The Decline of Usability • Hacker News Board

Re: The Decline of Usability

#11

Post by ridiculous_fish » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#12

Post by red_admiral » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#13

Post by floren » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #11

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…

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a finger scrolling on a touchscreen -- forever.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#14

Post by the_af » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #10

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,…

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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#15

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #12

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…

Sometimes they'll change their style every time you go to them! Aggressive A/B testing is truly awful.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#16

Post by Stierlitz » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

> 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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#17

Post by strken » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #10

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,…

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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#18

Post by red_admiral » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

q92z8oeif wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#19

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #6

Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.

Slacks design does look quite goofy in Safari, though, since Slack's toolbar design matches the browsers so it looks doubled-up…

Re: The Decline of Usability

#20

Post by RedShift1 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

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.