part of
| the host OS then we can't ignore the fact that this isn't
| anything new.
|
| Numerous applications completely disregarded their host OS design
| language. Examples: Every Java application, RealPlayer, WinAmp,
| iTunes, America Online, Macromedia/Adobe Flash and Shockwave
| apps, HyperCard, the list goes on and on.
| kazinator wrote:
| The decline in usability ("enshittification") is due to a readily
| evident change in incentives behind the software.
|
| You're no longer selling a shrink-wrapped application in a
| competitive market, where you compete on usability.
|
| You're giving it away, while figuring out how to extract value
| out of the user in other ways.
|
| Online services that have captive users (e.g. the one and only
| government site you have to use for some service) don't have any
| incentive to improve their user experience. But that is not new.
| There was no previous version of that which had a better user
| experience; the previous version was an obstinate bureaucracy
| driven by paper pushing in the backrop of rigid protocols. What
| you see is just the computerization of that.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| UX designer here who has done nothing but design web, mobile and
| related UI since about 2000, mostly working for or at large
| consumer brands (and now thinking of retiring).
|
| I'd definitely agree with the idea that change for change's sake
| is responsible for a lot of usability problems.
|
| But a bigger problem is the near extinction of any professional
| discussion or capable analysis of design by the people who are
| doing it.
|
| Most designers I work with don't have the vocabulary or knowledge
| about what makes something "usable" in the wider sense, let alone
| the ability to actually solve subtle interaction design or
| information display problems. With no knowledge or interest in
| basic heuristics, they literally don't know where to start. So
| they just live in Figma playing with colours, shapes and effects,
| pausing only to show some variations of the same UI for "user
| testing". It's become a wilfully ignorant, "non-technical" cult
| of innovation that's completely lost sight of its original
| purpose.
|
| To say I'm ashamed of my profession is no exaggeration. We've
| failed so badly.
| incongruity wrote:
| As someone who works as a service designer and design
| strategist, I agree, 100%. I've seen a general decline in rigor
| in the field. Many are back to making things "pretty" with
| poorly done research (if that) asking small-minded questions
| rather than thinking about context, ecosystem and systemic
| effects of their design decisions.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Sounds like the syndrome plaguing GNOME. :)
| sillywalk wrote:
| I've always assumed that GNOME developers don't actually use
| GNOME.
| cuddlecake wrote:
| As a frontend dev, what are good resources to learn about
| principles and heuristics that I can apply in my work?
|
| I have some knowledge, albeit very primitive, that I picked up
| from an HCI introduction and some good designers, but nothing
| too technical / formal yet.
| toss1 wrote:
| I'm not a UI/UX designer, and am equally frustrated by the
| failures described in the article and other comments.
|
| One item I can bring to the table from the world of designing
| cockpits for racecars and airplanes is that the primary
| principle to follow is:
|
| Reduce Driver/Pilot Workload.
|
| Does whatever you are doing around the workspace increase or
| decrease the work that the driver or pilot must do? Can the
| status of [thing] be discovered (read/heard/felt) with
| minimum time and effort? Does [thing] create an otherwise
| unnecessary need to take even a quick glance at something? Is
| something in the way of taking an action, requiring an extra
| motion?
|
| Of course, there are some things that maybe it _IS_ desirable
| to add an extra bit of work, e.g., a switch that kills
| critical [thing] maybe should have a cover over it requiring
| to flip up the cover then hit the switch; an extra moment of
| thought.
|
| This one principle translates well to software interfaces.
| Screw whether it "looks clean" or not -- does it reduce or
| increase the user's workload? Even a tiny change can make a
| huge difference, because many actions are repeated.
|
| I hope this helps
| ProxCoques wrote:
| It's more about trying to work out what motivates people to
| do things while using some reasonably simple tools like the
| N/N web heuristics to guide you. More a way of thinking
| straight about what qualifies as a good design under a
| certain condition, and what hypotheses to research and test
| out of that. So it's contextual. It may seem like there
| should be a more logical formula, but there's really not a
| lot of technical/formal things (along the lines of, say,
| accounting or structural engineering) that lead you to the
| best approach. My frustration is not that people don't
| necessarily know about these things (although I bet if I
| mentioned Bruce Tog to anyone at work they'd give me a blank
| stare), but that they can't marshal them in their work.
| codeptualize wrote:
| There is a misconception that consistency == usability. It's an
| important part of usability but there is a lot more to it. Tunnel
| vision on consistency (or anything really) doesn't lead to good
| outcomes. The big picture is what matters: can someone do what
| they need to do?
|
| Articles like these also have lots of opinions, no research and
| stats, nor have decent explanations of how much impact these
| "problems" actually have. Granted I have not seen much research
| on desktop apps, but in other fields things have measurable
| improved a lot.
|
| Even going by opinion, my memory from that time was that
| everything was pretty bad. How often do you lose work because of
| crashes or not enough undo steps? And could you do the same
| things you can do now? Also don't forget about all the horrible
| Java software that didn't use the OS UI.
|
| People romanticize (software of) the past. The stuff I use today
| is magic compared to the old crap.
|
| Obviously not everything is perfect and I do recognize/understand
| some of the criticism in the article, but focussing on the little
| things really misses the big picture that is usability:
| completing the task that you need to complete, and that is easier
| than ever.
|
| > You're old and angry! You bet! Now get off my lawn, punk.
|
| Fair enough, I'll see myself out.
| mnd999 wrote:
| > Articles like these also have lots of opinions, no research
| and stats,
|
| Oh you're in the data driven club. I bet you even A/B test.
| Good luck with that.
