[HN Gopher] The Decline of Usability
___________________________________________________________________
The Decline of Usability
Author : arexxbifs
Score : 248 points
Date : 2020-04-17 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (datagubbe.se)
| ilamont wrote:
| The OECD published the results of a massive survey of member
| countries some years ago, titled "Skills Matter"
| (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-
| matter_978926...). The researchers defined 4 levels of technology
| proficiency, based on the types of tasks users can complete
| successfully. There was a very good summary published here
| (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/) and
| excerpted below.
|
| For each level, here's the percentage of the population (averaged
| across the OECD countries) who performed at that level, as well
| as the report's definition of the ability of people within that
| level:
|
| _"Below Level 1" = 14% of Adult Population
|
| Being too polite to use a term like "level zero," the OECD
| researchers refer to the lowest skill level as "below level 1."
|
| This is what people below level 1 can do: "Tasks are based on
| well-defined problems involving the use of only one function
| within a generic interface to meet one explicit criterion without
| any categorical or inferential reasoning, or transforming of
| information. Few steps are required and no sub-goal has to be
| generated."
|
| An example of task at this level is "Delete this email message"
| in an email app.
|
| Level 1 = 29% of Adult Population
|
| This is what level-1 people can do: "Tasks typically require the
| use of widely available and familiar technology applications,
| such as email software or a web browser. There is little or no
| navigation required to access the information or commands
| required to solve the problem. The problem may be solved
| regardless of the respondent's awareness and use of specific
| tools and functions (e.g. a sort function). The tasks involve few
| steps and a minimal number of operators. At the cognitive level,
| the respondent can readily infer the goal from the task
| statement; problem resolution requires the respondent to apply
| explicit criteria; and there are few monitoring demands (e.g. the
| respondent does not have to check whether he or she has used the
| appropriate procedure or made progress towards the solution).
| Identifying content and operators can be done through simple
| match. Only simple forms of reasoning, such as assigning items to
| categories, are required; there is no need to contrast or
| integrate information."
|
| The reply-to-all task described above requires level-1 skills.
| Another example of level-1 task is "Find all emails from John
| Smith." Level 2 = 26% of Adult Population
|
| This is what level-2 people can do: "At this level, tasks
| typically require the use of both generic and more specific
| technology applications. For instance, the respondent may have to
| make use of a novel online form. Some navigation across pages and
| applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools
| (e.g. a sort function) can facilitate the resolution of the
| problem. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The
| goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent,
| though the criteria to be met are explicit. There are higher
| monitoring demands. Some unexpected outcomes or impasses may
| appear. The task may require evaluating the relevance of a set of
| items to discard distractors. Some integration and inferential
| reasoning may be needed."
|
| An example of level-2 task is "You want to find a sustainability-
| related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October
| last year." Level 3 = 5% of Adult Population
|
| This is what this most-skilled group of people can do: "At this
| level, tasks typically require the use of both generic and more
| specific technology applications. Some navigation across pages
| and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of
| tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards
| the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators.
| The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent,
| and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit. There are
| typically high monitoring demands. Unexpected outcomes and
| impasses are likely to occur. The task may require evaluating the
| relevance and reliability of information in order to discard
| distractors. Integration and inferential reasoning may be needed
| to a large extent."
|
| The meeting room task described above requires level-3 skills.
| Another example of level-3 task is "You want to know what
| percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about
| sustainability." Can't Use Computers = 26% of Adult Population
|
| The numbers for the 4 skill levels don't sum to 100% because a
| large proportion of the respondents never attempted the tasks,
| being unable to use computers. In total, across the OECD
| countries, 26% of adults were unable to use a computer.
|
| That one quarter of the population can't use a computer at all is
| the most serious element of the digital divide. To a great
| extent, this problem is caused by computers still being much too
| complicated for many people._
|
| Let that phrase sink in: _across the OECD countries, 26% of
| adults were unable to use a computer._ In some countries like
| Japan, the number is even higher (about 1 /3 of Japan's
| population can't use computers, which may reflect the aging
| population, poor interface design, or some other factor.)
|
| These data were based on surveys from 2011 through 2015, and if
| TFA is correct about the usability trends, surely it's gotten
| worse.
| verall wrote:
| Aww, he had to go after the Gnome stuff :/
|
| Many a time I have spent over a minute decoding a Gnome GUI for
| incredibly simple applications. Is that a clickable icon? Why is
| that icon/menu option greyed out? Toggles, icons, buttons,
| toolbars thrown together with a rare tooltip. I fully agree they
| border on parodical.
|
| And yet I still use the gnome tools frequently, because they are
| useful. So in a way I do feel bad for complaining because I am
| certainly not stepping up to the plate to improve these tools.
| cirno wrote:
| Problem is, would that even help? What I want is what Gnome 2
| already was. Their changes indicate they themselves don't want
| that anymore. Any attempts at voicing my concerns are met with
| disdain. What more can I even do as a developer?
| bityard wrote:
| > What more can I even do as a developer?
|
| Switch to MATE: https://mate-desktop.org/
| imhoguy wrote:
| You can fork! /s
| b0rsuk wrote:
| The whole "desktop metaphor", as usually implemented, is trash.
| I'm a happy user of i3 window manager (a tiling window manager).
| It's not the first and probably not the last, but it's the first
| time I can quickly and efficently arrange application windows on
| my screen. I think this will become the default eventually,
| tiling WM are the way. The way it uses the screen is beyond
| anything. They will just make it more intuitive and comfortable
| for first-time users. i3 requires you to memorize, but preferably
| _define_ your own hotkeys.
|
| Meanwhile applications like skype, other instant messengers,
| slack, music players have grown and now are fullscreen by
| default. Non-blog websites are usually large and can't be
| displayed in a simple window. People are complaining about 80
| character rule for code, and go to 120 characters and beyond -
| which again means you can fit fewer windows on a screen. I think
| web browsers and websites are largely to blame. Because that's
| like most users interact with computers today, that's what they
| expect and don't know it can be any other way.
|
| Every single application wants to be THE fullscreen application.
| I think it's an admission of defeat! Over the decades, they've
| tried - and failed - to make smaller application windows that
| people consider useful. And it's not the fault of application
| makers - it's the broken "desktop metaphor" where you're supposed
| to move windows like physical objects. It works on a desk because
| you have two hands and 10 fingers. Imagine working at a desk (no
| computer) using only 1 finger! That's how it feels using mouse.
| The default window managers are crap at actually managing windows
| and arranging them usefully. Dragging corners, window borders,
| moving windows feels miserable in the long run, and when you
| close one of your windows you need to repeat it when you want
| another app window to fit into your layout. So many people just
| don't bother, get a bunch of fullscreen windows and alt-tab
| through them.
|
| And applications with tabs are a symptom of the disease, too. Web
| browsers, the blue Microsoft Word, IDEs, and so on. It's alt-tab
| fullscreen windows in sheep's clothing. Nothing particularly
| wrong with alt-tab method, but it doesn't scale to a large number
| of windows we have nowadays.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Android and iOS are tiling window managers, so they already
| have become the default.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this;
| I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we
| gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I
| hate that word)).
|
| However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today
| have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much
| hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever
| so subtly changed. New entrants to computers understand these new
| paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new
| context.
|
| It's only when we look back we think how much usability has
| suffered.
