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The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

uxmovement.com

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Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#61

Post by digikata »

mentos wrote: post #2

"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away" I installed the new iTunes for my friends dad this weekend when I was helping him with his computer troubles. It took me way too long to find the file menu and it occurred to me in that moment that UI/UX designers have gone too far. In the pursuit of simplicity the marble nose has been chipped off the sculpture…

hiding != taking away

Or put longer: hiding functionality with out actually taking away the need to manually interact with the function is a superficial design utility improvement.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#62

Post by J_Darnley »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #49
Stratoscope wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a funny coincidence, just a few minutes ago I got an email indicating that an off-screen dialog bug I reported on Windows 8 almost three years ago has been fixed. (Actually I think it was fixed early last year in a Windows Technical Preview build - two years after I reported it!) I had my ThinkPad and an external monitor positioned like this, with their arrangement set in the Display control panel to match: +-----…

Knowing about Alt+Spacebar has been invaluable.

Can you summarize what that does for those of us who don't know?

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#63

Post by TylerE »

frik wrote: post #59
ashark wrote: post #12

Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's becoming an unconscious action. These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation. I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin t…

It's especially annoying if you log-in on a SaaS service to find out their redesign makes things worse. Actions that took one click, now take three clicks. As they seperated their single products into different products, removing navigation elements, introducing long animations, don't update their CSS for mobile devices, etc.

Does a redesign ever make things better?

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#64

Post by vortico »

Whenever I see a fixed navigation bar (e.g. http://fermatslibrary.com/s/a-new-proof-of-euclids-theorem, not like Hacker News' navigation bar), I feel like the page is constricted, and I just want it to go away. Not just visually but "physically," so it still bothers me that bars auto-hide on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up. In fact, that feels even worse to me.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#65

Post by wlesieutre »

J_Darnley wrote: post #62
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing about Alt+Spacebar has been invaluable.

Can you summarize what that does for those of us who don't know?

Pops up a menu in the corner of the active window with Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close. If the window is off screen, the menu should pop up within screen bounds anyway.

Also accessible by right clicking a titlebar, for anybody who's familiar with that one.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#66

Post by PostThisTooFast »

ashark wrote: post #12

Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's becoming an unconscious action. These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation. I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin t…

AMEN, totally correct.

The failure to designate controls as controls instead of static text has driven computer interaction backward decades. So now we're supposed to roll over, click on, or tap every text character on the screen to see if it's a hidden goodie?

The G in GUI stands for GRAPHICAL. If there's no graphic, there's no control indication. Period.

Apple doesn't even remember that you're supposed to GREY THINGS OUT when they're not applicable; you're not supposed to make them disappear entirely. When they're just missing, the user has no idea the function even exists, and does not learn where to find it for future use.

Next article should tell site designers to STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#67

Post by vitd »

WorldMaker wrote: post #55
rtkwe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vein I hate that existing user log in are so often buried as a tiny text link under a Sign Up section or a tiny link on the edges of a page.

An existing user logging in is such a boring metric compared to a new user signing up.~

Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#68

Post by mschuster91 »

Macha wrote: post #60
mschuster91 wrote: post #33

Meh, I'd see the trend to grey-on-grey, white-on-lightgrey etc. as the bigger problem. Yes, might look Apple-ish, trendy or whatever, but the vast majority of computer users: a) don't have perfect eyesight b) work in rooms with inadequate lighthing (e.g. sunlight from behind, making subtle contrasts basically vanish) c) surf on mobile which most often is equivalent to b), with the addition that the device is shaking…

The Ember docs recently changed to brown on light orange. https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.2.0/ I get that it's their brand colours, but really? Look how much more readable the older docs are: https://guides.emberjs.com/v2.1.0/

I'm just looking at the docs to determine if a project is worth my time investment (especially the learning curve).

No docs? => get off.

Docs unreadable => get off.

Docs outdated/StackOverflow filled with crap that is obsolete since 2 months and the question was asked 1 month ago => get off, work on your backwards compatibility, come back maybe.

Docs readable and reasonably current and the first 10 google hits for a common question don't offer 10 contradicting versions? => <3

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#69

Post by gnaritas »

Domenic_S wrote: post #24
gnaritas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the emotional experience trumps the direct navigability of the site itself Users don't come to a website for an emotional experience, they come to use the tool to do something. Emotional experience never trumps usability, ever. The only emotional experience sites with bad usability have is user anger at not being able to figure out how the damn thing works.

The usability of what? Not a glib question -- if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out, why would you want to muddy that up with a nav bar? For a lot of sites, "Get started" is the #1 thing you want people to do from the homepage. We've known forever that removing distractions from register/checkout/PPC pages increases…

> if your goal is to give the user a feeling which results in them clicking a signup button or going through another flow you've got laid out

And if your usability is so bad they can't find that button, the site sucks. Emotional feelings always come second to usability. Landing page usability is all about selling the user on a call to action, but they have to be able to find that call to action, that's the usability part. I didn't say anything about nav bars, I said usability. Beyond that, your users don't care to or want to be emotionally manipulated; you might want it, your business might want it, but the user don't care about that, they care that they can find the information they're looking and/or accomplish the task they came there for.

Re: The Navigation Bar Is an Affordance, Stop Removing It

#70

Post by endymi0n »

vitd wrote: post #67
WorldMaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An existing user logging in is such a boring metric compared to a new user signing up.~

Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?

As startup and also corporate value is often influenced by the amount of "users" (the smarter investors will look at DAUs and MAUs though), this might even be done on purpose...
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