| codeptualize wrote:
| No, I don't use A/B tests for usability as they aren't very
| helpful to find usability problems.
|
| A/B testing is more for conversion optimization, it's to
| measure how persuasive something is.
|
| User testing is my preferred method (in it's simplest form
| just observing people doing a task), if that's not an option
| I like heuristic evaluations.
|
| I suggest you actually look into what usability is about, you
| might enjoy it. Good luck with your assumptions.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| These things were studied in decades past. Did you demand
| research and stats when Microsoft made it impossible to tell
| which window is focused? What benefits were claimed?
| codeptualize wrote:
| My whole point is that usability is not about small details
| but the ability to complete a task. The big picture.
|
| I don't use windows, I don't like it, but if [it being
| impossible to tell which window is focussed] doesn't impede
| people accomplishing the things they need to do, it's
| probably a cosmetic, at best a minor usability problem.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Usability is the ease of completing tasks. Not ability.
|
| You seem very invested in dismissing constructive
| criticism. And you demanded research but provided none.
| wredue wrote:
| >the stuff I use today is magic compared to the old crap
|
| I... what?
|
| Software is losing features while simultaneously becoming less
| usable.
|
| The only thing software does better today than yesterday is
| spying on you.
| yawaramin wrote:
| > How often do you lose work because of crashes or not enough
| undo steps?
|
| Crashes and too few undo steps are not a UI/UX problem, they
| are a software quality/hardware limitations (enough memory or
| storage to hold all those steps) problem. Software reliability
| has definitely gotten better in many aspects, as long-lived
| software applications and operating systems have been through
| the crucible of time and learned from their reliability
| mistakes. But UI/UX is in many aspects worse than ever.
|
| > Also don't forget about all the horrible Java software that
| didn't use the OS UI.
|
| The article actually says the same thing: 'A few rogue
| applications didn't play by the rules,...'
|
| > completing the task that you need to complete, and that is
| easier than ever.
|
| Do me a favour-try getting an older person who has not used
| Zoom before, to host a meeting and accept guest join requests.
| You will really understand the sorry state we are in once you
| see them struggle to do this.
| codeptualize wrote:
| >are not a UI/UX problem
|
| Never said UI, but they are absolute usability & user
| experience problems. Arguably the most important ones! This
| is exactly what I mean by missing the big picture. What do
| you think has more impact on completing a task and the
| experience of completing that task? A working maybe slightly
| inconsistent toolbar, or the thing crashing and loosing your
| work?
|
| > The article actually says the same thing: 'A few rogue
| applications didn't play by the rules,...'
|
| Fair enough, although I would say it was a lot more than a
| rogue few..
|
| > Do me a favour-try getting an older person who has not used
| Zoom before
|
| Great example of something that you couldn't do and now can,
| times are truly great right now.
|
| It's great that you mention old people, I have helped some
| learning to deal with computers, back then, and also more
| recently. It's so much easier now.
|
| Old computers with the software we are talking about was/is
| really hard to learn for them, now with ipads and smartphones
| they can do so many things. Can't say I have tried zoom
| specifically, but Hangouts, face time, whatsapp, email, even
| installing games and apps, no problem at all! They can
| achieve so many more things because we have come so far and
| things are more usable than ever.
| yawaramin wrote:
| > This is exactly what I mean by missing the big picture.
|
| The point you are making is a different one than the one
| that the OP is making. Just because you are making a
| specific (different) point, doesn't make the OP's point
| invalid.
|
| > Great example of something that you couldn't do and now
| can, times are truly great right now.
|
| Again a different point. Of course we now have a
| proliferation of different and powerful software. The point
| I am making is about the UI/UX of the software, not about
| the fact that they make something possible that wasn't
| before.
| codeptualize wrote:
| The article states that usability is declining, the
| arguments to back that up are: things are somewhat
| inconsistent and I don't like [some UI patterns].
|
| My point is that the claim is wrong, and the arguments
| don't support it and have little to do with usability.
|
| This follows from a misconception that usability, UI, and
| user experience are the same thing, which is really
| showing a lack of understanding of what they actually
| are.
|
| I write my comments in the hope that people will actually
| look into these topics more deeply as they are quite
| interesting and often require setting aside the
| preferences, gut instinct, and pet peeves this article is
| filled with.
| yawaramin wrote:
| If you insist on nitpicking with a specific definition,
| you can of course dismiss the points in the OP. But if
| you try to understand what it's saying on its own terms-
| it's obviously talking about UI/UX and using the term
| 'usability' in a colloquial way. All the examples given
| in there are examples of bad UI/UX. Your point that it's
| _possible_ to do things now that weren 't back in the
| day, is just completely off on a different tangent than
| the actual thesis of the OP. I don't even know what to
| say except that it's a strawman.
| hjkl0 wrote:
| This is just a rant about some minor usability issues in a very
| small selection of applications used by the author, and mostly
| Gnome. There's is nothing behind it.
|
| The title is click-bait and the article is a waste of time.
|
| There's some very dubious claims, such as:
|
| > There was a time (roughly between 1994 and 2012) when a
| reasonably computer-literate user could sit down in front of
| almost any operating system and quickly get to grips with the
| GUI, no matter what their home base was. Windows, MacOS, CDE,
| OpenStep, OS/2 and even outliers like Amiga, Atari and BeOS all
| had more in common than what set them apart.
|
| Personally, having used many of these systems during those years,
| I completely disagree.
|
| There is no further context or evidence to support this claim.
| It's just "the premise".
|
| This is then contrasted with vague generalizations about the
| current situation:
|
| > Today, it seems we're on another track completely. Despite
| being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals,
| Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is
| steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to
| basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion
|
| While there is no evidence for the claim that usability was
| better in the 90s, there are some examples to show that it's
| worse now.