|
| Language is a good example of what I mean. Travel back 100 years
| and the linquistical choices that are made would not only be
| slightly alien to us, ours would be absolutely muddy to them.
|
| I think you can make a case that a lot of the new paradigms like
| electron do not promote usage of native UI styles and
| accessibility.
|
| But the Title bar being an overloaded UI element in todays
| context is generally ok I think.
| bloomberg2020 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Personally I've given up on mouse GUIs
|
| Why?
|
| Photoshop pros use macros
|
| Unix pros use text editing macros
|
| Why teach new users single point and click methods of computing
| when the pros think it's a waste of time
|
| It's from an era when computers couldn't multi task and were
| largely business focused data entry terminals
|
| Photo manipulation can be automated from a terminal and results
| displayed in real-time now
|
| Why care about file menus? That's just a set of keyboard macros
| unrealized.
|
| The desktop metaphor is finally dying. Let it
| timw4mail wrote:
| The problem with this line of thinking is that not every
| program is going to be used enough to make learning the
| shortcuts or command-line switches worthwhile.
|
| That said, each (gui) program should have relatively similar
| key-bindings.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > Photoshop pros use macros
|
| > Unix pros use text editing macros
|
| pros are like, 0.01 %
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I agree with 90% of this article. However, I differ on one point:
| as far as I'm concerned, the "File, Edit, View" categories are
| anachronisms from another era. They make sense in Microsoft
| Office+, but fail to cover the breadth of software in use today.
|
| I'm currently using Firefox (on OS X, where it still has a menu
| bar). The first three options under "File" are "New Tab", "New
| Window", and "New Private Window". Does it really make sense for
| any of those to be under "File"? I understand, historically, why
| they ended up there--each document used to correspond to a new
| file--but tabs fundamentally _are not files_.
|
| I'll switch over to OS X's Messages app++. The first two options
| under "File" are "New Message" and "Open". The former starts a
| new conversation, and the latter let's you attach a document to
| the current conversation. Those actions aren't related at all,
| except in that they kind of relate to the concept of the word
| "File", depending on which metaphor you're following.
|
| So, I don't think there's anything wrong with mpv grouping its
| menus differently from evince. They're doing different things and
| shouldn't have to follow the same categories.
|
| ---
|
| + Which is definitely (sarcasm) why Microsoft Office decided to
| replace the traditional menu with a ribbon. Again, I agree with
| most of this article.
|
| ++ I'm running OS X 10.9; Apple may have made changes in newer
| OS's.
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| Tabs and conversations aren't files, but it is nice to have a
| grouping of actions that create/restore/manage whatever the
| primary context/data-structure the app deals with is, as
| opposed to making changes to it (edit) or modifying how it's
| displayed (view). They're very logical categories, just 'file'
| is not generally enough named now.
| q92z8oeif wrote:
| While some are egregious usability disasters, like hiding the
| scroll bar, others points are just a sign of times moving on,
| like the [?] for menu.
| the_af wrote:
| > _others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the
| [?] for menu_
|
| The article addresses this at the end. In software, the "times"
| do not move on like an unsteerable force. We (users and
| designers) decide how the times should move on. For non-mobile,
| the [?] for menu seems like a step backwards and we shouldn't
| accept it without complaint.
|
| Applying mobile patterns which are suboptimal on the desktop
| seems like a UX antipattern to me. I think a huge part of the
| problem is that software -- both free and nonfree -- needs to
| show "change" in order to signal it's still alive and
| maintained, but change for change's sake can be a bad thing,
| especially if you already had a pretty good (or consistent) UI.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> change for change 's sake can be a bad thing, especially
| if you already had a pretty good (or consistent) UI._
|
| I run Trinity Desktop on Linux for exactly this reason: it's
| basically what KDE 3 looked like 10 or 15 years ago. I run it
| so I don't have to re-learn all my workflows every time
| somebody comes up with some new eye candy.
| red_admiral wrote:
| I'm sure, given a bit of time, one could come up with a
| consistent design language based around "hamburger" menus. At
| the moment though, as the article states, a lot of previous
| consistency (e.g. open/save/exit will be in the "File" menu) is
| being sacrificed as everyone rolls their own.
|
| I've actually seen applications where the first button on the
| toolbar is a hamburger menu and when you click it you get a
| dropdown with File/Edit/... etc options, that work as expected.
| I can live with that for now.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I've actually seen applications where the first button on
| the toolbar is a hamburger menu and when you click it you get
| a dropdown with File/Edit/... etc options, that work as
| expected. I can live with that for now.
|
| So instead of just having File/Edit/etc. on the toolbar
| they're nested inside another menu? This seems like
| introducing an extra click for no reason :(
| saagarjha wrote:
| "Hamburger menus" are and will forever be, in my mind, a lazy
| design for "catch all" stuff. (On Apple's platforms, it's three
| dots, but it's the same thing.)
| red_admiral wrote:
| Joel Spolsky has an old post somewhere where he says the
| reason the Palm Pilot failed but the iPhone succeeded at
| making mobile devices "a thing" is that desktop and mobile
| are two different things; the Palm tried to do a desktop
| interface on mobile.
|
| I'm ok with three-dot menus on mobile, especially for
| features like "settings" that I don't use all the time -
| Whatsapp's dots menu works for me.
|
| Using a dots/hamburger menu on desktop is lazy, I'd agree
| with you there; using it on desktop for things that people do
| use a lot like the editing menu in a painting program is
| atrocious.
| Firehawke wrote:
| I'm generally not a hamburger menu fan, but I've come to
| accept it in Firefox/Chrome/Edge/etc because I rarely ever
| need to bring up the menu anyway so it conserves precious
| vertical space on a widescreen display.
|
| When I DO need to bring up the menu, I'm usually one to two
| clicks from where I need to go.
|
| When a hamburger menu encompasses the whole UI
| (metaphorically speaking) I'd definitely agree it's
| problematic-- and the same goes for random placement of
| menu items into a hamburger menu. That's just lazy design.
| Pmop wrote:
| I'm young (25) but my first (family) computer used to run Windows
| 98 (that's what we could afford). And I can recall well, UI had
| one "meta-language": menu bar (file, view ..., help), toolbar,
| and if you'd hover your mouse pointer over a widget, a tooltip
| would show up with explanation about what the widget does and the
| keyboard shortcut for that action. Once you learnt how to use one
| application, say Paint, you'd probably pick up any other quickly.
| Also, there was the always helpful Help Window (F1) with rich
| explanation about everything you'd want to know.
|
| I feel that Modern UIs are awkward to use. Many applications have
| their own way of doing the same thing other applications do.
| Oftentimes their new way of doing something is badly documented
| (tooltips are too ugly I guess), so now you have to search the
| web for help; the help you found is full of useless text, ads and
| browser-locking javascript; soon enough you find yourself longing
| for Win 98 era UI.
| myself248 wrote:
| YES. We spent years training our muscle-memory to understand
| this interface, and it's gone. It's like someone flipped
| gravity because they thought it was cool, and if your stomach
| isn't okay with that, well that's your stomach's problem.
|
| Fuck those people.
|
| The top 2 evils on my list right now:
|
| Buttons that don't appear until you wave the mouse near them. I
| spent way too long, and had to Google, how to zoom a PDF in
| Chrome. Turns out there are buttons for that, they're just
| hidden unless you wander over into a corner where there are no
| other controls so you'd never go there.
