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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#101

Post by xg15 »

_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.

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals.

It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed.

It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned to optimize some higher-level goals, such as retention or conversion rates.

This is why we have dialogs where the highlighted default choice is neither the safe one nor the one expected by the user, but instead the one the company would like the user to take. (E.g. "select all" buttons in GDPR prompts or "go back" buttons if I want to cancel a subscription.

You can see that quite often in browsers as well, often even with good intentions: Chrome, for a time, still used to allow installing unsigned extensions but made the process deliberately obscure and in both Chrome and Firefox , options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs group policies)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#103

Post by lisper »

munk-a wrote: post #97

Oh yes gods slack in particular got a lot worse with the most recent update, but the site I think takes the cake is one we Canadians use for food delivery - skipthedishes.com . Gods this site breaks so many things, options to update things are hidden among menus that switch the current page while not being ctrl-clickable into a new tab (which can trash your current in-cart order) and the whole site loves "minimalism"…

Wow, you are not kidding. I went to this site to see for myself, and the very first thing I see is re-Captcha. And it doesn't even work! I have to pick out photos of tractors before I even get to see what is on the site!

Holy cow, why does anyone use this? It's a hot mess.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#104

Post by crazygringo »

I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of this article.

Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a single platform. But that's because the feature set of desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased exponentially, beyond what the classic desktop GUI could handle.

Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as search boxes and recommendation engines have completely changed the game.

Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on...

...then you have to make tradeoffs. Yes, the purely desktop experience has become less consistent. But at the same time, an app can be more consistent across platforms, which is what many users want when they're switching between platforms multiple times a day.

And as an industry, apps really do seem to fairly quickly standardize on UX conventions like tabs, hamburger menus, autocomplete, drag-to-refresh, and so on, which aren't any less intuitive than right-clicks, keyboard shortcuts, minimizing, or drag-to-trash-to-eject (remember that?).

So relative to functionality I don't see any decline at all. Young children can pick up an iPad and learn to use it without instruction. I don't remember young children doing that with a Mac Classic or Windows 3.1.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#105

Post by nxc18 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #20

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.

Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch gesture for the last ~10 years at least.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#106

Post by agumonkey »

ardy42 wrote: post #81
agumonkey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..).

I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#107

Post by Jtsummers »

crazygringo wrote: post #104

I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of this article. Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a single platform. But that's because the feature set of desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased exponentially , beyond what the classic desktop GUI could handle. Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as se…

> Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on...

Maybe we shouldn't strive for uniformity across many different interfaces.

My office has switched to MS Teams, which is an abomination on the desktop. But would be perfectly fine on a tablet. I can't have multiple chats open simultaneously. If I open a shared document in a chat or team, then I go back to the chat, I have to click several places to get back to the document (rather than having it, you know, opened and in a separate window). A desire for "streamlining" the experience or some other such bullshit has produced one of the worst productivity/collaboration tools I've seen in 25+ years of using networked computers.

I wouldn't expect a remote server to present the same interface as a desktop as a tablet as a phone as a watch. It's absurd, acknowledge the distinctions and design for the system that it's executed on. I'd rather MS Teams on Windows be like, well, a desktop application:

Contact list, chat window(s), documents opened in the application that can edit them, all with multiple windows taking advantage of the actual capabilities of my system. I have two monitors at work, but with MS Teams I may as well just have one.

And that's just one of the more egregious examples, many others are like it and it's the result of laziness or hubris or ignorance on the parts of the designers/developers.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#108

Post by mceachen »

nxc18 wrote: post #105
RedShift1 wrote: post #20

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.

Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch gesture for the last ~10 years at least.

Only on iOS. On Android and all desktop OSes, double-tap selects a word.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#110

Post by Lammy »

traderjane wrote: post #42
Lammy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The implementation may be bad but it seems like the same idea to me, “user must interact with UI before entering credentials”.
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