|
| But these are more like pet-peeves, and there's no evidence or
| theory to show why they're good or bad, just more vague
| generalizations.
|
| > Since Windows 2 (not 2000 - I'm really talking about Windows
| 2), users have been able to resize windows by dragging their top
| border and corners. Not so with Slack, anymore.
|
| This is not the decline of usability. It's the decline in respect
| for the reader.
|
| There really was a time when a title faithfully represented the
| text that followed it, right? It must have been sometime around
| 1994.
| bradley13 wrote:
| All true. It goes even farther: hiding the file structure, and
| even the concept of files. Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user
| where their files are stored - they have no idea. Ask if they are
| in the cloud - no idea. Worse - just as with UIs - there is no
| consistency where different apps store their data. We also
| shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-extensions.
|
| To add insult to injury Windows lies to non-English speakers. In
| German, for example, it will tell you your home directory is in
| "Benutzer", but there actually is no such directory, there is
| only "Users". These attempts to hide complexity wind up creating
| confusion and _more_ complexity.
| grishka wrote:
| > We also shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-
| extensions.
|
| That must be the number one reason why .jpg.exe with a jpg-
| looking icon still works on a surprising number of people. And
| that's with even the most non-technical users knowing what file
| extensions are and how they work.
| ben_w wrote:
| > In German, for example, it will tell you your home directory
| is in "Benutzer", but there actually is no such directory,
| there is only "Users".
|
| Fantastisch. /s
|
| Reminds me of a different issue we had back at my first
| permanent iOS role. We wrote about a "button" in the app
| description, the German translation of which is "Knopf"; this
| triggered Apple's naughty word filter, presumably because
| "Knopf" is also a translation of "knob", but "Knopf" doesn't
| have the penile connotations in German that "knob" has in
| English.
| twarge wrote:
| It's all about files. That we have a photos app with a custom
| database is an obvious failure of the OS file system. Why
| didn't the BeOS approach work?
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| And even if you do launch Explorer and start looking for your
| files, you'll find... what, THREE copies of your home-directory
| structure, two of which are "forbidden?"
|
| WTF is all that shit, Microsoft?
|
| Oh and another Explorer regression: It used to show little "+"
| signs next to directories that actually contained things.
| Microsoft GOT RID OF THOSE.
|
| Oh... unless you happen to roll your cursor through the left
| pane. Then they inexplicably appear. Or did MS regress even
| further, from the universally-understood "+" symbol to idiotic
| triangles?
|
| You can't even keep up with all of the regressions at this
| point.
| thetomcraig wrote:
| > Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are
| stored - they have no idea.
|
| This. The move towards "everything on the cloud" was a double
| edged sword for non-power users. It's great that you don't have
| to make Grandma plug in a external USB drive and use Time
| Machine, but yes nobody knows where things are anymore. Does
| Grandma know what "the cloud" even is?
|
| I feel like Apple is the biggest proponent of moving away from
| the idea of "files" and having your "content" be something you
| shuttle around between different apps. But each one has a
| slightly different "share" and "import" and "export" paradigm
| as well. And now there is an iCloud Drive "files" app! What
| does that mean? And how do I know if it's on my phone or I'm
| just seeing a representation of what's on my iCloud Drive? Does
| the cloud icon mean I've downloaded it or not, what if it's it
| slightly dark gray or slightly light gray? </rant>
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| 100% on target. Windows, which advanced the state of the GUI
| nicely in the '90s, has regressed into an absolutely infuriating,
| incompetent UI disaster.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have always felt that the pinnacle of Windows usability was
| Windows 2000 Professional. Clean, mostly intuitive, few
| gratuitous animations. It's been downhill ever since.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| I didn't have any problem with XP. I can't recall a single
| major irritant in its UI.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Did you leave the cartoon UI enabled? Because I recall XP
| not being a terrible release once one put back the "yes,
| I'm a professional, less crayola, please" UI elements
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| Oh yeah! I turned that off so fast that I forgot about
| it. You're absolutely right. I remember deriding that as
| the Fisher-Price UI.
|
| And I hated, HATED the "my this' and "my that" fad that
| dominated the early '00s. Yeah, I know it's MY computer,
| because it's on MY desk full of MY documents. So
| goddamned infantile.
|
| Sadly, I've seen some resurgence of the "my" BS lately.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I for one miss the 3-D buttons of the Windows 95 era. It was
| obvious what could be clicked and what could not.
| yard2010 wrote:
| It was so good that Google incorporated this idea in Material
| Design
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| And then all but killed it >:( https://m3.material.io/styles/
| elevation/overview#f9947307-48...
|
| My first smartphone ran KitKat and IMO it was Google's best
| work to date, design-wise.
| ben_w wrote:
| Absolutely agree; I think the anti-skeuomorphic "clean" fashion
| of the last decade has been terrible for discoverability even
| in mobile apps, and it's somewhat ironic that the same design
| cues have gone back to WIMP devices, giving us interfaces
| designed to look like touch screen mobile apps even though the
| tech is different -- and design cues matching a different
| technology in order to give a sense of familiarity is the
| actual definition of skeuomorphic.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Tbf, Apples baroque "skeuomorphic phase" with wood paneling,
| shiny metal and cloth was absolutely terrible even back then
| and most likely responsible for the "skeumorphic backlash"
| that followed. Subtle 3D hints for interactive elements
| always made sense, and don't need to look "old fashioned".