|
| Borderless windows. It's confusing enough that we seem to
| eschew background patterns now, but borderless windows (or
| like, 1px-wide borders on a high-dpi screen) make it so much
| harder to figure out what's going on at a glance. I've found
| myself trying to figure out where the title bar is, then
| grabbing it and wiggling the window, just to make sure I
| understand which UI elements are part of the thing I'm
| currently interacting with.
|
| What's worse is, I can't imagine anything that was actually
| gained from either of these changes, other than "Sam in Widgets
| thinks think it looks cool". They certainly don't help
| accessibility. They're the worst for usability.
|
| And they're a giant up-yours to anyone loyal to a single
| platform for a few years because they trusted that platform to
| reward their learning and muscle memory.
| Paianni wrote:
| GNOME MPV (now Celluloid) seems like a bad example since it's not
| part of the GNOME project.
|
| GNOME Videos gets away with the same UI choice as in that app,
| media is opened from the lists and not the menu.
| jordache wrote:
| what about the infamous iOS keyboard states? is white active or
| inactive?
| munk-a wrote:
| Oh yes gods slack in particular got a lot worse with the most
| recent update, but the site I think takes the cake is one we
| Canadians use for food delivery - skipthedishes.com . Gods this
| site breaks so many things, options to update things are hidden
| among menus that switch the current page while not being ctrl-
| clickable into a new tab (which can trash your current in-cart
| order) and the whole site loves "minimalism" i.e. let's put soft
| grey text on a white background to drive contrast into the
| ground.
|
| Given that this service's value proposition is basically "As a
| company we have a highly usable website and a fleet of delivery
| drivers" the fact that their website is trash is super annoying.
|
| (The site is blocked behind address entry, if you'd like to try
| it out may I suggest 1 West Georgia Street Vancouver BC)
| lisper wrote:
| Wow, you are not kidding. I went to this site to see for
| myself, and the _very first_ thing I see is re-Captcha. And it
| doesn 't even work! I have to pick out photos of tractors
| before I even get to see what is on the site!
|
| Holy cow, why does anyone use this? It's a hot mess.
| exprez135 wrote:
| Didn't even get the chance for a re-Captcha with me. It
| outright blocks me because I'm using a proxy.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives
| with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable,
| recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get
| her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself.
|
| Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar:
|
| https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment...
|
| and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar:
|
| https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/RC-Convers...
|
| It took me some time to realise out that it is the hamburger-
| menu-like icon in the upper-left corner. It has a tooltip that
| says "Main Menu", but it is not a menu. It controls collapsing of
| the sidebar. Confusingly, it is positioned in the top panel,
| separated by a line that would make one think it is not related
| to the sidebar, and closer in affinity to the logo, search box,
| etc.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I just started a new job and they use Gmail for the email, it
| has been probably well over a year since I logged into gmail on
| web.
|
| That's side hamburger button throws me for a loop every.
| Single. Times. For some reason I keep thinking it'll bring up
| the other gsuite apps, but instead the whole page shifts
| awkwardly aha then the sidebar disappears, "that was not what I
| was expecting" is my reaction every time.
| cirno wrote:
| I was so disappointed when Xfce, long my last bastion of
| consistent UI design, finally gave up the ghost and announced
| their move to client-side window decorations. It seems the days
| of the title bar + menubar + optional toolbar are numbered :(
| mceachen wrote:
| I'm having a real hard time squaring a rant about usability that
| expressly states that everyone should be held accountable to good
| design, and a website design that went out its way to be
| unreadable on mobile.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| I finally switched from Win7 to 10 about a month ago. Couldn't
| put it off any longer once lockdown started. I'm tech management,
| so it's office, mail, browser and graphics mainly. Illustrator 4
| runs fine on an X220.
|
| Win10. I just absolutely hate it. Every day I have to relearn
| something obvious. I can't find the corners of windows to grab
| them, and when I do, it's one damn pixel wide and I get jitters.
| Why is Candy Crush on the Start list when I never use it, but
| where the hell is Notepad? Bla bla bla.
|
| Would someone please make a Win7 skin so I can get back to work?
| chacha2 wrote:
| https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
|
| There you go. Brings back the Windows 7 Start menu/
| [deleted]
| Semaphor wrote:
| I had some reflexive reaction of wanting to disagree because
| there are also a lot of things that got better. But
| inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run
| their own experiment, getting more and more erratic, and
| apparently all getting great feedback from their users (not sure
| if all the feedback systems are broken or something else is going
| on). Of course, Microsoft who in recent years started following
| the "roll a die for what UI-style we use today" paradigm is one
| of the worst offenders.
| CivBase wrote:
| It seems to me like this article should be titled "Decline of
| UI Consitency".
|
| I think UIs have gotten better in general... but now instead of
| learning one difficult interface, users have to figure out many
| different interfaces. For power users who already had the
| difficult interface figured out, it definitely seems like a
| downgrade.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Partially I agree, partially for power users, partially for
| casual users. Sometimes this even overlaps. But a lot of
| designs nowadays are radically different which I'd say is
| just as much a problem for more casual users.
| toohotatopic wrote:
| Speaking of the Firefox version 75 bar: Why has there been a
| change in the way the selection works? Now it takes three well-
| timed clicks to select an entire url. Is this an improvement?
| kyleee wrote:
| To some apparently yes. I hate it. The URL is an input field,
| just like on a web form and a single click should place the
| cursor at the clicked position. That is the damn convention,
| and anything else just undermines consistency and usability
| dangus wrote:
| Things get better and worse. If you cherry pick the bad ones,
| everything will look bad.
|
| About the last place I'd look for advice on good UI design would
| be a website that looks like my tube TV after I unplug the
| antenna featuring screenshots with the color palette of an
| oversized sweatshirt of a kid at Epcot in 1993.
| Animats wrote:
| Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires
| "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The
| "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation
| when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to
| desktops.
|
| Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender
| 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change
| color, they disappear as modes change, and there are at least
| seven toolbars of icons. Some are resizable. Many icons were
| moved as part of a redesign of rendering. _You can 't Google an
| icon._ "Where did ??? go" is a big part of using Blender 2.82.
| Blender fanboys argue for using keyboard shortcuts instead. The
| keyboard shortcut guide is 13 pages.
|
| Recently I was using "The Gimp", the GNU replacement for
| Photoshop, and I couldn't find most of the icons in the toolbar.
| Turns out that if the toolbar is in the main window (which is
| optional), and it's too tall to fit, you can't get at the
| remaining icons. You have to resize the toolbar to give it more
| space. Can't scroll. There's no visual indication of overflow. It
| just looks like half the icons are missing.
|
| (I have no idea what's happening in Windows 10 land. I have one
| remaining Windows machine, running Windows 7.)
