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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#41

Post by intrepidhero »

Relevant quote from my reading yesterday: "Time itself is on the side of increasing the perceived need for usability since the software market seems to be shifting away from the features war of earlier years. User interface design and customer service will probably generate more added value for computer companies than hardware manufacturing, and user interfaces are a major way to differentiate products in a market dominated by an otherwise homogenizing trend towards open systems." - Jakob Nielson, Usability Engineering - 1993.

I think he partly got the prediction right, that usability would be big differentiator. Apple and MS over the following years had big efforts focused on consistency in their interfaces and we had what many consider a golden age of UI usability, at least from a consistency standpoint. I think what happened next is that two things came along and basically reset the state of UI design back to zero: Mobile and the web.

Both platforms were so radically different that Apple and MS UI guidelines were useless. We got a horde of web and mobile designers experimenting with all sorts of novel interfaces. Experimentation is a great thing but consistency has definitely suffered. I've long thought there was big money to made by somebody wrapping up a complete linux distro, with a set of common applications (libreoffice, et al) but putting in the (very significant) effort to standardize _every_ interface, write good manuals and provide customer support. Sort of like the service that Red Hat provides for servers but with a desktop focus. Maybe they couldn't eat MS's lunch, but if they could demonstrate big productivity gains for businesses, maybe they could.

In the last decade I think we've seen the (much needed) injection of artistic talent into the UI design space. UIs today are much more beautiful than in 1995. That's because businesses realized that users value beauty and hardware improved to the point where more visual effects could be provided without sacrificing performance. In the next decade I think we'll see a resurgence of focus on accessibility and usability centered around design guidelines that coalesce out of consensus in disparate communities rather than corporate policy. I think especially that as Moore's law continues to flatten out, and network connection speeds start to platau we're going to see a renewed focus on responsive UI design and application performance. I am excited about these trends and feel optimistic about software design going forward.

Too bad Nielson was totally wrong about customer service though. :-(

Re: The Decline of Usability

#42

Post by traderjane »

Lammy wrote: post #38
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,…

> It’s totally inappropriate to desktops. I don’t agree. It’s important for the user to know a login UI is the real thing. For example, Windows NT used to have you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to make the credential dialog appear so that any fake lookalike was impossible.

That's a bit different. I can fake swipe-up on a GUI but I can't fake Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#43

Post by AlexandrB »

red_admiral wrote: post #18
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 w…

> 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.

So instead of just having File/Edit/etc. on the toolbar they're nested inside another menu? This seems like introducing an extra click for no reason :(

Re: The Decline of Usability

#44

Post by MereInterest »

Lammy wrote: post #38
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,…

> It’s totally inappropriate to desktops. I don’t agree. It’s important for the user to know a login UI is the real thing. For example, Windows NT used to have you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to make the credential dialog appear so that any fake lookalike was impossible.

Ctrl+Alt+Del cannot be caught by any program, and is therefore reasonable to identify the login UI. Swiping up can be detected by any program, does not improve security as a result, and is ridiculous to have on a desktop UI.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#45

Post by athenot »

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.

The author does mention that:

What about Apple?

I can't comment on the current state of MacOS since the time I've spent actually using a Mac during the last 8 years or so probably totals to a few hours. Apple used to be good at this, and I hear they still do a decent job at keeping things sane, even post-Jobs.

But yes: that consistency, though still flawed in many ways (looking at you, iTunes^W Music.app) is what has kept me on this platform, unbroken from System 6.0.7 thru macOS 10.15.4.

Disclaimer: I've been in enough flame wars over this UI that I fully acknowlege that this is a matter of preference. You're not a bad person for preferring otherwise.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#46

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

1) The examples cited are valid UX/UI design criticisms.

2) The author makes quite a few important points about UI problems (I especially appreciate the point about the importance of maintaining high standards for free software).

3) Concluding that "usability" is "in decline" from a handful of anecdata is an irritating, insincere, clickbaity absurdity that serves only to make the author and those who agree feel more important, that they're Older and Wiser™ for having grown up with CLIs, while the Children Today™ are ignorant fools who ought to Get Off My Lawn™. I'm so, so tired of this attitude getting in the way of sincere design critique. If the author had instead titled this "Some Problems With Various Software UI Design" I wouldn't have a problem. But then no one would click on it, I guess. (The author anticipates some of these and the following objections but doesn't actually make any satisfying argument against them.)

4) Design (among many, many other things, like art and language) are output by cultures. Cultures evolve unstoppably. Any argument that suggests that cultures should just "stop changing" are arguing the impossible.

5) Cultures CAN be steered deliberately, but generally only with massive efforts, such as civil rights in the 20th century (and even then.... :/). But saying "It's people like you and me who decide to change UI design" is completely insufficient. I understand and very much appreciate the idea, of course—be the change you want to see in the world—but insinuating that new ideas are dumb and useless is itself useless.

6) Cultural change is absolutely critical to continued survival of the culture. Many new ideas will fail. Many people will fail to learn from history. But some people will, and some new ideas will succeed wildly. Stagnating in a perpetual, rose-tinted dream of everything running on a command line doesn't help anything.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#48

Post by mschulkind »

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 tip for Blender at least... It's very hard to discover, even if you know it exists, but you can drag out from the side of the main icon bar and turn on text labels as well.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#49

Post by entropicdrifter »

floren wrote: post #13
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.

How is that the future and not just a description of current social media apps on mobile/tablet devices?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#50

Post by AlexandrB »

clarry wrote: post #35
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. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. Have you tried pressing a key?

Is there any indication that pressing a key is an option? I've been swiping up with the mouse the whole time as well.
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