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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

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Re: Perfectly Cropped

#181
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's designers, just like kids these days. In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.

Nearest I can figure, all the tuning is based on "engagement", which is a metric of how long a user spends on a thing. That's a useful metric to tune for if you only care about shoving ads at people, but is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you want if you're trying to help people get shit done.

Precisely. If modern touch user interfaces are the result of any carefully-gathered metrics (a premise I find suspicious, but let's run with it), the metrics themselves must be orthogonal to the user actually being able to complete tasks in as short a time as possible. Efficiency, speed, and accuracy were the sort of metrics used in legacy UI design.

But you are right, it's likely that modern metrics are things such as engagement, and whether the user is doing actions that are high-value for the company, such as sharing content with their social networks.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#183
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

For #1 - I feel the same way. I now use this technique instead -> https://mashable.com/article/ios-12-precise-text-selection-k... Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.

That's a perfect example of UI discoverability fails. The feature is super useful and perfectly hidden. Will use this all the time now, thanks!

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#184

You can see the solution on that same screenshot. Make a sliver of the subsequent button visible. Hard to do with all the variable resolutions, but theyre smart people, im sure they can figure it out.

Or, and hear me out on this, they could have a widget off to the right that signals to the user when content could be scrolled down. Heck, you could even get _really_ crazy and have it display _where you are_ within the scroll content.

On second through, nah, the world isn't ready for that kind of idea.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#185
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was out with a group of friends last night and had an interesting conversation when no one else realized you can search iMessages. From the main Messages window, swipe down and previously hidden search bar appears. There's no indication this is an option or it exists. As far as I know it's been there since at least iOS 9.0 (probably longer) and 6 people hadn't found it yet.

This is a common iOS design pattern now. I'm sure there are lots of search bars you are missing.

The visual cue that one exists is, let me check my notes, oh here it is "go fuck yourself."

The #1 thing that drives me crazy with phone UI is the huge amount of hidden functionality that you'll only ever discover if you find an article online or just randomly tap and swipe everything in the app until things happen. And then you have to remember that all in your head because there are no reminders anywhere about the functionality.

And what do they do with all of the space they save by not having indicators? Absolutely nothing at all. Tons of whitespace is added to the app so you are always scrolling around anyway.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#187
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before. This 1000%. Working with text on iOS is such a pain now.

Hold on the space bar. They removed force touch on the whole keyboard, but this is an okay alternative. I find not having to hold my finger over what I'm selecting much easier to use.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#188
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

Holy Christ, thank you so much for this:

> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.

I had no idea you could move the cursor this way! Until I read your comment!

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#189
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen. I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen. I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of…

I frequently highlight text while reading because the lines are too long and I end up loosing where I am when looking for the next line. This is usually only a problem on desktop.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#190
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

My cynical view is that this is just more promotion-driven development for all those UX designers. The optimistic view is that this is necessary to integrate new features. The reality is probably somewhere in between.
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