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Blender icons are also microscopic on a 1920 x 1080 monitor of
| usual size. We don't all have astronaut vision.
| mschulkind wrote:
| One tip for Blender at least... It's very hard to discover,
| even if you know it exists, but you can drag out from the side
| of the main icon bar and turn on text labels as well.
| Stierlitz wrote:
| > Ubuntu got worse at 18.04 ..
|
| Give Lubuntu a try.
|
| https://lubuntu.net/
| buovjaga wrote:
| The official site is https://lubuntu.me/ btw.
| zrm wrote:
| > Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the
| mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid
| problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your
| pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops.
|
| Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it
| wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and
| pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby
| discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing
| Enter.
|
| Having used it this way for two years now, your description of
| this behavior is the first time I'm learning that it is also
| possible to do it by dragging the mouse upwards. The
| discoverability of this behavior apparently does not exist -- I
| assume if pressing Enter hadn't worked I would have had to use
| a different device to look it up on the internet.
| reddotX wrote:
| Ubuntu got worse because of GNOME
| wolrah wrote:
| Press escape at the "lock screen" and you'll get the login UI.
| It works the same way on Windows too.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Ubuntu shell was a disaster and I can't imagine it's gotten
| better - Mate on Ubuntu is the answer for that.
|
| And Gimp is a mess. Enabling single window mode makes it
| better.
| msla wrote:
| > Ubuntu got worse at 18.04.
|
| Only if you use the default UI, which I think is an important
| distinction to make: I use Window Maker and had no regressions.
|
| The ability to choose your own UI is an important strength of
| Unix, and one which distinguishes it from macOS and Windows.
| rags2riches wrote:
| Icon mania... and pretty much every single icon is only
| possible to understand after you have learned what it means.
| loopz wrote:
| Even worse: You have to try out each icon. Next version
| replaces many of them and entire design again. Rinse &
| repeat.
| clarry wrote:
| > Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires
| "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box.
|
| Have you tried pressing a key?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Is there any indication that pressing a key is an option?
| I've been swiping up with the mouse the whole time as well.
| josteink wrote:
| > Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires
| "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box.
|
| I don't know about you, but I just start typing on my keyboard.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Took a while to figure out I could do that. And I only
| figured it out by accident.
| the_af wrote:
| Is there a sane mode or config for vanilla Ubuntu 18.04? I'm
| considering upgrading from my trusty old 16.04 LTS (both home
| and office laptops) and I dread the usual pointless UI changes
| that come with all the reasonable bugfixes/improvements.
| worik wrote:
| Do not upgrade.
|
| Switch.
|
| A lot of Ubuntu software is now (Version 19.xx) only
| available with "snaps". They make some sense for IoT
| machinery (the user does not control updates, so they are
| deploy and forget) but I do not want to loose control.
|
| Final straw for me. I am test driving Arch now....
| imhoguy wrote:
| I highly recommend trying out other flavours of Ubuntu:
| Xubuntu (XFCE), Lubuntu (LXDE), Kubuntu (KDE), Ubuntu MATE,
| Ubuntu Budgie. Next week all should get 20.04 LTS release.
| thanatropism wrote:
| I don't understand why you need different distributions for
| different DEs.
|
| The only distro I've used past teenage is Ubuntu. I
| alternate stints of maybe 2 years with Windows, 2 years
| with Ubuntu. First thing I do after installing the most
| recent LTS Ubuntu is "apt install spectrwm".
|
| Spectrwm is not even particularly good -- everyone tells me
| to use xmonad instead -- but I know how to get it in usable
| shape in about half an hour. This after many moons of
| exclusively using Windows.
| olyjohn wrote:
| 20.04 is due out in a few days. I hope it's good. 18.04 has
| been total crap for me. The lock screen randomly won't
| authenticate, and I am forced to reboot. My USB dock suddenly
| started randomly disconnecting and reconnecting, after it
| worked fine for months.
|
| The "Save/Open" button in the file dialog boxes is in the
| title bar, which is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.
| Dialog boxes get tied to windows, so when I try to move the
| dialog out of the way to see my work, it drags the whole damn
| window. (Some of this is mentioned in the TFA.) I think a lot
| of these decisions were Gnome-driven, but still... stick with
| 16.04.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I think Xubuntu is a good alternative. XFCE doesn't have as
| much eye candy, but it certainly surprises me far less and
| usually is very pleasant to work with.
| bityard wrote:
| I used Xubuntu for a number of years and it's a great
| lightweight environment overall. The main problems that I
| experienced with it are that it's handling of hot-plugging
| multiple displays (especially in between sleep states) has
| always been poor and crashy.
|
| And I like the cohesiveness and integration of GNOME,
| although I had to do a hell of a lot of customization to
| mold it into something I could tolerate.
| Figs wrote:
| No, or at least I haven't found one. I was recently forced to
| upgrade from 14.04 and tried the default configuration in
| 18.04 (clean install) for a while before I gave up and
| installed Unity -- which, thankfully, is in the package
| manager. That at least got me back to the point where I could
| configure things critical to my workflow like having a 3x3
| workspace switcher. The system has fought me every step of
| the way though -- especially with things like global hotkeys
| which have about half a dozen different places they can be
| configured and it's completely inconsistent what works where.
|
| I've literally spent _weeks_ trying to get back to the level
| of usability I had on my 14.04 setup -- compiling old
| /patched versions of software from source because the
| "improved" versions removed features I depend on or otherwise
| fucked up the interface (I cannot understand why anyone
| thought removing typeahead from Nautilus was a good idea!),
| trying every damned thing I can think of to debug the global
| hotkey problems (still can't get IME switching to work right
| reliably... it works for a while after I fiddle with it then
| just stops working and I have no clue why), and just
| generally having a bad time.
| walkingolof wrote:
| The "Slide up" is gone in next LTS due in a few days.
|
| https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...
| kristopolous wrote:
| Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the
| late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think
|
| "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons
| are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It
| isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear,
| this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes
| everything!"
|
| Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going
| the wrong way, what's going on here? Why aren't we in control
| of this?
| akeck wrote:
| I'm dating myself, but I really liked late 90s GIMP, where
| almost everything was available via right click menu. GIMP
| was simpler then, though.
| loopz wrote:
| Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it
| quite easy to use.
|
| UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what
| that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality
| designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real
| research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid
| down rules to enforce some consistency. This became
| "unfashionable" and was removed.
| xg15 wrote:
| My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it
| just follows radically different paradigms and goals.
|
| It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental
| models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which
| particular isolated tasks can be performed.
|
| It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as
| easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction"
| are often deliberately tuned to optimize some higher-level
| goals, such as retention or conversion rates.
|
| This is why we have dialogs where the highlighted default
| choice is neither the safe one nor the one expected by the
| user, but instead the one the company would like the user
| to take. (E.g. "select all" buttons in GDPR prompts or "go
| back" buttons if I want to cancel a subscription.
|
| You can see that quite often in browsers as well, often
| even with good intentions: Chrome, for a time, still used
| to allow installing unsigned extensions but made the
| process deliberately obscure and in both Chrome and Firefox
| , options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard
| to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser
| chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs
| group policies)
| lloeki wrote:
| > It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent
| mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty
| with which particular isolated tasks can be performed.
|
| IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead
| of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game.
| Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so
| creates a model in conflict with everything else, making
| everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket.
|
| I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and
| screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in
| computer science are a super small minority.
|
| But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on
| say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know
| are dramatically cognitively different than adults.
|
| Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched?
| That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look
| like Nickelodeon?
|
| There isn't one user and one interface that's right for
| everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year
| olds, and 95 year olds.
|
| We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also
| do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental
| interaction levels, to the person using the screen.
|
| And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.
|
| For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have
| a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:
|
| * Cartoons and video games
|
| * Lectures and tutorials
|
| * Other "
|
| And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to
| set the interface and algorithms.
