[HN Gopher] Never-Ending Learning of User Interfaces
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Never-Ending Learning of User Interfaces
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-08-26 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > For example, it is possible to guess if a UI element is
| "tappable" from a screenshot (i.e., based on visual signifiers)
| or from potentially unreliable metadata (e.g., a view hierarchy),
| but one way to know for certain is to programmatically tap the UI
| element and observe the effects.
|
| Sigh.
|
| If your site is accessible, this is pretty easy to semantically
| derive. The issue is that frontend barriers to entry are so low,
| and good teaching nonexistent, that we have an Eternal September
| of new web devs making divs instead of buttons and links.
|
| ---
|
| The draggability work is certainly more interesting. I suppose
| it's because it went out of fashion before the revival of new
| standards in CSS and JS but it's kind of crazy there still isn't
| a great, standardized way to do drag-and-drop on the web.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| This paper is about App Store apps, not web sites.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Swift and Android also both have accessibility built in.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/view-
| acces...
|
| https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility/.
| ..
| elcritch wrote:
| Random web apps that aren't the worse offenders. Heck, half of
| web apps use bootstrap and at least make buttons buttons.
|
| It's the big "professional" players like Apple, Microsoft,
| Google, etc which appear to think that turning random text into
| indiscriminate buttons is a _good idea_. It 's the worst of fad
| driven trends.
|
| For example everytime I open up Apple TV app I have to button
| left and right to figure out which show is highlighted because
| the highlight is so subtle and I'm not 20 anymore. All the
| other TV apps are just as bad, much less the phone apps.
| [deleted]
| pen2l wrote:
| Pardon me that I'm somewhat off-topic but it seems tangentially
| related, the rant I'm about to go on --
|
| When looking particularly at the evolution of MS Office, I often
| land on the view that UI peaked around 2010 and promptly shot
| down in ruins with the advent of flat design. It's flat design
| which went away from gradient textures on buttons which for
| preceding years familiarized us with the impression of button
| states, importance information, and a handful of other subtle
| things.
|
| The stated reason was simple and understandable, the designs had
| needed to remain sensibly consistent when switching from small
| form factors to large ones, when resizing (or rotating e.g. when
| a tablet goes from horiz. to vertical, etc. But I'm not satisfied
| with this defense: it seems lazy, the gradient textures could
| have been retained. It would have required a lot more work by
| Microsoft/Google UI designers, but they chose not to step up to
| the plate by just giving it all up to go the easy road. At least
| Apple has had the courage to not take the easy way out.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| The ribbon design apparently came out in 2007, which fits my
| memory--it was terrible, Office was already well into decline
| by 2010.
|
| Although, really, it is just what some of the other comments
| mention here. Re-learning UI is just a pain in the butt. So, I
| guess the first version of office that we all hate is the first
| one that came out after we were kids and learning new UI was
| fun.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I guess the first version of office that we all hate is the
| first one that came out after we were kids and learning new
| UI was fun.
|
| It's not (just) that. It's that the "ribbon" didn't simplify
| things, it just lowered the number of clicks to get to _some_
| things. But one of the reasons you organize things in
| submenus is _to organize things._
|
| It's easier and faster to find a particular thing hiding
| within a few dozen labelled boxes, each filled with another
| few dozen labeled boxes, than to find something when all of
| the contents of all of those boxes are dumped out onto the
| floor. Even more, within a hierarchy it's easier to find
| other, closely related things to the thing that you were
| looking for, if the thing you were looking for turns out not
| to do the job.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| And thus was it shown why lightweight markup has taken over the
| document space.
|
| Teams and then enterprises got real, real, _reaaaaaaal_ tired of
| watching their overhead costs clock up new zeroes every time a
| new Project Manager landed a gig in the MSO /Adobe/PTC/Wherever
| design office.
|
| The exception are those enterprises locked into a tool ecosystem
| by their customer contracts, aka, "you must use tool X to do the
| thing we're paying you for". I don't have any doubt that such
| contracts will die in a fire as the quest to cut costs continues;
| they're a bad deal for literally everyone.
| nullifidian wrote:
| >Never-Ending Learning of User Interfaces
|
| At first I thought it's about users continually being forced to
| relearn UX they relied for years because app's developers came up
| with a new "design" that should "improve things" according to
| their "studies" which found something confusing.
| luckman212 wrote:
| That's what it _should_ be about. I thought the same thing. I
| 'm so tired of looking for where the "submit" button is or
| trying to figure out your stupid new password requirements.
| Must contain: 1 letter, 1 emoji, 2 uppercase, no "Z"s
| allowed... smfh
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| You forgot to include today's wordle answer in your password.
| analog31 wrote:
| This is why the number-one request from users is: "Please don't
| change anything."
|
| When you go through an office area, where people are using
| "enterprise" software all day, make a mental note of the little
| pieces of paper taped to their monitors and cube walls, with
| written-out instructions for getting through everyday tasks.
| One thing is that they don't want to be forced to re-make those
| instructions, which may have been discovered at great cost.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Some industries, at this point in time, should be using the
| same compute and toolkit in 100+ years.
|
| My mechanic is using software he bought in the 90s, in an
| emulator, becuae _why change_? What 's the point?
|
| He enters customer names, he books appointments, he inputs
| inventory, he bills. Nothing has changed in 30 years, norhing
| will change in another 30.
|
| It's barely a gui by today's standard, and works wonderfully.
|
| Why transition to another POS system? Why worry about
| conversion of current data?
|
| And the stuff he has is rock solid. All the new stuff he
| tried has bugs, and the bug fixed versions have different
| bugs.
|
| You wanna be a hard core dev? Develop stuff that will be
| written to floppies and pressed to CDs, with no internet for
| updates.
| [deleted]
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