| attractivechaos wrote:
| This! I hate iOS' flat design and the trend after that. When
| that UI first came out, texts and buttons looked so similar
| that I often had to poke to distinguish them. Now iOS is not as
| bad but I still prefer its original 3D design. I guess Jobs
| would never approve the current iOS UI.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh man, I can remember when the Windows 9x/Motif/Nextstep look
| was so modern, we thought the future of UI was going to be more
| of the same: huge bevels on the buttons with maybe a texture
| map. Think the buttons from the menus in Super Mario 64, and
| then go watch some old 90s scifi or other technology-themed
| movies and see how much their "futuristic" UIs looked like
| that. _The Lawnmower Man_ and some scenes from _Hackers_ come
| to mind.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| One of my frequent hobby horses is the area of portable music
| players (formerly called Walkmans or MP3 players, currently
| "DAPs"). I simply don't understand who would want to buy any of
| the currently available players because they'll are so terrible
| to _use_. The good ones were killed off by a combination of
| streaming services and Android devices. There are no more light-
| weight, simple players with high capacity, physical buttons and
| good battery life. You know, the kind of thing you could put into
| your pocket take on your run without bruising yourself. The kind
| of thing that has a legible screen, sane menu layout, that can
| read tags from your files and let you simply drag playlists into
| them. I know that there are people out there who want the same
| thing, but manufacturers are instead releasing gigantic bricks
| with protruding knobs and weird edges, huge battery-draining
| touch screens, running some dreadful Android hack of an OS.
| "This one had TWO DACS!". Really! Well I'm not in a sound-proofed
| listening room with EUR10000 monitors, I'm on a bus with some
| IEMs. Reviews rarely discuss the most important aspects of a
| _portable_ music device, and instead gush like wine critics about
| the ... I don 't know, _smell_ (?) or _taste_ (?) of the music.
| I'm only half joking. The more prestigious the reviewer the more
| bollocks they write, and half the time I can't even find mention
| of the weight or size. Or when they do, they're plain wrong (eg:
| "The Shanling Q1 is a light weight portable device"... No it's
| f*cking not, it's an awful brick with a shitty OS, bad battery
| life, overly sensitive buttons. I don't care how well it sounds
| if I can't get playlists into it and don't want to use it because
| it's a heavy blob with a shitty interface.
|
| 13 years ago Rockbox on the Sansa Clip+ was great. If we could
| simply produce that with today's tech I'd take it in front of any
| of these ludicrous hulking house-bricks that cost an arm and a
| leg.
|
| Am I off-topic?
| jonjacky wrote:
| See also this author's Short Thoughts on Computers and
| Programming:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32935466
| alistairSH wrote:
| Even worse, the trend away from good UX is leaking from software
| to hardware.
|
| Who at Kia thought this was a good idea? Three steps to open the
| door. Requires two hands. Good luck if you're an amputee, have
| arthritis, can't see the door unlock touch zone, or just can't
| figure it out.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=Rv5so7szIMM
|
| Then there's Elon's obsession with that stupid F1-style steering
| wheel.
|
| And VW's off choice to control 4 windows with 2 switches in their
| EVs. So weird.
|
| It just goes on and on. Don't these companies hire engineers with
| UX experience? Sigh.
| [deleted]
| mceachen wrote:
| FWIW, those door handles are a copy of the Tesla Model 3 door
| handles (along with their usability issues).
|
| It's very similar to everyone copying Apple's auto-hiding
| scroll bars--usability be damned.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I thought the Tesla version popped out automatically. The Kia
| version requires the user to push the forward edge to
| manually pop the back edge out.
|
| 1. Unlock with barely visible touch zone.
|
| 2. Push forward edge, which flips out back edge/main handle
|
| 3. Grab and pull main handle.
| couchand wrote:
| Cars are particularly bad these days, where once they were a
| model of streamlined usability.
|
| My father-in-law's van has three large knobs next to each other
| on the dash. Which one adjusts the volume, which one the fan
| speed, and which one switches gears? Hope you don't pick the
| wrong one while driving at highway speeds!
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I used to work at a place where the company car we'd have to
| drive when visiting the home office was often one of the
| higher-end Mercedes sedans. (I don't remember which one.) The
| controls were such a confusing, overdesigned mess. Over the
| course of 2 or 3 years of regular visits to the office, I
| don't think anyone on my team was ever able to figure out how
| to turn off the air conditioning.
|
| We never figured out how to turn off the radio, either, but
| at least we did figure out how to turn the volume all the way
| down.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Steering wheel buttons are another one. They do different
| things at different times, depending on what mode your dash
| display is in.
|
| Ever wonder why old airplane dashboards look so complicated?
| It's because each switch and dial does one thing and that
| thing never changes.
| pacifika wrote:
| Ok so where are the good examples, anyone doing anything of note
| to address this?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The good examples are the software they replaced.
| Y-bar wrote:
| It's not unlike a tragedy of the commons, clicking through
| Wikipedia maybe "Collective action problem" is even more apt?
| Individual app makers do things which they like and want
| without considering the wider implications of cross-app
| usability in the operating system.
|
| In isolation many apps may be acceptable, but that falls down
| in the wider context.
|
| The problem would be less of a problem if everyone did the same
| thing (bad or good UI) in a similar manner, because then there
| is predictability which is a powerful concept in user
| interaction.
| tazjin wrote:
| > Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals
|
| Yes, but these "professionals" consider everything in the vacuum
| of whatever software they're working on. Streamlined, cross-
| program UX is not just not considered, but actively discouraged.
| Everything needs to be its own island.
|
| This is why as things progress I move more and more things into
| Emacs, with only the browser and a few websites remaining outside
| of it at this point. In Emacs you can't isolate your application
| to the point where I somehow _have to_ learn your paradigm.
| wredue wrote:
| "I NEED TO SAVE SCREEN REAL ESTATE SO I CAN... CHECKS NOTES...
| PUT A BUTTON THAT TAKES THE ENTIRE SCREEN"
|
| Yeah. This one always gets me with the whole "moving to the title
| bar saves screen space".
|
| The other thing that really grinds my gears today is how many
| applications steal focus multiple times during launch. The number
| of people that have accidentally posted passwords in team chats
| cause of bullshit focus stealing is too damn high!
| euroderf wrote:
| Yeah, is there a web page that tells you how to disable this
| focus-stealing-on-launch in most OSs ? That would be a public
| service.