|
| Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into
| children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are
| correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to
| understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm
| sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there
| should be a general public version.
| majewsky wrote:
| > here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few
| interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: [...]
|
| This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories
| are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a
| ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed
| run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the
| "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and
| tutorials" bucket?
| kristopolous wrote:
| It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation
| of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed
| these decades of hard work in the garbage can because
| somebody in marketing didn't like the colors.
|
| It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers
| wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then
| they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff
| on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock.
|
| We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad".
| Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't
| want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's
| nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible
| UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad".
|
| Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't
| matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to
| the other people in the waiting room to democratically
| decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is
| important.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| You can change the UI skin in the options. I've been using
| GIMP for years and I don't have any major complaints.
| xg15 wrote:
| This is about usability, so I don't think referring to a
| setting buried in the options (that you have to know about
| first) is a valid point.
|
| > _I 've been using GIMP for years_
|
| I think usability to users experienced in the software and
| to new users are two different things. I believe an
| important part of usability is discoverability which is
| probably better judged by new users than by experienced
| users.
| kristopolous wrote:
| sure, you can make the icon bar more sensible with some
| effort, but not as sensible as it was in 1998:
| https://scorpioncity.com/images/linux/shotgimp.png
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| UI design lately sounds more and more like a Monty Python
| sketch.
| Lammy wrote:
| > It's totally inappropriate to desktops.
|
| I don't agree. It's important for the user to know a login UI
| is the real thing. For example, Windows NT used to have you hit
| Ctrl+Alt+Del to make the credential dialog appear so that any
| fake lookalike was impossible.
| traderjane wrote:
| That's a bit different. I can fake swipe-up on a GUI but I
| can't fake Ctrl-Alt-Del.
| Lammy wrote:
| The implementation may be bad but it seems like the same
| idea to me, "user must interact with UI before entering
| credentials".
| olyjohn wrote:
| Except you don't have to. Just start typing your
| password.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Ctrl+Alt+Del cannot be caught by any program, and is
| therefore reasonable to identify the login UI. Swiping up can
| be detected by any program, does not improve security as a
| result, and is ridiculous to have on a desktop UI.
| strken wrote:
| One nice thing about recent Ubuntu is that even though they
| hide the password box, you can start typing on the unlock
| screen and your text will be entered into the password box.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Unless slack steals the focus. Happened to me a few weeks
| back. Then slack gets your password and enter key, and the
| login screen doesn't.
| DDR0 wrote:
| Steam remote streaming did something similar, while on the
| road with my laptop it presented me with my Kubuntu login
| screen... so I logged in, fine... and now my computer at
| home is sitting unlocked and unsecured.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users
| learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible
| is a good UI design...
|
| (Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari
| team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told
| me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into
| the tab overview, and...just start typing. A little search
| bar will pop into appearance in the top right corner. Why it
| couldn't just be there and have keyboard focus from the
| start, I have no idea...)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Worse, this creates a bad habit. What if the UI changes and
| now it's the username that pops up first, not a password
| box?
|
| So it's a hard-to-discover feature, and a misfeature unless
| you elect to keep this behavior forever.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As I recall history, using icons was a main way the rest of the
| industry tried to copy the usability of the MAc UI, as it
| conquered a lot of mindshare in the 80s and 90s.
|
| But the Mac almost never had just icons in the ui. There would
| usually be an icon _and_ a text. With little space you 'd
| revert to text only.
|
| Apple had a team of expert Usability experts. Others... did
| not. So they just copied something that looked cool and was
| easy to implement.
|
| That it cut down on internationalizion efforts surely didn't
| hurt either.
| twic wrote:
| That swiping up thing makes me so angry. What an absolute waste
| of effort. No way to disable it. If this is what they're doing
| in the most visible bits of the system, what on earth is
| happening in the rest?
| koheripbal wrote:
| Good news, it is gone in the next version.
| freedomben wrote:
| Just hit the Escape key. You can also just start typing your
| password. I often type my password and press enter before the
| monitor is even awake.
| 101404 wrote:
| ...just to then realize that the computer was still logged
| in and the focus was on a chat window, and it was only the
| screen that had been in power saving mode. :-}
| switch007 wrote:
| Your post needs a trigger warning. My heart is racing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of this article.
|
| Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a
| single platform. But that's because the _feature set_ of
| desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased
| _exponentially_ , beyond what the classic desktop GUI could
| handle.
|
| Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's
| knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as
| search boxes and recommendation engines have completely changed
| the game.
|
| Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of
| consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're
| using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a
| hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so
| on...
|
| ...then you have to make tradeoffs. Yes, the purely desktop
| experience has become less consistent. But at the same time, an
| app can be _more_ consistent across platforms, which is what many
| users want when they 're switching between platforms multiple
| times a day.
|
| And as an industry, apps really do seem to fairly quickly
| standardize on UX conventions like tabs, hamburger menus,
| autocomplete, drag-to-refresh, and so on, which aren't any less
| intuitive than right-clicks, keyboard shortcuts, minimizing, or
| drag-to-trash-to-eject (remember that?).
|
| So _relative to functionality_ I don 't see any decline at all.
| Young children can pick up an iPad and learn to use it without
| instruction. I don't remember young children doing that with a
| Mac Classic or Windows 3.1.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of
| consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're
| using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a
| hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and
| so on...
|
| Maybe we shouldn't strive for uniformity across many different
| interfaces.
|
| My office has switched to MS Teams, which is an abomination on
| the desktop. But would be perfectly fine on a tablet. I can't
| have multiple chats open simultaneously. If I open a shared
| document in a chat or team, then I go back to the chat, I have
| to click several places to get back to the document (rather
| than having it, you know, opened and in a separate window). A
| desire for "streamlining" the experience or some other such
| bullshit has produced one of the worst
| productivity/collaboration tools I've seen in 25+ years of
| using networked computers.
|
| I wouldn't expect a remote server to present the same interface
| as a desktop as a tablet as a phone as a watch. It's absurd,
| acknowledge the distinctions and design for the system that
| it's executed on. I'd rather MS Teams on Windows be like, well,
| a desktop application:
|
| Contact list, chat window(s), documents opened in the
| application that can edit them, all with multiple windows
| taking advantage of the actual capabilities of my system. I
| have two monitors at work, but with MS Teams I may as well just
| have one.
|
| And that's just one of the more egregious examples, many others
| are like it and it's the result of laziness or hubris or
| ignorance on the parts of the designers/developers.
| anthk wrote:
| Microsoft even had MSN Messenger. The former commenter has no
| excuse, but lazyness and a great lack of understanding of
| 90/00's computing environment. W9x-w2k/KDE's paradigm were
| the best ever for a DE based multitasking.
|
| This is a PC. Why does the parent commenter want to
| _downgrade_ its user experience to the one from a mobile
| user?
| amluto wrote:
| Hah, what a delightful version of Evince the authors makes fun
| of. Newer versions removed the "Open..." option entirely AFAICT.
| dzonga wrote:
| what the post forgot to mention is how even though the hardware
| on a win95 machine was slow. the interactivity felt fast. no slow
| loading bars. software was snappy. & fewer bugs. compared to the
| present day with fast AX series on iphones, Zen processors,
| almost every piece of software feels slow. from the 'native'
| desktop apps to web apps running boatloads of JS in the browser.
| let's not mention endless AB testing
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| The web puts us in a usability death-spiral. It's easy to use an
| onClick div to make a beautiful pop-up menu, but harder to
| support much more than clicking on an item. This in turn trains
| users to only click, which further erodes the case for any sort
| of richer interaction.
|
| This is bleeding into basic browser functions. Find and scroll
| bars are routinely broken by the infinite scroll paradigm.
| Undo/cut/copy/paste are broken in customized rich text editing.
| Eventually these features will atrophy and fall off.
| floren wrote:
| If you want a vision of the future, imagine a finger scrolling
| on a touchscreen -- forever.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| How is that the future and not just a description of current
| social media apps on mobile/tablet devices?
