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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#81

Post by ardy42 »

agumonkey wrote: post #30
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.

> 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.

Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of pointless side-grades and regressions, forever.

Progress come from thoughtfulness, vision, and luck. You can't replace any of that with A-B testing and little experiments.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#82

Post by kristopolous »

_y5hn wrote: post #69
kristopolous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way,…

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors.

It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock.

We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad".

Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#83

Post by _lbaq »

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,…

The "Slide up" is gone in next LTS due in a few days.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#84

Post by freedomben »

twic wrote: post #64
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,…

That swiping up thing makes me so angry. What an absolute waste of effort. No way to disable it. If this is what they're doing in the most visible bits of the system, what on earth is happening in the rest?

Just hit the Escape key. You can also just start typing your password. I often type my password and press enter before the monitor is even awake.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#85

Post by Firehawke »

red_admiral wrote: post #27
saagarjha wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'm generally not a hamburger menu fan, but I've come to accept it in Firefox/Chrome/Edge/etc because I rarely ever need to bring up the menu anyway so it conserves precious vertical space on a widescreen display.

When I DO need to bring up the menu, I'm usually one to two clicks from where I need to go.

When a hamburger menu encompasses the whole UI (metaphorically speaking) I'd definitely agree it's problematic-- and the same goes for random placement of menu items into a hamburger menu. That's just lazy design.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#86

Post by imhoguy »

itronitron wrote: post #61
floren wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why should I have to touch the screen though when I can tilt it back to scroll up and tilt it forward to scroll down?

and bring closer to your face to zoom in

Re: The Decline of Usability

#87

Post by Ididntdothis »

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…

“the 5th button from the left”

Exactly. That’s how I work in applications I use a lot. I don’t look much at the symbol and certainly not at the text. Same for buttons. It’s highly confusing when they shift icons around. Office 365 has become pretty bad that way. Every two months something gets shifted around. No new functionality. Just change for change’s sake.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#88

Post by MattGaiser »

I work on a project meant to sell a service and meant to manage the service being sold to the consumer. However, the button to actually buy the service is hidden by a scroll bar on all but the widest of screens. Unless you scroll the widget or have a 22 inch monitor, you will not see the purchase button.

Why? The UI was designed in on a wide screen and we developers are just the implementers of the picture. UI is quite often taken from a drawing and little else. It looks great in a mockup, but it isn't all that practical.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#89

Post by Ididntdothis »

wwweston wrote: post #33
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…

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#90

Post by imhoguy »

cirno wrote: post #58
verall wrote: post #28

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…

Problem is, would that even help? What I want is what Gnome 2 already was. Their changes indicate they themselves don't want that anymore. Any attempts at voicing my concerns are met with disdain. What more can I even do as a developer?

You can fork! /s
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