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being
| mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on
| mobile. Can I _PLEASE_ have my fucking scrollbar back now?
|
| I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a
| developer trying to find a setting because there was no
| indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll
| down to. Something that would have been obvious before the
| onslaught of hidden scrollbars. The trouble is that having my
| pointer over the navigation pane--practically a guaranteed
| position--causes the scrollbar on the other pane to be hidden.
| Without the visual cue of a scrollbar there was no reason to move
| my pointer over to the other pane to discover there's more. Hell
| you might not even know it's a separate pane now that we've
| gotten rid of every defining border. I shared a screenshot with
| the developer, assured them that I was using the current version,
| only to have him say "scroll down." No doubt, I'm the fucking
| idiot (/s).
|
| Just like on mobile, you're supposed randomly interact with every
| UI element in hopes of discovering how it works only to have that
| learned skill be unique to one fucking app. Tap it, slow tap it,
| slow tap it for a different amount of time, tap it faster, spam
| it... "google it"... oh, this time you're supposed to drag it to
| something that doesn't even look like a UI element. Stupid
| grandpas!
|
| "Is the checkbox checked?" was never as ambiguous as "is the
| slider switch on?" Also, the checkbox uses less screen space! I'd
| argue that they optimized for neither screen space or user
| friendliness. It's optimized for a look and you can even make it
| worse by making it flatter. Go ahead make it look like two
| squares! Is the darker area the switch part? Who cares! It looks
| so clean and distraction free! I was so distracted by knowing
| what state the switch was in.
|
| Sorry, time for my meds. I usually make it half way through the
| day.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a
| developer trying to find a setting because there was no
| indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to
| scroll down to._
|
| I've done that, man. Quite embarrassing.
| winrid wrote:
| Embarrassing for the app/os designers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I try to write mine, to avoid that kind of thing. It often
| involves a lot of arguing with the graphic designer.
| wredue wrote:
| And what the fuck is with the wording on check boxes these
| days?
|
| On top of not even knowing if the sliding circle is actually on
| or off, half the time I cannot figure out which of on or off I
| actually want. Double negatives all over the place. Weird
| wording. No indication of actual impact.
|
| It's all crazy.
| [deleted]
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I was with you, until you got to the slider switch part. Now
| I'm with you AND my blood is boiling. Nice to know it's not
| just me though - I find the ambiguous slider switches in way
| too many apps now!
| grishka wrote:
| Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens
| in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly
| no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a
| touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose.
|
| On your scrolling complaint -- well, there's this desktop-
| specific thing that OP doesn't mention but that becomes very
| apparent once you start looking for it in old-school desktop
| UIs. _Controls_ never, ever scroll. Only content does. If
| controls don 't fit into a window, you don't make it scrollable
| -- you split it into tabs or you put the extra controls into a
| separate window that opens via a button. This appears to be
| universal at least for Windows and macOS.
| indymike wrote:
| > Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting
| touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it
| happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person
| I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches
| its screen on purpose.
|
| When I was doing a lot Android development, it was nice to be
| able to test touch without loading on a phone. It was equally
| nice to be able to markup screenshots with the pan. I
| switched to Linux from Windows a couple years ago and the new
| laptop doesn't have touch (it does have a giant 17" panel and
| all day battery), so I keep a tablet that has a stylus in the
| bag for doing UI markup and bug reports. I may switch to the
| 16" Gram because it does have touch and stylus... and I won't
| have to carry the tablet.
| brazzy wrote:
| But then you need fixed window sizes, which is pretty damn
| annoying as well.
| grishka wrote:
| That same Microsoft solved that nicely in win32 by using
| "DLUs", or "dialog units", for layouts. These scale with
| the font.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've had touchscreen laptops for about 7years now. The only
| time that the touchscreen gets used is when somebody is
| showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and
| accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.
|
| It's strange - I love to optimize my flow, but I just haven't
| yet hit a situation where my hands leaving keyboard and
| touching the screen is faster. (I'm a die-hard and proficient
| track point user,and my hands never leave keyboard, so maybe
| I'm a special weird case?)
