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The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

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Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#31

Post by infogulch »

icebraining wrote: post #14
mmatants wrote: post #7

If you decide to study how to build bridges, you will start out with calculus, build a background in science of materials and then a guided tour of approaches to structure-building. In addition, you have to learn typical environmental factors. And, of course, there are workflow patterns and human factors involved in actually constructing a typical bridge. Oh, and sure, there will be a bit of CAD. Let's apply this met…

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

I think many of these problems aren't caused by someone unable to construct a good UI, but that the manufacturer's other goals happen to be opposed to good UI. UI is just not high on the priority list and is inadvertently trampled on.

E.g. clamshell/tamper-proof packaging is awful (I like calling it "customer-proof"), but the goal to reduce theft is a much higher priority than making it easier to open.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#32

Post by foofoo55 »

icebraining wrote: post #14
mmatants wrote: post #7

If you decide to study how to build bridges, you will start out with calculus, build a background in science of materials and then a guided tour of approaches to structure-building. In addition, you have to learn typical environmental factors. And, of course, there are workflow patterns and human factors involved in actually constructing a typical bridge. Oh, and sure, there will be a bit of CAD. Let's apply this met…

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software.

I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or better on the UIQC test", or some such thing.)

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#33

Post by hibikir »

orf wrote: post #26
icebraining wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

Lets say conservatively that 70% of Americans open at least one package a year, equalling 223,230,000 packages opened. 6,500 injuries is 0.0029%. Not bad I think.

0.0029% for injuries that require an emergency room visit, not injuries at all. Let's go for a conservative, 100:1 ratio of minor cuts vs injuries that make you want to spend a bunch of money on doctors, and we see that it's pretty darned dangerous. Dangerous enough that at work, we have mandatory training on how to open different kinds of packages safely!

That said, the state of blisters has improved, precisely because people complained about how easy it is to get injured with the older, plastic on plastic blisters that require either heavy duty scissors or a box cutter, and leave behind very sharp edges.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#35

Post by rpgmaker »

prawn wrote: post #22
yakult wrote: post #21

>>It's also not clear that the model of background apps requesting the user's attention works. How many iPhones have you seen with a red circle containing "23" on the home screen, indicating that 23 apps need updating...and it's been there for months? I would argue this is working as intended. The advantage of background notification rather than modal is that the user gets a choice. The user could very well decide th…

Agree. I avoid updating apps that are working satisfactorily because many later add ads or other annoying functions.

Or remove functions, or change the UI needlessly and for the worse. I honestly don't know how people can update their apps without having a backup to go back to. I probably would not do it if I didn't have one of my backups around. The different app stores should offer the user a way of going back to a previous version (if you already had it installed) but it seems that none of them do so...

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#36

Post by rsync »

Can we talk about search dialogs that are not actually dialog boxes ?

I first saw it at netflix - instead of a search box in the upper right, there is a picture of the word search and if you click on that picture of the word search it becomes a textbox[1] that you can type into.

As if that's not bad enough, the word "search" can turn into a textbox faster than it takes to fully load the control, which means you get the textbox but cannot type into it for another few moments.

How much of an unimaginable asshole do you have to be to pervert a basic web UI component like this ?

[1] No, of course not a real textbox - some 50 kilobyte control from some web-authoring toolkit that masquerades as a textbox.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#37

Post by rsync »

dman wrote: post #19

Request to all designers - please stop building nested scroll and drag interactions. Common pet peeve for me recently is embedded map widgets in web pages. A user scrolling the page will find at some point that their mouse has come over a map which is now eating the scroll events and they are now scrolling the map instead. Only choice at that point is to move the mouse over and start scrolling over. Bonus annoyance -…

"A user scrolling the page will find at some point that their mouse has come over a map which is now eating the scroll events and they are now scrolling the map instead."

This annoyance has been widely extant for ten years or more - I think I first experienced it with google maps as I believe they were the first to zoom with scroll ...

Seems easy to fix - sub window elements in the browser cannot zoom until clicked on ?

It's amazing that behavior made it through one browser version iteration.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#38

Post by rsync »

euske wrote: post #11
collinglass wrote: post #3

was hoping you were going to give a standard resource where I can find alternatives for common bad designs

I tend to rely on the Apple's UI guidelines. They have many hints that are applicable even for non-Apple apps. I remember Apple had a similar thing already back in 80s, which I found amazing. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

Cycle through apps using command-tab. Cycle through a few times. See how it works.

Now cycle through app-windows with command-` and see how that works .. completely differently.[1]

So yes, even the wizards can get it wrong[2].

[1] command-tab has a proper "memory" allowing you to command-tab back and forth quickly between the two most recent apps. command-` is just ... weird. It sort of preserves sequence ... until you let go ? and then reverses sequence ... or something ? 8 years into OSX and I still am not sure what the algorithm is.

[2] Not saying either is the right one - but they are both different, so one of them (as far as apple is concerned) is wrong.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#39

Post by nitrogen »

columbo wrote: post #27
icebraining wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

another example would be petrol/gas station pumps: http://www.olivierlorrain.com/2009/06/20/bad-design-gas-pump...

Another example of bad UI of a sort: comment form spam, demonstrated by the last two comments on your link.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#40

Post by 1971genocide »

Jach wrote: post #15
1971genocide wrote: post #9

"Set of Standard Resources" Check out Material Design by google - its been a lifesaver to me who is from a very technical background. Best part is with very little work you can really impress your bosses ! Good Luck

Material Design is just like Apple's guidelines. It's great for helping to create something that looks uniformly designed and not a hodge podge of UI gimmicks, helping design-ignorant coders create something that looks nice, and as you say it's easy to get management buy in, but is it actually good? Will following it actually reduce your count of UI mistakes? Personally I don't like it at all, and I've had many compl…

I agree.

But I do not have the time to go back and do another degree on design. Try convincing people with money to shell out extra for someone with good design experience.

I guess once we have millions of customers we might have to think about it - but small companies without much resources its hard to justify spending a lot of resources on good design.

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