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Just in case someone doesn't get the parent post's quote,
| it's a riff off of a famous George Orwell quote, "If you
| want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a
| human face, forever.
| itronitron wrote:
| why should I have to touch the screen though when I can tilt
| it back to scroll up and tilt it forward to scroll down?
| imhoguy wrote:
| and bring closer to your face to zoom in
| floren wrote:
| https://youtu.be/pg-5SOydz6Q?t=38
| voldacar wrote:
| You jest, but it's hauntingly true
| postalrat wrote:
| https://new.reddit.com vs https://old.reddit.com
| MattGaiser wrote:
| And this is not considering that new Reddit is horribly slow.
| You can be waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for the
| actual content to load.
| anthk wrote:
| I got fed of it; I just use TUIR with a ~/.mailcap file, and
| ed/vi as the comment editor.
|
| Ultrafast, easy and the CPU usage is pretty low.
| StartupTree wrote:
| New Reddit is so so bad, I feel like I'm in a hallucinogenic
| nightmare when I accidentally click into it. Kudos that they
| kept the sane old option for people who want to use the
| website.
| nimvlaj30 wrote:
| Old is much better. Even then it's not perfect. The goddamn
| sidebar keeps taking up 80% of the screen on my vertical
| monitor or portrait phone.
| red_admiral wrote:
| It's not only that every app has a different style these days,
| but some of them change their style or add new features via auto-
| update every few weeks. Even office 365 (desktop version) does
| this.
|
| It's not just a usability nightmare, it's an accessibility one
| too (although the two go hand in hand most of the time). Imagine
| teaching some elderly neighbour how to write a word document, and
| after weeks of practice they get it into their muscle memory that
| the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left ...
| then microsoft adds another one in the next update so it's now
| the 6th.
|
| This would be one place where free software could really shine -
| you could convert a lot of people with "every application works
| the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once
| every two years unless we really have to.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think we're in a strange bubble. Rapid iteration was a
| potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you
| can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N
| years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by
| throwing every possible solutions at them.
|
| It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to
| fatigue and false sense of progress.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements
| (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs
| potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield
| better understanding of users by throwing every possible
| solutions at them.
|
| > It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads
| to fatigue and false sense of progress.
|
| Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of
| pointless side-grades and regressions, forever.
|
| Progress come from thoughtfulness, vision, and luck. You
| can't replace any of that with A-B testing and little
| experiments.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly
| believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to
| global improvements (same goes for ajax web..).
|
| I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer
| stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier
| constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better.
| I like the notion of seasonality these days.
| wwweston wrote:
| If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers
| (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product
| people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it
| is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory
| interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not
| a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.
| ilamont wrote:
| I think a lot of companies have too many designers with not
| much to do. Google has a team of people responsible for
| changing up the art or making whimsical games on the home
| page every day.
|
| I also read 10 years ago that Amazon hired a big name to take
| over design for the shopping portal and Bezos wouldn't let
| this person do much of anything.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they
| create. The more the better. Even if it's 100% correct for
| the business you are digging your own grave if you leave
| things the way they are.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every
| two years unless we really have to
|
| You get that for free by running a stable/LTS distribution.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Sometimes they'll change their style every time you go to them!
| Aggressive A/B testing is truly awful.
| jwing wrote:
| "The electric light did not come from the continuous
| improvement of candles." - Oren Harari
| btrettel wrote:
| > This would be one place where free software could really
| shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every
| application works the same, and we promise we won't change the
| UI more than once every two years unless we really have to.
|
| This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my
| computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2,
| and he's right.
|
| I'm not entirely immune. After switching fully to GTK 3 it took
| me a while to find a decent style that had scroll bars or not
| terrible scrollbars. The one I'm using right now (ClassicLooks)
| has a few issues (e.g., I can't tab through GUIs because it
| won't highlight the active option), but overall is acceptable.
| I'll fix the highlighting issue eventually...
| newsbinator wrote:
| > the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left
|
| I agree it's normal and expected that people get used to
| buttons being in certain places, and moving them around too
| often is bad usability.
|
| That said, the fact some of my elderly relatives use and
| understand technology this way, by memorizing how many
| centimeters from the edge of the screen they should look for a
| button, makes life needlessly tough for them.
|
| They'd be better off understanding what a button is
| conceptually, what forms it comes in (e.g. standard button vs.
| underlined link with no outline, etc), and how buttons might be
| grouped.
|
| I know it's a lot to ask of elderly users, but it pays
| dividends.
|
| After many years of Q&A with me, my mom understands her iPad
| conceptually and as a result gets much more from it than my
| aunt does, who only understands procedurally that if she
| presses her finger on 'the button in the corner' then 'x'
| should happen.
|
| If there is no button in the corner, my aunt is lost.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of
| ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving
| them directions every time something changes.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The way people react to computers is similar to how many
| react to math.
|
| A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to
| watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The
| expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those
| expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to
| seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen.
| Something about math (the subject, their experience when
| taking the courses, whatever) has left them with a severe
| discomfort or level of fear when dealing with it.
|
| Computers illicit the same response from many people,
| regardless of background, education, level of experience
| with computers. They develop an understanding by rote, or
| with a rudimentary (but likely totally wrong) mental model.
| As soon as something is slightly different, the fear or
| discomfort rises and their mind blanks. They cannot figure
| out the next step. At an extreme, a color changes and they
| think it must _mean_ something, but really it 's just that
| that control is now "transparent" (pulling in the
| background color but blurred) and they happen to have a
| bright red object behind it, when normally it's a more
| neutral gray or blue. For some it's that things are no
| longer in the right place or that display differently
| (think of the changes in the Windows start menu over the
| decades). They'll have different thresholds, but once they
| hit theirs they cannot proceed without great difficulty.
| Ididntdothis wrote:
| "the 5th button from the left"
|
| Exactly. That's how I work in applications I use a lot. I don't
| look much at the symbol and certainly not at the text. Same for
| buttons. It's highly confusing when they shift icons around.
| Office 365 has become pretty bad that way. Every two months
| something gets shifted around. No new functionality. Just
| change for change's sake.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I wish they would use more words in menus instead of icons. I
| built this wonderful capacity to read quickly, I scan a list
| pretty quickly, some interpretation is necessary, but some icons
| are really obscure/vague.
|
| And if I have to click more than once to find a scroll bar
| because it was so small I missed, then the gui is doing it wrong.
| veeti wrote:
| > The Decline of Usability
|
| Featuring a 600px wide container for text.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I thought that was just for desktop and there it is not bad.
| But it also doesn't use the entire screen on mobile...
