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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#21

Post by cosmotic »

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.

Using just resizing as an example: there are no visual queues you can resize any macosx window without hovering over an edge; the edge is visually 0 pixels wide; the resizable area extends outward from the window a few pixels which means you're clicking on the window underneath to resize the top most window (unless it is near the edge of the window underneath, then all bets are off); The resize cursor is unreliable, sometimes it does not show but clicking and dragging do resize the window; resizable windows are visually indistinguishable from nonresizable windows, and the same relative pixel that resizes one window either moves the nonreziable window or brings forward the window underneath.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#22

Post by jl6 »

I find the entire Windows/Mac/Linux desktop experience has regressed terribly, with inconsistency the primary offender.

I suspect this is because usability testing is only ever (a) app-specific and (b) short term. Nobody is studying the collective desktop experience across multiple applications, so every vendor thinks they have nailed it, but never notices that their version of “nailed it” is different to everybody else’s.

The commercial nature of most desktop software would seem to render this problem insoluble as there is no incentive for vendors to cooperate and every incentive for them to churn their UIs to push new versions out.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#23

Post by saagarjha »

strken wrote: post #17
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.

Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible is a good UI design…

(Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the top right corner. Why it couldn't just be there and have keyboard focus from the start, I have no idea…)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#24

Post by ridiculous_fish »

Stierlitz wrote: post #16

> 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.

If you have a giant full-screen window with tabs, inactive controls are never visible, so there is no reason to make an inactive appearance.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#25

Post by Jtsummers »

saagarjha wrote: post #23
strken wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible is a good UI design… (Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the t…

Worse, this creates a bad habit. What if the UI changes and now it's the username that pops up first, not a password box?

So it's a hard-to-discover feature, and a misfeature unless you elect to keep this behavior forever.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#26

Post by saagarjha »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #24
Stierlitz wrote: post #16

> 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.

If you have a giant full-screen window with tabs, inactive controls are never visible, so there is no reason to make an inactive appearance.

I was going to make a comment about how this might be a mobile thing, where focus is less of an issue because everything is fullscreen, but now iPad does multiple windows and has the same focus problem…

Re: The Decline of Usability

#27

Post by red_admiral »

saagarjha wrote: post #7
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.

"Hamburger menus" are and will forever be, in my mind, a lazy design for "catch all" stuff. (On Apple's platforms, it's three dots, but it's the same thing.)

Joel Spolsky has an old post somewhere where he says the reason the Palm Pilot failed but the iPhone succeeded at making mobile devices "a thing" is that desktop and mobile are two different things; the Palm tried to do a desktop interface on mobile.

I'm ok with three-dot menus on mobile, especially for features like "settings" that I don't use all the time - Whatsapp's dots menu works for me.

Using a dots/hamburger menu on desktop is lazy, I'd agree with you there; using it on desktop for things that people do use a lot like the editing menu in a painting program is atrocious.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#28

Post by verall »

Aww, he had to go after the Gnome stuff :/

Many a time I have spent over a minute decoding a Gnome GUI for incredibly simple applications. Is that a clickable icon? Why is that icon/menu option greyed out? Toggles, icons, buttons, toolbars thrown together with a rare tooltip. I fully agree they border on parodical.

And yet I still use the gnome tools frequently, because they are useful. So in a way I do feel bad for complaining because I am certainly not stepping up to the plate to improve these tools.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#29

Post by Stierlitz »

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,…

> Ubuntu got worse at 18.04 ..

Give Lubuntu a try.

https://lubuntu.net/

Re: The Decline of Usability

#30

Post by agumonkey »

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…

I think we're in a strange bubble. Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them.

It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.

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