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Reaching for the screen all the time also sounds like a
| shoulder RSI just waiting to happen.
| kvmet wrote:
| I have a touchscreen laptop for work and the only real use
| I've found is testing the behavior of touch-only HMIs.
| high_priest wrote:
| I have to admit that using a touchscreen laptop with a decent
| pen has made my university life a breeze. Ability to whip out
| a laptop and have all the notes, from all the years,
| searchable, with drawings just as good as when they were
| drawn and even better, because I can fix them and annotate
| them anytime... makes me feel like a terminator machine.
|
| And it is the main reason I am stuck with Windows, despite
| also enjoying the 'normal' pc experience on linux much more
| than Windows bloat.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This feels like a modern rewrite of "Falling Down" :)
|
| * That's not a criticism. I agree with your take on it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Slide switches are just awful. A skeuomorphism that doesn't
| work. Checkboxes are far better, assuming there aren't double
| negatives in the label text (e.g. a check means something is
| disabled.... the developers who do this should be shot at
| dawn).
| m3047 wrote:
| I feel you. There is nothing today quite like _Inside Macintosh
| Volume I_ laying out out in drawings and prose (!) what the
| elements of a UI are, what they do, and how they work... almost
| like people had never seen a UI before. People must have had to
| think about it, they wrote a book for F sake. /s
|
| They devote ink and paper to declaring that modes are to be
| avoided, and why. The do's and don'ts of UI on page 70 are
| worth repeating:
|
| Do:
|
| * Let the user have as much control as possible over the
| appearance of objects.
|
| * Use verbs for menu commands that perform actions.
|
| * Make alerts self explanatory.
|
| * Use controls and other graphics instead of just menu
| commands.
|
| Don't:
|
| * Overuse modes (again!).
|
| * Require keyboard / mouse when the operation would be easier
| with the other.
|
| * Change the way the screen looks unexpectedly, especially
| scrolling.
|
| * Redraw objects unnecessarily.
|
| * Make up your own menus and give them the same name as
| standard ones (they define the standard ones in this book, you
| know: About, File, Edit as well as what goes in them. yes, yes,
| this is where it all started).
|
| We've meandered into a bullshit local minimum where there is
| the One True UI and it's different for every app, but the same
| for every user. Meanwhile in industrial control where a $50,000
| piece of equipment has its own app, used by maybe one person or
| three if it's operated 24 hours a day, the responsive mobile
| interface is as easy to lay out as slides in a slide deck and
| takes about as long to do. Hell, a customizable dashboard is a
| widget.
|
| If the cloud made shoes there would be different shoes for
| grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size and you'd
| have to cut off toes if your feet were too big or stuff them
| with prostheses if they were too small.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Today is your lucky day. Have a new word; Procrustean.
|
| "forcing strict conformity through disregard of individual
| differences or special circumstances"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procrustean
|
| "In Greek mythology, Procrustes ... was a rogue smith and
| bandit from Attica who attacked [read: killed] people by
| stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force
| them to fit the size of an iron bed."
|
| "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes"
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| Eh, Apple's ideas are not to be taken as gospel. This is the
| company that fielded UI that's as bad (or worse) than
| everything we're complaining about here, decades earlier.
|
| For example: secret alternate menus. You can actually press
| modifier keys on the Mac while a menu's open and sometimes
| you get totally different menus. These are not indicated
| anywhere. So theoretically every menu on a Mac may have...
| let me do the math here... eight sets of contents using
| Control, Option, Shift and all combos of those. So according
| to Apple, you should open every menu and mash every combo of
| modifier key to see what's in each... and memorize them.
|
| Another Apple menu defect is to start every entry with the
| same word:
|
| VIEW
|
| Show meters
|
| Show clips
|
| Show this
|
| Hide that
|
| Hide the sense
|
| Show WTF the point is
|
| This makes the first word of every entry nearly useless, and
| massively degrades the usability of the View menu. You have
| to sit there and parse the first part of every line, which
| only has two options... both of which are four characters,
| BTW, and thus visually the same size.
|
| You don't do this; you use CHECKMARKS, which we learned
| decades ago. Some Mac apps do this, but many Apple ones still
| have this asinine convention of "show" and "hide" repeated
| over and over.
|
| VIEW
|
| * Meters
|
| * Clips This
|
| * That
|
| * The sense WTF the point is
|
| But that brings us to another classic Mac menu defect: The
| misuse of the Window menu. This menu is supposed to show
| names of open windows in an MDI-type situation. But Mac apps
| often bury View options in the Window menu, apparently
| expecting the user to guess that whatever they're looking for
| has been implemented as a window. Why would I go into the
| Window menu to activate audio meters, for example?
|
| And most of the time, whatever the option is has NOT been
| implemented as a window.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm a UI/UX layperson by any measure, but as an avid vim
| user, I actually wish modes were everywhere and I could use
| every app with the keyboard alone
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| The way Microsoft office handles this is pretty wonderful.
| Alt reveals the keyboard shortcuts and they work in a very
| intuitive way. All pretty discoverable once you learn the
| one "alt" key trick.
|
| (Side note, for mouse-work, They're now starting to f**
| with their ribbon a bit and the hidden/simplified version
| is just terrible, but they haven't forced that upon us
| yet.)
|
| To handle the lack of vim modes in other apps, I just use a
| keyboard with my own custom QMK firmware that makes my
| keyboard have modes. That works well enough for 90% of what
| I'd be doing in VIM.
| awinter-py wrote:
| > Google, for example, have gotten increasingly into some kind of
| A/B testing of late and ...
|
| no AB test ever performed in the history of user research has
| correctly measured the _intense hormonal rage_ pheromones
| released by power users when a button is moved for any reason
| quantum_bit wrote:
| He's right about Gnome for sure. I used to use Ubuntu 14.04-16.04
| from 2014 to 2019 along with macOS all these years.
|
| Although macOS has a lot of problems, I returned to Ubuntu
| (22.04) since July in a new workplace, and it is horrible. This
| weird empty horizontal top panel and menus behind the hamburger
| button are just madness.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Try PopOS if you want a Linux desktop environment that's not
| painful to use and looks modern.
|
| Gnome 4 just looks alien. They've abandoned every common
| desktop metaphor and replaced it with a scuffed android
| launcher.
| Condition1952 wrote:
| Sorry for being obnoxious but I think it's worse than madness,
| it's cruelty.