| toomim wrote:
| What's the problem?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| inspect element ; div.content ; .content,.priv ; max-width ;
| delete
|
| Compared to any 'modern' website this is a fucking pinnacle of
| usablity.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Thanks goodness Firefox provides Reader Mode usability
| feature.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Some of the worst offenders are 16x9 monitors. Great Apple did
| not follow that strange fad, and stuck with 16x10.
| adamc wrote:
| Good piece, with accurate criticisms. I've lost count of the
| number of times designers insisted on re-styling links in some
| unintuitive way.
|
| I suspect (but cannot prove) that people struggle to channel
| their natural inclination toward creativity into constructive
| channels. A big part of the job of a UI is to be familiar and
| hence easily understood. The best UIs often don't stand out --
| they just let you get your work done effortlessly.
| Stierlitz wrote:
| > All of these title bars denote active windows. The top one,
| Outlook, looks exactly the same when inactive ..
|
| Yes, when did active-clickable-elements go out of fashion and
| everything became the same faded shade of cold blue brushed
| aluminum.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| If you have a giant full-screen window with tabs, inactive
| controls are never visible, so there is no reason to make an
| inactive appearance.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I was going to make a comment about how this might be a
| mobile thing, where focus is less of an issue because
| everything is fullscreen, but now iPad does multiple windows
| and has the same focus problem...
| l0b0 wrote:
| This was always one of the biggest failings of open source
| software. Most communities in my experience absolutely explode
| when anyone suggests an UI change, even if it's to bring the
| application in line with well-known usability, accessibility or
| design standards. The only two outliers are GNOME coreutils,
| which have at least a semblance of consistency in their command
| structure, and the corresponding BSD tools, which unfortunately
| have opted for a completely _different_ UI standard.
|
| I'm afraid there's only one way around this: pressure from above.
| Pressure from the community keeps failing every day. Newbies try
| something out, rant about the bonkers UI in a forum or bug
| tracker, and the fans shut them down with what amounts to "it's
| how we've always done it!" Whoever decided on the UI of many of
| these have clearly got too big an ego to see that they are
| hurting users by "differentiating" themselves.
| flowerlad wrote:
| iOS/Mac also experienced a significant decline in usability after
| Steve Jobs died. Here's a comparison before vs after:
| https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/
| galad87 wrote:
| iOS 7 was a rushed redesign. It took 5 years to fix many of
| those issues.
| interlocutor wrote:
| It is still unusable compared to iOS6
| z3t4 wrote:
| I'm guilty of many of these. The reason is screen real estate.
| You want to have the most essential stuff on the screen, and not
| in hidden menus or popup windows.
|
| And your app needs to adapt to many screen sizes, all from
| mobile, pad's, notebooks to desktop monitors.
|
| Then it's much more efficient to use the keyboard rather then
| reaching for the mouse to click on icons you have no idea what
| they mean, or pulling on scrollbars.
|
| Only problem is that if you design your app like Vim, you will
| have to put a lot of time into teaching users to use it properly.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Relevant quote from my reading yesterday: "Time itself is on the
| side of increasing the perceived need for usability since the
| software market seems to be shifting away from the features war
| of earlier years. User interface design and customer service will
| probably generate more added value for computer companies than
| hardware manufacturing, and user interfaces are a major way to
| differentiate products in a market dominated by an otherwise
| homogenizing trend towards open systems." - Jakob Nielson,
| Usability Engineering - 1993.
|
| I think he partly got the prediction right, that usability would
| be big differentiator. Apple and MS over the following years had
| big efforts focused on consistency in their interfaces and we had
| what many consider a golden age of UI usability, at least from a
| consistency standpoint. I think what happened next is that two
| things came along and basically reset the state of UI design back
| to zero: Mobile and the web.
|
| Both platforms were so radically different that Apple and MS UI
| guidelines were useless. We got a horde of web and mobile
| designers experimenting with all sorts of novel interfaces.
| Experimentation is a great thing but consistency has definitely
| suffered. I've long thought there was big money to made by
| somebody wrapping up a complete linux distro, with a set of
| common applications (libreoffice, et al) but putting in the (very
| significant) effort to standardize _every_ interface, write good
| manuals and provide customer support. Sort of like the service
| that Red Hat provides for servers but with a desktop focus. Maybe
| they couldn't eat MS's lunch, but if they could demonstrate big
| productivity gains for businesses, maybe they could.
|
| In the last decade I think we've seen the (much needed) injection
| of artistic talent into the UI design space. UIs today are much
| more beautiful than in 1995. That's because businesses realized
| that users value beauty and hardware improved to the point where
| more visual effects could be provided without sacrificing
| performance. In the next decade I think we'll see a resurgence of
| focus on accessibility and usability centered around design
| guidelines that coalesce out of consensus in disparate
| communities rather than corporate policy. I think especially that
| as Moore's law continues to flatten out, and network connection
| speeds start to platau we're going to see a renewed focus on
| responsive UI design and application performance. I am excited
| about these trends and feel optimistic about software design
| going forward.
|
| Too bad Nielson was totally wrong about customer service though.
| :-(
| hamaluik wrote:
| You might be interested in Elementary OS?
| https://elementary.io/
| chacha2 wrote:
| That has most the issues that this article complains about.
| It gets rid of both the minimise and maximise button, leaving
| only close because that's how the iPhone does it.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Ironically this page only uses 70% of my screen's width on
| mobile, the font size is uncomfortable and paragraph sentences
| are broken into 6~7 words which is really annoying. Chrome
| suggests "show simplified view" and that definitely makes it
| better.
| nxc18 wrote:
| Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch
| gesture for the last ~10 years at least.
| mceachen wrote:
| Only on iOS. On Android and all desktop OSes, double-tap
| selects a word.
| mmphosis wrote:
| There was a time (roughly between 1982 and 1993) when very few
| could sit down in front of a GUI. I do feel like I am returning
| to that time. Here are some interfaces I could do without, except
| that I can't:
|
| - The command line. In 2020, I need to do a lot of things at a
| command line because there is no other way. For example, starting
| and stopping _sshd_ needs to be a checkbox.
|
| - Tabs. Tabs. and more layers of Tabs: boot tabs, workspace tabs:
| work-spaces/virtual-machines/containers/emulators, Apps [?]+Tab,
| Windows [?]+~, the sad return of "Multiple Document Interface" in
| the form of tabs and hierarchies of tabs within those tabs, tabs
| within the page and hierarchies of tabs within those tabs, Views
| within the page with tabs within those views and hierarchies of
| tabs within those tabs, keep going recurring tabs possibly
| forever.
|
| - You deserve better than this: window snapping. And so-called
| "tiled" window managers which are little more than poor versions
| of 1980's window splitting.
|
| - Right clicking and yet another menu/sub-menus pops up of things
| I don't want.
|
| - JavaScript. Advertising. "Block pop up windows" has been
| enabled by default for a long time, but what about blocking pop
| ups within a page? An ad blocker for now, I guess.
|
| - The hamburger menu. Or for that matter, any menu with sub-menus
| and any menu with more than 8 to 9 menu items.
|
| Here are some interfaces that have improved:
|
| - No modes.
|
| - The ability to go full screen when needed without compromise.
| And, being able to, fairly easily, get out of full screen.