|
| The GUI makes you look for basic stuff every time, such as gas
| Lightning
| shrubble wrote:
| Gnome is pathetically bad at this point. The old desktop CDE is
| almost as good overall despite its many quirks...
| jwells89 wrote:
| I can mostly live with GNOME, but making the top bar mostly
| composed of empty space and omnipresent while apps try as hard
| as possible to avoid proper menus makes no sense at all. The
| space for menus is right there!
| bombolo wrote:
| [dead]
| osigurdson wrote:
| It has taken me a least a year to learn the right gesture
| combination to close apps on iPhone 13. Many operations are very
| subtle.
|
| However, I seem to be far less bothered by modern usability than
| some others. My brain is hard wired for novelty it seems. I would
| not want to use Windows 2000 for example.
| NavinF wrote:
| That sounds like a good thing. Apps should almost never be
| killed. The OS automatically kills suspended apps when it needs
| more ram
| [deleted]
| osigurdson wrote:
| That would be true if it were not for state.
| nmlt wrote:
| Apple support recently told me to kill all other apps to make
| the Files app work. It was taking ages to download and save
| data.
| notbeuller wrote:
| macOS is absolutely and infuriatingly the same as the examples
| here. I've yet to find anyone that actively defends this style -
| just like I have yet to find people to actively defend open
| office workspaces. (In apples case, both were designed by the
| same people.)
| hkpack wrote:
| I actually don't agree much with the article. I think that all
| modern OSes (macOS, Windows and even Linuxes) are much much
| better from the usability perspective than years ago.
|
| Some UI elements and patterns are indeed problematic, but it
| doesn't really that of a big deal, and some of them are the
| results of compromises.
|
| Most of these complains are because people don't like change
| and it is ok.
|
| I recently started using Windows 11 after a decade on macOS
| (have to port some apps there), and was very surprised by the
| UI improvements in the core components. I asked couple of
| colleagues about those, and most of them hated the change and
| were not using new features.
| sannysanoff wrote:
| It happened to me to be part of a project where design was made
| by a young female friend of mine. After reviewing it (lots of
| gray semitones, including dark gray text on black, and subtle
| difference between active and not active elements), I asked her
| "but..... why?". She honestly answered that she perfectly
| differentiates one from another. Later I learned that grown men
| have drastically different color perception than younger women.
| the_af wrote:
| I cannot prove it, but I think some of these UI and UX horrors
| are caused by the ever present need for software to change in
| order to demonstrate it is alive.
|
| Imagine you reach peak usability in $YourApp, in the year of our
| lord 2023. It's maybe not _perfect_ , but there's no conceivable
| way your app's usability can improved past this point. Users are
| reasonable proficient, everything mostly clicks into place past
| the inherent hurdles of learning to use an app.
|
| Can this situation stand? Well, no. If you keep your UI as is,
| the software world will often perceive your app to be "stale" or
| even dead. So you have to change. But if you change anything
| after you reached peak usability, you will necessarily worsen
| your UX, sometimes in catastrophic ways.
|
| I cannot prove it, but I think this is one of the reasons (not
| the only one) that explains why some app's (and desktop
| environments!) decent UIs get ruined so thoroughly.
| indymike wrote:
| > I cannot prove it, but I think some of these UI and UX
| horrors are caused by the ever present need for software to
| change in order to demonstrate it is alive.
|
| The sad thing is this is largely driven by managers trying to
| keep their teams looking busy, and not by customer request.
| Most of the time, users will ask to make something work better
| or actually work. Make-work requests often site some internal
| usability/HIG guidelines without having any user interest at
| all.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| The stages of decline from _user-centred design_ to _abuser-
| centred design_ :
|
| -1- The Beginning. We want people to like our product. We will
| care and listen. We will dedicate resources to usability. Happy
| customers make us happy.
|
| -2- The Middle. Usability is hard. Building ergonomics and
| affordance is not as easy as we thought. And then there is
| _Internationalisation_ (I10N). We had to learn most of this
| ourselves because no one teaches these domains. Contractors are
| expensive.
|
| -3- The Decline. We want to develop more features. Hire more
| programmers. Sack the usability team -- whatever we needed to
| accomplish is achieved. (Sack the documentation team too.
| Software developers are _engineers_... they can write FAQs!)
|
| -4- The Bottom of the Barrel. We threw features galore at our
| customers in a series of brilliant sprints, yet our customers
| are unhappy. What's _wrong_ with them?
| pjerem wrote:
| You are even more right considering your modern app is
| subscription based so you must justify the monthly fee. Also
| you are paying an entire UX team which was useful for your
| nearly perfect v1, you'd better feed them some job.
| hliyan wrote:
| More than that, you will have to find a new product to
| demonstrate the value of your continued employment at the
| company. The team is incentivised to keep tinkering.
| silvestrov wrote:
| I think architecture has the same problem. The best way to
| stand out in the 50s/60s was to break with every good rule of
| traditional architecture and create the Brutalist style.
|
| They completely ignored the human emotional aspect of buildings
| and living spaces.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I don't even think it's that calculated. I think it's just that
| there are teams of designers employed there that would have
| nothing else to do once the design is "finished".
|
| My ideal is to create a product that is well loved and used,
| automate the hell out of every conceivable customer support and
| operational concern, and either/both move on to a different
| product or kick back on the beach.
|
| Nobody wants change. I only ever see hordes of people
| complaining whenever any UI changes. There is never an
| equivalent mob of true believers on the other side of the line.