|
| - UTF-8
|
| - more guides: the translucent lines or boxes that help align UI
| elements in flexible ways
|
| What is missing:
|
| - pop ups/menus used extremely sparingly.
|
| - Tools that float, in the sidelines -- not on top of content,
| only in the context of when you need them. For examples, see game
| interfaces, or excellent graphics applications.
|
| - What you deserve is "Zoom to fit" which when done well is
| great.
| anthk wrote:
| - Under any other Unix you'd write a GUI over /etc/rc.d/rc.ssh
| and you called it a day. I dunno about TCL/TK under OSX, but on
| BSD/Linux it's a click away. Or better: iomenu/dialog. You
| pressed a keybind, and chose to start/stop SSH from a dialog
| under a term.
|
| - I hate tiling. CWM has the best of the minimal and floating
| worlds.
|
| - JS? use unbound and a hosts fetching + AWK script. Now you
| have a system wide ad and pest bloking.
| jl6 wrote:
| I find the entire Windows/Mac/Linux desktop experience has
| regressed terribly, with inconsistency the primary offender.
|
| I suspect this is because usability testing is only ever (a) app-
| specific and (b) short term. Nobody is studying the collective
| desktop experience across multiple applications, so every vendor
| thinks they have nailed it, but never notices that their version
| of "nailed it" is different to everybody else's.
|
| The commercial nature of most desktop software would seem to
| render this problem insoluble as there is no incentive for
| vendors to cooperate and every incentive for them to churn their
| UIs to push new versions out.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I work on a project meant to sell a service and meant to manage
| the service being sold to the consumer. However, the button to
| actually buy the service is hidden by a scroll bar on all but the
| widest of screens. Unless you scroll the widget or have a 22 inch
| monitor, you will not see the purchase button.
|
| Why? The UI was designed in on a wide screen and we developers
| are just the implementers of the picture. UI is quite often taken
| from a drawing and little else. It looks great in a mockup, but
| it isn't all that practical.
| wmeredith wrote:
| I work with fortune 100 companies that do shit like this. It's
| maddening.
| bityard wrote:
| It drives me crazy that even though huge, wide computer screens
| are completely ubiquitous, there seems to be a whole generation
| of UX designers that only ever use (and therefore only ever
| develop) full-screen applications.
|
| It's like they learned to compute on an iPad and then use the
| same mental model for every other device they encounter.
| askafriend wrote:
| Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize
| my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| The fact that MacOS shows the menu at the top of the display
| all the time used to bother me but I've long since come around.
| As more and more cross platform Electron apps take over the
| desktop, I'm even more thankful that it's there, keeping a lot
| of this nonsense at bay.
|
| Microsoft has been going downhill for a loooong time, the
| stupid Ribbon Bar drove me off of MS Office 15+ years ago. The
| control panel in Windows XP was a mess and it's only gotten
| worse as far as I can tell.
| leepowers wrote:
| I was just thinking this. It sort of gives you a home base to
| return to, regardless of how weird/spiffy the rest of
| application is. Additionally "Help" is always to the right of
| the other menu items. And there's a search box under "Help"
| that you can use to search menu items. Which can be
| extraordinarily useful, especially in applications like
| Photoshop that have complex menus and panel systems.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Slacks design does look quite goofy in Safari, though, since
| Slack's toolbar design matches the browsers so it looks
| doubled-up...
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Full screen mode would alleviate that issue though, right?
| <eye roll>
| cosmotic wrote:
| Using just resizing as an example: there are no visual queues
| you can resize any macosx window without hovering over an edge;
| the edge is visually 0 pixels wide; the resizable area extends
| outward from the window a few pixels which means you're
| clicking on the window underneath to resize the top most window
| (unless it is near the edge of the window underneath, then all
| bets are off); The resize cursor is unreliable, sometimes it
| does not show but clicking and dragging do resize the window;
| resizable windows are visually indistinguishable from
| nonresizable windows, and the same relative pixel that resizes
| one window either moves the nonreziable window or brings
| forward the window underneath.
| athenot wrote:
| The author does mention that:
|
| _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._
|
| But yes: that consistency, though still flawed in many ways
| (looking at you, iTunes^W Music.app) is what has kept me on
| this platform, unbroken from System 6.0.7 thru macOS 10.15.4.
|
| Disclaimer: I've been in enough flame wars over this UI that I
| fully acknowlege that this is a matter of preference. You're
| not a bad person for preferring otherwise.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The missing menu bars are really the most egregious; resulting in
| totally mystery meat navigation (props if you know what that's a
| reference to!)
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| 1) The examples cited are valid UX/UI design criticisms.
|
| 2) The author makes quite a few important points about UI
| problems (I especially appreciate the point about the importance
| of maintaining high standards for free software).
|
| 3) Concluding that "usability" is "in decline" from a handful of
| anecdata is an irritating, insincere, clickbaity absurdity that
| serves only to make the author and those who agree feel more
| important, that they're Older and Wiser(tm) for having grown up
| with CLIs, while the Children Today(tm) are ignorant fools who
| ought to Get Off My Lawn(tm). I'm so, so tired of this attitude
| getting in the way of sincere design critique. If the author had
| instead titled this "Some Problems With Various Software UI
| Design" I wouldn't have a problem. But then no one would click on
| it, I guess. (The author anticipates some of these and the
| following objections but doesn't actually make any satisfying
| argument against them.)
|
| 4) Design (among many, many other things, like art and language)
| are output by cultures. Cultures evolve unstoppably. Any argument
| that suggests that cultures should just "stop changing" are
| arguing the impossible.
|
| 5) Cultures CAN be steered deliberately, but generally only with
| massive efforts, such as civil rights in the 20th century (and
| even then.... :/). But saying "It's people like you and me who
| decide to change UI design" is completely insufficient. I
| understand and very much appreciate the idea, of course--be the
| change you want to see in the world--but insinuating that new
| ideas are dumb and useless is itself useless.
|
| 6) Cultural change is absolutely critical to continued survival
| of the culture. Many new ideas will fail. Many people will fail
| to learn from history. But some people will, and some new ideas
| will succeed wildly. Stagnating in a perpetual, rose-tinted dream
| of everything running on a command line doesn't help anything.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't think he is arguing against new ideas. He is arguing
| against a trend in UI design. In some cases, he's arguing
| against novelty for novelty's sake.
|
| As for cultural change being a positive force: I agree.
| However, for a lot of people computers are mainly tools to
| achieve a goal, not a goal in themselves. Just like you would
| be annoyed if your screwdriver was deprecated, and instead all
| that was supported was a power screwdriver -- yes, it's useful
| sometimes, but don't test your newfangled ideas on me when all
| I needed was an old fashioned screwdriver.
|
| My metaphor is flawed because physical screwdrivers don't
| deprecate themselves out of existence, but you get the idea:
| for most people, computers are just tools. Change to see "what
| sticks" is annoying and they don't want to become guinea pigs.
|
| _Particularly_ irritating is when the screwdriver manufacturer
| tells you that a- manual screwdrivers are no longer supported,
| and b- you were unscrewing screws the "wrong" way -- like
| desktop environment developers sometimes tell their users:
| "it's wrong to want icons on your desktop" ("but that's what I
| like and always did!" "Well, you're wrong, feature removed!")
| frenchy wrote:
| I missed the part in the article where he was praising the
| usability of the CLI.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-04-17 23:00 UTC)