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| I think we need to move past the first to market model and
| assume a best in market model. Allow things to reach peak
| usability then maintain them. Add security features and new
| usability when it's discovered but let a good product make you
| money.
| doctor_radium wrote:
| Completely agree: change for the sake of change. I held my
| breath for a while after Office 2007, hoping the Open/Libre
| Office developers wouldn't be tripping over themselves to
| implement the Ribbon, too. That they've held fast all these
| years is one small bright spot.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The "ribbon" is when I stopped using Office.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jvans wrote:
| I would say the same logic applies to products/features and
| influences the design component. You create a product that
| reaches some local maximum of utility but there's a constant
| pressure to churn out new features with increasingly small
| gains in customer utility. Those features need UI elements,
| items in menu bars, etc etc which results in a bloated UIs full
| of esoteric features
| grishka wrote:
| Yes, it's that as well. Imagine you've already designed
| everything that needs designed across all your products, but
| you still employ an entire department of graphic designers
| _that need something to do_. You wouldn 't just fire them,
| right? That's how all those UI redesigns happen. I've seen it
| myself. "We need to change it because it's been a while since
| we last changed it."
|
| The omnipresence of high-speed always-on internet connections
| exacerbates this issue immensely. Before that, software
| developers were at least forced to have _some_ defined goals
| and deadlines for their products so that they could put the
| thing on CDs or floppies or whatever and ship it to stores --
| with no easy opportunity to release an update. And when they
| did release an update, it had to be something meaningful and
| substantial to convince the users to go through the trouble of
| obtaining the new version and updating. Modern software, on the
| other hand, is best characterized with this saying we have in
| my language, roughly translated as "samurai doesn't have a
| goal, he only has his path".
| the_af wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to developers trying not to get fired -- I'm
| a developer myself! But from the user's side it's often
| ridiculous.
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| Craigslist was the pinnacle of UX success
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| The defiance of purposeful and decades-old UI standards isn't
| just annoying and counter-productive; it can be life-threatening:
| https://jalopnik.com/did-jeeps-recalled-gear-shifter-contrib...
| nathias wrote:
| Usability has increased, the problem is we are not the intended
| users, we are cattle to be sold as data or attention to the users
| who publish their adds.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The past decade or so, I've found myself in a constant battle
| with UI/UX team members.
|
| A big part of the battle seems to be a shift from power/tool user
| to consumer design paradigms. 20 years ago, most software was
| tools for professionals, now most software (on a usage level at
| least) is consumer software (literally consumers of video, social
| media etc.) Designers can't seem to switch modes and keep trying
| to apply "content consumption" rules and techniques to "jobs to
| be done" projects.
|
| A favourite is removing visible tools with 3-dot menus in the
| name of "cleaner" or "more intuitive" user interface that turns
| one-click actions into two clicks: 2 clicks hundreds of times a
| day for the tool users. Tables that show 10 items with 4 details
| each in the same screen real estate that used to show 20 items
| with 6-8 details. Dashboards that show 4 graphs instead of 10.
| Menus that take up the top 10-20% of the app. Massive H1 titles.
|
| One of my aunts changes around her furniture constantly, not
| because she has an idea of a better layout but because she's
| bored with the current layout. This seems to be a common
| personality trait in PMs and/or UX people. Adding a 4th table
| view to the product? ... "we should use this entirely different
| style" not because it's "better". Since COVID, I've run a weekly
| Google meet with friends ... it changes in some way pretty much
| every time we get together, most recently the request to join
| process has changed, again, and not for the better.
| mk89 wrote:
| The best is that if you (junior or senior) bring this up,
| you're either shut down by management because you don't have
| the right expertise (how dare you, especially if you like me
| are mostly working in backend) or by the UX guy saying 1) it's
| a best practice, and 2) if they ran a research/survey, they
| found that it makes "almost no difference" - the major points
| are xyz (which is something really worse that requires
| immediate work).
|
| At a certain point just accept the way it is, and wait until
| the better way of doing things becomes the new best practice...
| loopz wrote:
| Not just a front end problem. As a customer of facebook,
| netflix, hbo,prime, disney+ etc., it continually amazes that
| these expensive devs can't make the backend remember what I
| watched and not. Combined with an "engaging" front end that
| hides what I'm interested in and shifts the interface
| randomly, the experience is pretty low.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Netflix used to work like that, once upon a time. They
| intentionally changed it.
| d33d33 wrote:
| i think they do it on purpose just to give you the feeling
| of having a lot of content. Hate it, too.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| They intentionally change cover art for exactly this
| purpose
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| doctor_radium wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but possibly my biggest annoyance with web
| design is trying to find where the designer hid the Logout link.
| This, on a web site designed with endless negative space. I swear
| for a while the site of either my electric or gas utility
| literally didn't have one. I'd eventually just shrug and close
| the tab.
| gumby wrote:
| If they could hide the close button they would.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of
| professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User
| Friendliness", is steadily declining.
|
| En contraire. The more usability professionals you hire, the
| worse your usability gets. It seems every dev team nowadays has
| at least a part-time designer. They come up with new, fresh ideas
| all the time and, of course, want to see it implemented.
|
| If it were only the Devs, you'd just use Google Material or "read
| the docs" for whatever it is you were building. As it is though,
| people think that you need "brand recognition across platforms",
| which basically means that you do whatever the hell you want and
| the more guidelines you break, the better. It has the added
| advantage that you really only need to design once and ship to
| all platforms. Who cares if iOS/Windows/Mac/Android are
| different? Just implement your own pop-up dialog!
| YoshiRulz wrote:
| > If it were only the Devs, you'd just use Google Material
| [...]
|
| Which is all well and good until Google replaces the Material
| Design team with designers with no UX training... Sorry, I just
| can't complain enough about M3.
| bombolo wrote:
| [dead]
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